Slashdot Mirror
Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting
jeffdsimpson writes "PC World NZ is 15 years old this month and they've written a story looking back at some of the statements made in the magazine over the years. Some gems include 'The past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in clock rates, from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. This more than six-fold increase will not be repeated' from July 1989 and 'The Internet Connection Company of New Zealand (ICONZ) offers full internet access and charges $50 a megabyte for email, and $10 a megabyte for all other information sent or received' from April 1994"
it is nice when a company can take a pop shot at its self. You have to respect the magazine for showing some of those comments.
(what is it with humor stories? everyone jumps on them)
... then we're off to the next. We're living in beta, babies. Enjoy the ride.
... Despite the power of Microsoft's OS/2 LAN Manager, it's still a NetWare world. Novell's 1989 introduction of its NetWare 386 network operating system more or less guaranteed that much of the world will stick with Netware."
... last year, DOS accounted for 70% of operating system units sold worldwide."
... To really take advantage of Windows, you'll want either a fast 286 or a 386 machine, preferably with at least 2MB of RAM. Enhanced mode allows you to run multiple DOS applications
PC World at 15
It was 5475 days ago today, or thereabouts, that your favourite computer magazine first hit newsstands. PC World lifer Chris Keall looks back on the laughter, the tears and the $24,000 386.
Chris Keall
Monday, 28 June, 2004
Since it first appeared as a standalone magazine in 1989 (having done time in the trenches as a Computerworld supplement), PC World has chronicled the highs, the lows and the sometimes keyboard-pounding agony that is the personal computer industry. As you follow me on our highlights tour of articles past (in our own - cringe - unedited words), you'll find three themes emerge:
1. Star Trek references intrude with troubling frequency.
2. People always underestimate how quickly hardware will evolve.
3. People are constantly thumping said keyboards as promised usability breakthroughs never quite happen. Software developers just about get a handle on one trend and
June 1989
PS/2 luggable gains positive reception
"The PS/2 Model P70 is a high-functionality, 20MHz 386 portable ($16,425) that weighs in at 9kg (the lightest notebooks today are 1.2kg - CK). PC professionals are saying the VGA monitor and the 4MB of memory (expandable to 8MB), make it a powerful luggable."
July 1989
IBM's 486 steals show
"The past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in clock rates, from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. This more than six-fold increase will not be repeated."
Dec 1989/Jan 1990
Easy DOS it
"Processing speeds are now fast enough to satisfy all but the most exacting user."
PC World Awards
Best desktop PC: Apple Macintosh IIcx
Best laptop: Compaq SLT/286
Best word processor: WordPerfect 5 for DOS
March 1990
WordPerfect 5.1
"With 11 5.25-inch floppy discs, installation may seem daunting, but there are many new features, with added commands including {FOR} and {WHILE} loops."
May 1990
Could 1990 be the year of the LAN?
"The philosophical dividing line between the eras of standalone and networked PCs will be drawn in 1990.
Word processors: Nine packages point for point
"Of these products, three - Samna Ami Professional, NBI Legend and Microsoft Word for Windows - exploit the new graphical tools provided for Windows-compatible products. The remaining six - IBM DisplayWrite, Lotus Manuscript, Microsoft Word for DOS, Aston-Tate's Multimate, WordPerfect for DOS and WordStar - offer various levels of text-based word processing."
June 1990
Has OS/2 version 2.1 got the right stuff?
"When Microsoft and IBM jointly announced OS/2 almost three years ago, many thought it would become the predominant operating system. That obviously hasn't happened yet
July 1990
Return to the clone zone
"In this issue's comparison of 33MHz 386 machines, we look at five well-known international brands with prices ranging from $17,000 to $24,000. But when we researched local assemblers like PC Direct, TL Systems and Ultra, we found equivalent machines for less than half that. Companies such as ALR, Compaq and HP will find it difficult to justify these differences in the face of cut-price clone competition."
August 1990
At last, a true rival to DOS?
"Windows 3 is more than an update. In many respects it's an entirely new environment
Why do people read these things, anyways? PC World is nothing but a catalog of buzzwords and hype. Always was.
If email was still charged at $50 (32USD ATM) per megabyte the spam problem might be sorted very quickly (or it would never have happened in the first place).
Decode these
the more they stay the same. I think their nerd quotient is still as applicible today as it was 12 years ago:
How can I tell if I am a nerd?
"Subtract the number of girlfriends/boyfriends/wives/husbands you've had from the number of computers you have owned. If the number is positive, you are a nerd."
Damn, I'm at +5....
No news source is ever going to own up to its really spectacular gaffes, though. I'm going off to our family cabin this weekend. There are lots of old Popular Sciences there -- I think my grandfather's -- from the early 1950s. Sample article, paraphrased:
(And yeah, that's a real example.)
Popular Mechanics from back in the day has a lot of do-it-yourself projects that would kill anyone who tried them. Example: Make a "backpack" for your car from plywood, clip it on with a couple of cheap latches, and let your kids travel cross country back there. That one stuck in my mind, but there are many others.
The ones they'll admit to in articles like this are like the Popular Mechanics article from the cabin about bizarre new cars from Europe: Front Wheel Drive? Seatbelts that go across your shoulder? They'll never catch on, because surveys done by Ford show Americans want bigger and bigger vehicles.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Also, let's not forget a modern monitor supports 1024x768 x 32bit colour easily. Keeping your wallpaper in memory costs at least 2 megs of ram. No I didn't calculate that. I think it comes to ~3 megs. Windows has more support + services to support the support than you can shake a stick at.
I'ms ure if you went with a fine tooth combe though, you can get it to work on lower end machines.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting
In general, And still no expose on price fixing and monopoly abuse, still no coverage of fundamental research in both software and hardware, just the same copy and paste press release stories. No undercover journalism, no coverage of the spamming and malware writing "bad" parts of PC town. Still the same meaningless benchmarks and megahurts ads for articles. No coverage of the scary moves by the once garage operation and now mega coorporations. No credit where credit is due for real inovation, no mention of the real inventors of "the next cool thing", just of the latest guy to market a clone years later.
Overall I really hope that the dead tree coverage is better elseware in this world. Beside the likes of el`reg and vulture HQ only C`t seems to have some grip with what is going on. At slashdot we often joke about the dumbed down (or plain dumb) coverage by "normal" news sources (cnn/nyt), but the dedicated dead tree rags basicly have no journalism/real news whatsoever.
Sure its more complicated then this, but when looking back, do you see improvement over the years?
If you have a satellite internet connection (which you might need in places where the telephone service is very poor, in parts of Africa for instance) then you will pay around $10 a megabyte today if you pay as you go.
I have a friend who pays this much, so I always keep my emails to him short, and don't attach a sig.
That's probably the most important cultural change in today's technology.
Formerly you studied and learned your knowledge once in your lifetime. In school and college, that is. After that you lived on and used the knowledge.
Everyday life was rapid and the knowledge stayed. Now it is vice versa. You probably can't tell if you had a brunette girlfriend year or three ago, or in which year you found your nowadays favorite band.
The computer world changes entirely in a few years. You'd never mistake a 2002 PC for a 1996 PC. The technological or professional time runs a lot faster than a private time, probably the first time in the human history.
In 1989 I had an ST I think. The Amigas were going strong, and the C64 was hanging on in there by its fingertips. The magazine awards best PC to a Mac IIcx. In the UK at least, there were things such as the Amstrad PCW range - CPM-based (I believe) green screen business machines that did well for themselves as straight wordprocessing devices.
Then slowly it all died away, until now we're basically on a PC-only world on the desktop, even if a few flickers of OS competition are stirring. Only the Mac remains outside the fold, and I say this as an OS X user. Even so, just two hardware platforms for personal computing is hardly the same as the plethora of makes available in the 80s.
Ah well. Fun while it lasted. Time to dig out the Spectrum vs C64 vs Beeb flamewars of the school playground...
Cheerss,
Ian
CERN has a commitee by the name of PASTA which tracks computer technology, making predictions of future growth.
:)
I remember reading the first such report in 1996, and finding predictions of 500GB disks in PCs for the year 2006 somewhat inconceivable. There were similar results for CPUs and memory.
I just had a quick look on the CERN website and found their latest report (2002). There's a lot of information in there, much of it quite technical, and I'm in a rush so let me leave the interested to read it, and I'll just make a few points:
- The predictions they've been making for the last 8 years have turned out to be much too conservative in some fields.
- KCHF and MCHF stand for kilo-swiss-francs (803 USD) and mega-swiss-francs (803,000 USD). Yes, the people there really think in these numbers. They're scientists.
- LHC is the next generation of CERN experiments, due to go online now in (I believe) 2007. As far as data aquisition goes: "A peak rate of 1000 MBytes/s is required, and capacity for 5000 TB per year. This is a rather minimal requirement in terms of drives. In practice, support for ~2.5 GBytes/s might be needed at LHC startup"
(I cut and pasted that text, incidentally.)
Back when I worked at a major modern art museum, we had the two large local papers essentially parroting back our press releases about new shows as "reviews." These were big time journalists covering areas in which their subjective opinions were an accepted, encouraged part of their columns. They showed less intellectual curiosity than most fifth graders I know, at least in print. It was mostly about playing it safe and cashing the checks, from what I could tell, though they all liked what they were writing about and could be very interested and opinionated in person.
I have lots of contact with music reviewers, too. They don't have canned press releases to work from, so they've resorted to their own convention-laced boilerplate reviews. (Period instruments? I will include a tossoff remark about how the orchestra was less squeaky than has been the case in the past.) Pretty often they don't even cut and paste correctly -- the performers' names are often wrong in the review.
And those are in artistic areas -- where you're supposed to have an opinion and inject it into your writing, and where taking risks would theoretically be less damaging.
Also -- more general point -- why do people even write "prediction" stories? They're totally lame even for sports, where you can almost immediately figure out whether you got it right. If I was a news editor, I'd forbid anyone from writing prediction stories. (Maybe that'd change the completely idiotic, inane, asinine, expectations-spinning political coverage we see. Horse race polls before an election aren't informing anyone of anything, they're just attempts to tell me what I supposedly think already. That's utter crap.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
"A telephone connection can transport you from one bulletin board to another [...] We were able to download an X-rated picture, no questions asked."
WHAT'S THE NUMBER PLEASE POST
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
And you have scientific evidence for this right? You wouldn't be spouting off your own personal opinions as fact now would you?
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
I believe...
Your beliefs in a soul or spiritual component to human existence are only beliefs. They are not scientific fact and should not be presented as such.
K
You are an entirely mechanical process. So am I. Computers are simply not yet fast or capacious enough to mimic us, and some fundamental breakthroughs in our knowledge of a mind's operation apparently remain to be made, but one day there will be a thinking "machine". It's inevitable.
Computers weren't designed to think; they were designed to follow instructions.
That was then, this is now. Today humans constantly ask computers to do the thinking for them. My car has dashboard lights that tell me if my engine needs servicing or my oil need replacing; gone are the myriad dials that I would have to interpret myself. Stoplights are connected to sensors and to each other in order to optimize rush-hour traffic flow.
And that's just at the consumer level. Power plants and grids rely on systems designed not only to regulate power, but shut it down if necessary. PC software does "intelligent" background searches to locate information related to whatever I'm typing or reading. Most of the systems in a large airplane are automated because it would be impossible for a human to react quickly enough to maintain them.
The real problem with intelligent computers is that computers are still designed to live in a world of absolutes, truth and falsehood, and people never do. We don't learn about the world from logic, but instead we create logic to analyze the world. Human (and animal) brains learn by identifying patterns, and then observing when those patterns are broken. Computers are built around patterns and then, when those break, so do the computers.
Self-awareness is a property that the soul impinges on the mind, not an inherent property of neurons.
This is a metaphysical question, entirely unprovable, and one that real researchers try to avoid.
Lately I've started going back and viewing the slashdot headlines from 5 years ago. Its really hilarious to go back and see where we've been.
/. editors put together some slash-way-back stories to dig deeper into some of the more popular fads and see where they're at now.
Here's a start:
1 Year
2 Years
5 Years
Modifying the URL to go to an arbitrary day is easy. Just modify the YYYYMMDD code in the URL:
http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=19990722
It would be nice to see the
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
The $50 was only for international traffic, traffic within NZ was charged at significantly lower rates (or not at all). The Universities got their traffic significantly cheaper, so what would usually happen was that Linux (and other useful free software) would get mirrored on one of the University ftp servers and everyone else would download from there. Binary newsgroups were also useful for more than just warez and porn in those days. The other tricks we used to use were to PASV FTP something onto the University web servers from overseas (without using our own bandwidth) then email the admin and ask them to put it the pub directory so you could download it, and to use FTP via email gateways (which usually took several days to get the file to you in chunks) to take advantage of the price differential. There's nothing like a financial incentive to make you learn how to use the old internet protocols to their fullest.
1. No matter what you predict in the future, you will be horribly wrong.
2. The people in the future will mercilessly mock you for it.
Classic Dumb Terminal
"It's ridiculous claiming that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the 80s, we should by how have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and eat pills while listening to monotonous electronic music."
Finally. Someone knows why Raves and Ecstasy (The drug, not the feeling) are so popular.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Having lived through that 15-year era, I have to say that while I don't bat an eye at the MHz or MB ratings of equipment, the prices reported back then are astoundingly high.
They are talking about $28,000 PCs... who the heck would ever pay that much for a PC? They talk about $3,000 as a "breakthrough" when today you can grab an average system for $1,000 or less.
I would be curious to see a price trend chart over the years, of the "high-end PC", "average PC" and "bargain PC", whatever that meant in each time period.
Personally, I was into Commodores 15 years ago. The Amiga 2000 cost abour $2000 when your average PC cost about $5000. I never understood why people would buy PC compatibles back then!