The PC That Was
By: yuga
Date: Sept-22-2002

In the years that have passed, I would say that I saw the birth (well, almost) and growth of the newest and most frequently replaced home appliance - the computer. Why do I refer to is as a home appliance, you would ask? Well, I don't know about you but I use my PC to watch movies, play CDs of my favorite music, and listen to the radio via internet streaming. I could have even watch TV and listen to local radio stations if I had a TV/FM tuner card installed. Pretty much like your common household appliance, eh?!

First time I saw a computer was at my grandpa's house in the city. It was a device for playing chess made by Texas Instrument and you can hook it to the phone line to play against an opponent miles away. I forgot what else it could do but it was the size of a keyboard. The year was 1989 and I was just in grade five.

Then two years later my uncle brought back from the states what seemed to be a small green-screen TV that looks like an electric typewriter. It was my very first PC, or so I thought was mine since nobody else knows how to use it. If I remember right, it was an IBM PC clone 80x86 with double 5.25 floppy drives. And yes, it boasts of 640 kilobytes of memory which was, by the way, too much for the current applications at that time. It had MS DOS 3.0 to boot it up. Lasted about another year until I plugged it in a 220V socket and went kaput.

The following year, my same uncle brought home a new one he got from a sale in one of the stores in the states. This one's much better. It's an IBM desktop 286 with 2 Megabytes of RAM, a 3.5" floppy drive and a CGA monitor from Hewllet Packard. What's more exciting with this PC is that it has a hard drive. Yes, a 40 MB hard drive made by Priam. It also runs on Windows 3.0 and it was ultra cool! It was the first time I learned how to use a mouse too. That was the time I could finish a game of Minesweeper in 7 seconds tops (the beginner level). Too bad the HD broke down after I tinkered with the Stacker program which runs the compression of the drive. Failing to find a replacement hard drive, I settled for a 3.5" floppy drive and a 5.25" drive B.

That poor PC went on like that for years. I even brought it here in Manila when I studied for college back in 1995. It didn't really have that much use since all I could do with it is play games (tons of them!) and do word processing using WordStar. Heck, I can memorize almost all WS keyboard commands and shortcuts then. Alas, the parallel port had already gone bonkers so I have no use for a printer.

Got tired of the thing so I lent it to a roommate who gladly used it to do some spare time programming using Pascal. Well, good for him since he pretty much enjoyed it. He became very good at it too. Now, my problem was how to get a new PC for myself - a better and faster one.

To my surprise and after several months of haggling with my parents, I got a new one. It's an Acer laptop packed with a Cyrix 486-DX4 100MHz with 8MB RAM and 220MB of drive space. Though it only had Windows 3.1 installed, I later replaced it with Windows 95 after asking help from a friend. Adding MS Plus! didn't work since an 8MB of RAM couldn't load them all. I had to save several thousand bucks from my savings in order to buy another 8 MB to satisfy that urge of installing more apps. The LCD wasn't colored and it didn't have a CDROM drive but during those times I was more than content. Besides, I could run Warcraft 1 and play against a friend using a data cable thru the printer port. That was enough.

Years later, I got a Pentium II 300 PC and then upgraded it to Pentium 3 450MHz. Now, I'm using a Pentium 4 1.4GHz with 256 MB RDRAM. When I look up a decade ago, this rig was unimaginable. Even Bill Gates once said that we couldn't use up all the 640KB of RAM even if we loaded all the programs in the world, he was wrong. Processing speed had gone almost 100 times faster now compared to a decade ago. Drive capacity increased 2,000 times. Even the number of transistors that can fit in a square inch of silicon die multiplied from several hundred thousands to hundreds of millions in less than a decade.

It was so fast. Your newly bought PC could be the slowest in 6 months and obsolete in 18 months. Yet, we never got tired of upgrading each time. Maybe except for me, I got tired years ago.