[IP] more on Twenty five years of the IBM PC
Begin forwarded message:
From: John Pickens <jpickens@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: August 11, 2006 5:45:55 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Twenty five years of the IBM PC
Reply-To: John Pickens <jpickens@xxxxxxxxxxx>
At Visicorp, as we moved away from the cassette tape loaded software
model, two of the most divisive internal technical battles around
minimum resource application assumptions in the evolving IBM PC was
1. assumption of 16K vs 64K RAM
2. assumpion of single vs double sided floppy disk
And then a few years later I recall an industry pundit arguing that
personal storage needs were going to grow exponentially, and that the
newly emergent 5MB hard disk would have to quickly grow to 50MB
(thought to be sufficient).
Outrageous assumptions.
J
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Aug 11, 2006 11:04 AM
To: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [IP] Twenty five years of the IBM PC
Begin forwarded message:
From: Claudio Gutierrez <claudio.gutierrez.m@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: August 11, 2006 10:04:20 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Twenty five years of the IBM PC
Computer firm IBM made technological history on 12 August 1981 with
the announcement of a personal computer - the IBM 5150.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4780963.stm
Costing $1,565, the 5150 had just 16K of memory - scarcely more than a
couple of modest e-mails worth.
The machine was not the first attempt to popularise computing but it
soon came to define the global standard.
It altered the way business was done forever and sparked a revolution
in home computing.
"It's hard to imagine what people used to do with computers in those
days because by modern standards they really couldn't do anything,"
said Tom Standage, the Economist magazine's business editor told the
World Service's Analysis programme.
"But there were still things you could do with a computer that you
couldn't do without it like spreadsheets and word processing."
<snip>
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