In August of 1981 IBM announce the IBM Personal Computer. I was working for them at that time and as the end of the year approached I decided that I wanted to understand this new technology and hoped that it would lead to my being involved with supporting IBM’s newest computer products (which it did, but that is another story). Anyway I placed an employee order for a new IBM PC.
My new IBM PC arrived in early 1982 and my technology journey started. The system that I purchased had an Intel 8088 processor running at 4.77MHz. I also opted for the Intel 8087 Math co-processor. It had 64KB of memory. Yes, you did read that right, 4.77 MHz and 64KB of memory. I order it with two 5 1/4 inch single sided floppy drives. At the time a single sided floppy disk held 180KB of data. I opted for a CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) that had a whopping 16KB of video memory and could display a grand total of 16 colors in 640 x 200 resolution. In addition I got a printer adapter and a dot matrix printer. Oh, and the operating system was Microsoft DOS. I had the best that IBM offered at the time. The retail on this was in excess of $4000. At that moment in time I could not see things getting much better. Little did I know. Technology did change and as a result I “upgraded” to newer and better systems periodically.
I recently had need to purchase a new system. I opted for a Dell XPS 8500 Desktop. As configured now this system is equipped with a 3rd generation Intel Core i7-3770 processor running at 3.40GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 which can speed it up to 3.90 GHz. It has 16GB of ram. Two 1TB hard disk drivers for storage. It also has a 256GB mSATA solid state drive which I am using to store and run the online games that I play. I selected an NVIDIA GeForce GT640 video graphics card that has 1GB of ram on the card. This system also includes wireless and wired connectivity along with Bluetooth capability. It also has a DVD read/write drive, in addition to several other cool things. Oh, and the cost of this system was just a bit over 25% of the original IBM PC.
Think about it; processor speeds of GHz vs MHz, memory of GB vs MB, TB of storage vs KB of storage. Amazing things have happened in the technology that we use everyday. Looking at the differences I have to say that my original thoughts about “it not getting much better then this” were wrong. LOL I think now that “it should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer” that technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the many years since I got my first computer. I now understand that it will continue to do so for years to come and that sometime in the near future I will have to upgrade again to a newer. faster, better system. Just hope that it is awhile before that happens. LOL
Hope you have a SUPER Day!! God bless!!
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