The Top Five Milestones of The IBM PC

Over those three decades, the device that was once believed to have little to no consumer appeal has changed our life dramatically to a degree where most of us would be word for word lost without being able to use a computing device on every single day. In 30 years, the original idea of the PC has evolved significantly. If you had to choose five milestones, which ones would you think of?

Apple sold its first computer in 1976 and at the time there was the famous Osborne Computer in 1979. The first idea of x86 can be traced back to a napkin drawing by Austin Roche in 1968; and Intel's 4004 CPU, the first single-chip processor, came to market nearly 40 years ago in November of 1971. Konrad Zuse is credited with inventing the modern, programmable computer in 1936; and if you were to go back in history, you would find the Antikythera system in other words believed to have been created in 87 BC; and clearly, there is the Abacus, whose origins are in 2400 BC.

How could I not mention the virus as the origin of all security concerns, data theft and countless wasted hours trying to desperately restore data that has been lost, or until further notice was at risk? The first concept virus can be traced back to a paper published by Veith Risak in 1972, which described "self-reproducing automata with minimal information exchange, which referred to the first fully functional virus written that targeted, back at that time, a Siemens 4004/35 system. The first virus in the wild was Elk Cloner and was written in 1981 to attack Apple's DOS 3.3 OS. The term virus was coined in 1984 by Fred Cohen. Nevertheless, the first PC virus did not surface in the wild until 1986:Brain is officially being credited with the honors of being the first annoying virus, even if it was created to deter software piracy. Among the most famous virus we remember today are the Iloveyou virus in 2000, which infected millions of computers in a matter of hours, Code Red in 2001, which caused denial of service attacks, as then as Sasser in 2004, which resulted in system constant crashes and restarts.

The computer

Windows has commoditized the computer. As much as we complain about the fact that Microsoft has stolen Apple's idea of an easy-to-use GUI, it was Microsoft that succeeded in making the kind of software that was necessary to take the PC mainstream. Windows was launched in November 1985 and Microsoft for all that controls the OS market today - with a market share of near 90 percent.

Microsoft's success did not arrive until the release of Windows 3.1 in 1992, when Microsoft's fortunes began to rise at an exponential rate. Windows 95 followed in August 1995 and prompted people around the world to wait in line at midnight to get their hands on of the first copies. Today's Windows hasn't quite such an emotional following anymore, nevertheless we know that Windows 7 is at a rate of 20 million licenses per month and remains the core business of Microsoft. Windows 8, due in 2012, is likely to become a major Windows release that will take us much closer to cloud computing services.

The WWW has just turned 20 years old

While the WWW has just turned 20 years old, if we consider Tim Berners-Lee's post to a newsgroup and the idea for a hypertext-based network as the birthday of the WWW and the mainstream Internet, it was the general web browser that enabled users to in fact browse Internet content. Mosaic was the first web browser and was invented by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina at NCSA. The first version was released in January of 1993 and remained available until 1997 for Windows systems.

Mosaic was licensed by Spyglass, which licensed the browser, for instance, to Compuserve and later to Microsoft, which renamed it to Internet Explorer - and used the original NCSA code in versions 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. A PC without connection to the Internet and without a web browser would be to put it more exactly useless today - and a web browser is one of the key features we expect to come with a PC. It was most likely the most significant addition to the PC in other respects the operating system in its history.

This last choice was a tough one. I ended up choosing wireless features over 3D graphics and especially the 3dfx Voodoo2 3D chip and the Nvidia GeForce 256 GPU due to our dependency on wireless connectivity today. When we talk to basic wireless connectivity today, we most likely refer to 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, which was first commercially used in 1999, however did not become usually available until 2001, when, for instance, Intel sold an in the extreme expensive Wi-Fi 802.11b kit with a base router and two cards for $1200. It was especially Intel that aggressively pushed Wi-Fi, later on as part of its integrated Centrino platform and helped create an entire industry that turned the research into a standard feature on any PC.

Of course, wireless is evolving and is including other components just as 3G, 4G and WiMax. Most computers sold today do not come without wireless capabilities as there would be no Internet access. When was the last time you have seen someone connecting a notebook to a telephone line or even using an Ethernet cable to a broadband connection?