I Miss the PC Golden Age

I can still remember buying my first PC. I was in college. I had already written a couple of term papers on a type writer. The problem with a typewriter was that I wasn’t accurate in typing and correcting errors was a real chore. Eventually I found my way to the writing lab in the Humanities building where they had a Macintosh computer. I was dazzled by how easy it was to make corrections and by fonts. Oh, the fonts were so fun. I wrote a letter home to my Mom using every font available. I know I wasn’t the first or last to do that.

Finally the IBM compatible computer became available at a price I could afford and I went out and bought one. It was an 8088 that could run at speeds of up to 8 Mhz. It had two 5.25” floppy drives, 640 KB of RAM. It had no hard drive. What an exciting day that was for me. I used that computer as a typewriter replacement. I had WordPerfect and typed all my papers on it. That was all. At the time I didn’t really know what else you could do with it. It sounds pretty boring, but actually that computer was more exciting to me than my current quad core with 8 GB of RAM.

I remember spending over $200 to upgrade to almost a megabyte of RAM. Spending that money was extravagant, but I ran into a program that demanded it and I had no choice. I remember buying my first sound card and being so thrilled with the midi sounds my computer could make. I remember my first CD-ROM player. It was an external and played at the original 1x speed.  I put in an encyclopedia disk and listed to Patrick Stewart say, “Welcome to” [pause as data buffered] “the exciting world of” [pause as data buffered] and this went on and I was patient and excited. My first hard drive was 10 MB. I could hardly believe so much room could exist for storage. I had the x286 processor, the x386, and nearly died of happiness when I was able to get a x486.

Networking came along and I got a modem and an AOL account. I remember my first email address and hearing those wonderful words “You have mail!” One night, after hours at the office, I was blown away when I entered the world of Doom with a friend. There I was, in a virtual world, and I could see my friend in there and interact with him. We slaughtered monsters (and got slaughtered). I wondered if Heaven could be as wonderful as that experience.

Those years were the Golden Years for personal computers. There was always some new development just around the corner that made such a difference in the personal computing world that even a regular computer user just had to have it. But all golden ages throughout history have one thing in common—they come to an end. PC technology finally grew up and lost that “what’s next?” excitement.  I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but I believe it started during the Microsoft XP era.  I remember buying a brand new Vista computer. It was my first dual-core processor and I mistakenly thought it was going to smoke my old Pentium 4 computer. I was wrong. It actually seemed slower and more error prone.  One reason for this was that they sold me the computer with 1 GB of ram in it when Vista really needs at least 2 GB to run. The other reason was that the pre SP1 Vista was buggy. I still have that computer five years later and it is running fine (upgraded to Win 7). Although I have newer computers at home I also have very active older computers still running Pentium 4 processors and Windows XP. In my shop I am constantly fixing computers that are five years old or older. It is this that tells me that the original golden age of computers is over. Back in the 80’s and 90’s I was buying new computer every year because I had to in order to run the newer programs. Now that PCs have matured a five-year-old machine can run this year’s software releases (except for some of the high end games). Yes, you can go out and buy PCs that are far more powerful than the five year old PCs, but they don’t seem to make that much difference in your day-to-day computing experience. Although this situation saves me money, I look nostalgically to those earlier, more exciting days of the PC.

Perhaps all is not lost. It seems that we are entering a PC revival. Well, not really a PC revival, but a computing revival.  Although PCs themselves are not making waves in anymore, the PC alternatives or what I call PC extenders, are. We are now in the age of mobility. The excitement of desktop PCs was replaced by the laptop. The excitement of the laptop was replaced by the extremely portable netbook. The excitement of the netbook has been replaced by the tablet and the smart phone. Ultrabook technology is lurking around the edges of the limelight. What all this means is choices for the average computer user. And choices mean excitement—at least a little. I still rely heavily on a desktop PC. However my laptop sees a lot of use too. I have a netbook that goes on house calls with me. I also have a tablet that travels around the house a lot. In my pocket I carry a smartphone that is a real workhorse.  I am having fun again reading about the latest in each of these areas and find a little excitement in trying to figure out how much difference some of these new gadgets will make in my life. But still, none of these things makes my heart beat as fast as the day I got my first one gigabyte hard drive.