by David Alan Bates

 Christmas has come and gone and if you didn’t read my previous article on how to ‘hunt online’ for cheap gifts for Christmas, you should buy a back copy since Valentine’s day is just around the corner. Today we aren’t going to talk about gifts or gift giving, we are going to talk about how computers have evolved. Many of us here and MAX-IT have been using computers for over 20 years. That’s right; we’ve been at it since computers became ‘personal.’ That should also give you a rough idea how old we all are. But anyway...

We will talk about how computers evolved to what it is today. But what we really want to focus on is how the trends of computing shifted from one where computers were made to become more and more powerful to the current trend of it being more compact, portable and more energy efficient and most importantly easier on the pocket.

Once Upon a Time

It is debatable which the very first ‘personal’ computer was. There are many claimants but no sure winner. The Apple II was the first highly successful mass produced personal computer, it was launched in 1977. But the IBM PC as we know it was launched in 1981 and that more or less heralded the boom of personal computing. While not many of us own or even owned IBM PCs nearly all of us at some point owned an IBM Compatible PC. These are basically what most of us use today. If you aren’t using a Mac/Apple or something exotic then you are very likely using an IBM Compatible PC, though it is not longer termed as such.

There were of course also Apple Compatibles but those have faded away for a variety of reasons, mostly due to the fact that IBM had a reputation for business computing and many third parties began developing peripheral devices that were compatible with the IBM. This directly brought about the decline of Apple’s popularity in favour of IBM. The Windows platform was also later developed to be used on IBMs making them both the ‘industrial’ standard as far as computing was concerned.

But no matter what the brand all computers have hardware that does pretty much the same thing. That’s what we are going to explore next.

The Heart and Brain

You could call it the heart or you could the brain but every computer has one and that is the Central Processing Unit or CPU. Without it no number crunching gets done and your computer would be nothing more than a fancy and overly large paperweight.

When the IBM PC was first launched it used Intel’s 8088 processor. A revolution of affordable computing the 8088 had an 8-bit data bus and a whopping 1MB of RAM. But computers still didn’t really take off spectacularly until the 80286 and 80386 series of processors. Commonly known as just 286 and 386 machines, the 286 could have as much as 16MB of RAM and could run to a maximum of 12.5Mhz. Advanced Micro Devices or AMD would further push the architecture of the 286 to enable it to run as high as 25Mhz, technically double that of Intel’s. This would be a precedent to how AMD operated its company for many years. They would always offer higher clock speeds as compared to Intel, luring many customers to use AMD processors. The unfortunate trade off was of course that AMDs were known to run hotter and were also known to be somewhat less stable and reliable.

The 386 would later have a clock speed of up to 40Mhz followed by the 486 which commonly had 66Mhz. The 386 is also significant due to the fact that it was available in three guises; the SX, SL and the DX. The SX was a lower cost version whereas the SL was a power efficient version laptop processor that also had power management options. What is important to see here is that the 386 was the forerunner to modern day CPUs that gave users the options of going quick, going budget or going portable.

That little snippet aside, the evolution of the CPU is a fairly straightforward one. It just kept on getting faster and faster with each new release and almost always it was the clock speed that was the most obvious change each time.

The Heart and Brain in the Modern World

Clock speed is no longer a sure fire way to compare whose CPU is larger. Take for example an Intel Celeron 900 processor, the Celeron 900 clocks in at 2.2Ghz yet scores 150 points higher on PassMark then a Pentium 4 that runs of 3.8Ghz. This of course creates a lot of confusion among buyers, which should you buy? It is no longer that simple.

Now throw in all the Dual-Core and Quad-Core madness and a non-geek would be doubly confused. Why this happens is because clockspeed is not the only determining factor as far as number crunching is concerned. There is also the Front Side Bus among other things to take into consideration.

Speed however is no longer the paramount concern in computing. Take the Atom processor for example. The Atom is currently the staple of many a netbook not for its performance but for its excellent power consumption. On PassMark the Atom N280 1.6Ghz scores 316 points, just a rank lower than the Pentium 4 2.4Ghz which scored 323 points but in terms of power consumption the Atom consumes tremendously less than the Pentium 4.

This is where computing is heading as far as CPUs are concerned. We have hit a peak where everyday computer users no longer need the most powerful machines around. A Pentium 4 would still happily run everything an average person needs and thus more and more processors are being launched to be ultra-portable instead of ultra-fast. You may be able to afford the latest Intel Core i7 but frankly, most people wouldn’t even notice the difference if the i7 was swapped with a Core 2 Duo.

Colour My Screen

In the early days screen computer monitors were monochrome affairs that displayed Red, Green or Blue characters on a black screen. Soon afterwards around the time of personal computers increasing in popularity the Colour Graphics Adaptor (CGA) was introduced. These CGA graphics cards had 16kb of memory and allowed the computer to be connected to NTSC compatible monitor or television set. CGA’s capability was 16 colours and in those days it gave gaming a whole new depth and experience.

By the mid 1980s however there came the Enhanced Graphics Adaptor which was very quickly followed by VGA or Video Graphics Array. Completely outdoing CGA and EGA, VGA could produce 256 colours and until today VGA still remains in use as the lowest possible setting as far as hardware compatibility is concerned.

While it may seem that graphic cards have been with us from the very start it was only in 1995 that the first consumer 2D/3D graphics cards were released. These cards followed the Super VGA standard but incorporated 3D functions. Graphics cards of this era had as little as 8MB to 16MB of memory but at that time, this was revolutionary.

As the use of dedicated graphics cards became more and more widespread so did the amount of memory it carried. But as they got more powerful and expensive the need for dedicated graphics cards also reduced to a point where only hardcore gamers or those who ran powerful graphic applications saw a need to purchase a dedicated graphics card.

So what happened to everyone else? We opted for the now readily available “onboard/integrated graphics processor”. Manufacturers began to see the trend and the “non-necessity” of graphics cards and had begun incorporating graphic processing units or GPUs onto their motherboards. These were of course nowhere as powerful or as capable as their dedicated buddies but they were cheap to produce and on top of that did not require its own memory to run. Most low budget computers relied on these chips and much like processors the way of the machine was moving towards budget and not performance.

But budget did catch up somewhat with both the major players in the graphics market; ATI and NVIDIA producing relatively powerful integrated graphics cards with their own dedicated memory yet still being affordable enough to be found in a large number of computers. For the truly budget conscious there is always Intel’s GMA series...

PC Speaking

Like everything else a PCs audio went through a phase of improvement from the standard PC Speaker which could do nothing more than beep and tweet to what we have today.

In the beginning the PC Speaker was largely used to communicate with the user and to inform them of any possible errors during the boot process. A certain series of beeps would tell you that something has gone wrong with the RAM for example. Smoke would indicate something else altogether but that has nothing to do with the PC Speaker.

Employing the simple magnetic speaker many game developers were able to create in-game sound effects as well as soundtracks to some extent. There isn’t all that much to say here except that a PC Speaker could not make a computer sound like a television set. It was in the mid 90s when many companies, perhaps most notably Creative that began selling what they called Multimedia Kits which included a Creative Sound Blaster card as well as a CD-ROM.

With these kits the multimedia experience was thereabout complete and for perhaps the first time many computer users could listen to music, watch movies and even play games that had effects that weren’t a cross between Road Runner and Tweety Bird.

I still recall how much these kits cost, a kit that had a Sound Blaster 16; a 16bit sound card, cost about RM800 and this was over a decade ago. Big money then and if you splurged a little more you got a 2X CD-ROM drive. 2X! A couple of friends of mine actually had 1X drives where you had to insert a CD into a crystal case cartridge and then insert the whole lot into the CD-ROM drive. I was lucky enough to have a drive that had a tray much like what we use today. Because everyone was probably rather proud with the fact that their computers could now ‘speak’ the computer could also be configured to say ‘Open’ or ‘Close’ whenever you inserted or ejected a disc. Corny I know but those were the 90s.

Back on track to what we were talking about, now every imaginable computer comes with audio capabilities that put the sound cards of old to shame. Almost nobody buys dedicated sound cards anymore and even Creative who arguably pioneered the device now also only produces its X-Fi series which they position as a device for hardcore gaming.

All Gone, for Better or for Worse

It’s no longer the fad to get the latest and most powerful processor in the market, and most computers do not come bundled with graphics or sound cards anymore either. People are now more concerned with having a computer that is ‘enough’ more so since even an averagely priced processor is more than ‘enough’ these days.

Tightening of belts have also made dedicated graphics cards a rarity among everyday users, but perhaps the worst hit is that of dedicated sound cards which has become virtually nonexistent. But all in all the computing experience has vastly improved over the past three decades and for less and less cost to the consumer we now get more and more. Novelties are now everyday computing necessities and all that is made possible simply because manufacturers are bundling in their midline products for our enjoyment. The Pro market will always be there and there always will be those who would not submit to anything but the best, but for the rest of us there is no better time than now for getting the most bang for your buck.