The Computer Business

I don’t know if this is just a myth, but someone told me before that Steven Spielberg have concept movies that he had purposely delayed because the technology still did not exist to visualize them, and that his house is full of work just lying around and waiting to be finished.


Yesterday I answered a thread in one of the forums about the state of technology 20 years ago, and it had sparked many things.


First of all I remembered some of the utilities I tried to program but never finished because of the limited technology. Like Steven Spielberg, some of my work remained as a concept.


So going back to 20 years ago, here are some trivia I think some of you might find amusing:

• Almost every program was DOS based. There was already Windows 3.0 but only has two colors (black and white).
  
• No internet yet, but there is something called a BBS or a Bulletin Board System. You have to dial up to their server.
  
• Mouse connects to the computer’s serial port and not PS2. No USB yet.
  
• Monitors were placed on top of casings
  
• The most popular word processor was Wordstar and Lotus 123 for spreadsheets
  
• Diskettes and hard disks are 5.25 inch wide.
  
• Intel and AMD processors were named 286, 386, and 486. Intel released Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III then Pentium IV while AMD continued with 586 then proceeded with Athlon, Duron and Sempron
  
• Computer speeds ranged from 4.7 mhz to 8mhz, memory modules are 1 megabyte, and hard disks ranged from 5, 10, and 20 megabytes. Now it’s all in gigabytes, and some terabytes.
  
• There are switches (dip switch) on the motherboard that can disable the keyboard, and only a few of us knows about this in school. We switch it off so that they will think that the PC is defective. We are the only ones who know how to fix it therefore we always have a PC reserved for us.
  
• 3D games already existed, but only in vectors with two colors. Outrun is one of them featuring the car Testarossa.

Well, there are a lot more trivia but only an old dog like me can appreciate them because it has been a part of my youth and it is like a trip on memory lane.


It is also a vital ingredient in my plans for the future because as I said, during those days I have developed some programs that were put on hold because of technology limitations. But now that everything is just a click away, I can now go back to my old concepts and bring them to life.