Public Discussions > General Discussion

Revolutionary PC Technology

(1/4) > >>

agrisea:
Last week there was a sub-discussion on /. about technological leaps that advanced the way we all used PC's (the original article was about the new gddr5 memory).

It got me to thinking of before OS/2 was released, how my company then used video memory dram chips on the monster motherboards to make our PC's faster than anyone else. From strictly a hardware point of view: Then hard drives instead of floppies, mfm then rll, finally the ide came about. The next leap was overclocking the cpu, which we did with AMD because intel would fry. Next up was storage media, from tape to CD, then dvd. (Blu-Ray, IMO, was released too late because flash drives rapidly had larger capacities for much cheaper than a single disc.) Next leap was the multi-core CPU. And the sata standard which brought us solid state drives.

In the software realm, we all (I hope) discovered the magic of OS/2 and what it did to PC's. I got involved when 2.1 came out, designed a pc to use it, then started showing it off to clients. Warp 3 (blue box) was amazing or terrifying, the ms-zealots were quite amusing at various COMDEX shows. I really wish ibm had stuck with Warp and given us a 64-bit version.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on technology leaps..

Matt Walsh:
My thoughts are that having an OS with no viruses, no weekly security updates and the ability to keep using my 20 year old bookkeeping program and my text email (instead of awful HTML ) at ever increasing speed with Ryzen CPU and Radeon video with USB-3  and gigabit network speed are fine for me.
MattW

agrisea:
Would that be Peachtree or MoneyCounts? I've used both in the past, am using gnucash these days on a mint pc. I was trying to recall which email client I used, java something. I still have a Warp 4 PC running but it's not connected to the internal network or internet, I use it for the customer database running in paradox.

Neil Waldhauer:
I remember when a PC came with 4 MB RAM and a Mac came with 768 MB RAM. "But Macs are more expensive..."

I remember a Seybold conference where graphics designers ran $799 iMacs against $25,000 HP personal computers. The Macs ran circles around the PCs.

OS/2 for Power PC had such promise, but IBM had already abandoned OS/2, and Apple abandoned MacOS, and rebranded NeXt as OS X. I had a compatible, but it never ran OS/2, unfortunately. Mac OS 7 did have some libraries with the same names as some of the OS/2 SOM DLLs. I wouldn't be surprised if there was code in common.

David Kiley:

--- Quote from: Neil Waldhauer on October 22, 2020, 03:41:33 pm ---OS/2 for Power PC had such promise

--- End quote ---
IBM spent billions on the PowerPC direction, when they should have put all their resources into dominating the pc market instead.
But sometimes I think IBM was literally the worst company to own OS/2.. would have been a different ball game if Apple owned it maybe :).
But then I probably wouldn't still be using it then..  ah the paradox.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

Go to full version