11 Things Computer Users Will Never Experience Again
Once upon a time, microcomputers weren't all-in-one devices. They were put together from standalone components, each with its technical merits -- and we had to know all about every one of them.
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Miniaturization is remarkable. The MacBook Air 13 weighs only three pounds. The ASUS C201 Chromebook weighs two pounds. That's an admirable feat of engineering, and has earned undying gratitude from old-school "road warriors," those of us who once bragged about our laptop computers only weighing fifteen pounds. Thanks, hardware folks.
I have been suffering from an unrepentant "Get off my lawn" nostalgia, and a desire to preach to the the kids who don't know what came before. A computer was not always built as a single solid-state device, wherein an errant coffee spill can destroy an entire system. In the high and far-off times, O best beloved, the computer had no all-in-one functionality. We made it happen.
Initially, and until fairly recently, personal computers were boxes that connected several boards, each of which had a dedicated purpose, unique technical features (from "cheap" to "best video resolution"), and a separate price tag.
[Have a new PC? Read 11 Windows 10 Apps For Your Upgraded PC.]
That piecemeal approach had advantages. Primarily, you could build computer systems that met your needs. Let's say connectivity was more important than video quality, such as with an early Web server. In that case, you could invest more money in your network card than your video card. The breadth of options also meant healthy competition. Each vendor was motivated to make its product the preferred brand, ideally through innovation.
The process wasn't always pretty. We had nasty flame wars over which was the "best" video card. Friendships were destroyed over such things. All off us had to cope with uncertainties resulting from battling industry standards, as the "standards" changed long before a computer wore out. It was exhausting.
Plus, when everything was purchased separately, vendors of operating systems had to write dedicated drivers for every single device. If your OS wasn't supported, you couldn't use the hardware. Too often, you learned that the hard way.
Many people turned to established vendors, which would sell a computer as a single system, as they do today. But it was popular -- and less expensive -- to build your own, or to go to a "white box" vendor that would customize the computer exactly the way you wanted it.
Let's take a step into the WABAC machine with a photo retrospective of the old days, when computer hardware was sold as components. Once you've reviewed our history lesson, tell us about your own experiences in the comments section below.
Everything started, naturally, with the chassis into which you plugged all the components. You needed room for all the cards and devices, which forced several decisions. For example, you had to ask yourself: "Do I want a full-height floppy drive?," "Will I use an internal tape drive?," and "Are any of my cards full-length?"
You also had to determine which CPU you planned to use, and whether it ran so hot that you needed a dedicated fan to cool it off, so the computer wouldn't overheat.
The answers to each of those questions affected the number of drive bays you needed, and thus how big the actual physical box would be. It was a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Most of my computers were too tall to fit under my desk. It was also a mark of geek pride if you never bothered to put the case back on the computer.
The above magazine advertisement, from 1998, is relatively late in the era. For $399, you got "the guts to build your own system," which meant it included the case, the motherboard, a power supply, and a fan. That was a fair price for a (sort of) pre-built system. Of course, there wasn't a CPU, storage, video, multimedia, or monitor.
We had options. Lots of options. Every printed computer magazine (including InformationWeek) had entire sections devoted to ads from mail-order computer companies, printed with ever-teenier print in order to fit every product on a single magazine page. Each mail order company promised to sell you equipment from any vendor you liked -- presumably at the lowest possible price.
Some mail order companies specialized in one kind of product, as you can see in the above ad (circa 2000), with all its attention on SCSI hardware. My favorite item here is The Book of SCSI: An Adventure! Other mail-order firms sold only programming tools, camera equipment, or computer memory.
Magazines had page after page of ads like this, and many people loved reading them in the wish-book sense of "Wouldn't it be fun to buy that?" These mail-order ads supported a healthy marketplace of computer publications, wherein the articles explained how each of those hardware components worked, and how to choose the best device.
In a personal computer all the smaller boards (or cards) plugged into one larger main board. The term was interchangeably used with "motherboard." A sow and her piglets gives you the correct, if inelegant, imagery.
Makers of motherboards advertised their support for a given brand of CPU. These nearly always were sold separately, since CPUs varied in speed, cache size, and other factors -- and yes, to set up a computer you really did need to know the differences. Similarly, the choice of motherboard told you which type of hardware memory you could use, as well as the speed it would support.
Importantly, the motherboard also defined the number of slots you could use, sometimes referred to as the "bus." On several occasions, I couldn't add another device to my computer (such as a special-purpose board to speed up my laser printer) because I'd already used up the four or six bus slots in my PC.
Over time more and more functionality was built in. Initially, it was primarily "something that connects all the cards," but gradually motherboards included video, parallel, and serial ports; storage support; and multimedia. The above 1998 print ad shows that transition underway.
Then, and now, a computer's power is affected by how much random access memory (RAM) the CPU can address, and how fast the processor can interact with that RAM.
Memory has always been relatively expensive, as it is today. In the days before the IBM PC, when hobbyists still relied on the S-100 bus, an advertisement like the one above, for the Cromemco (CP/M) personal computer, could crow about 16K (that's in bytes) turning your computer into "a working giant." Nowadays, it'd be positively Lilliputian.
In 1998, a specialist mail-order company (which had phone sales and a website!) could offer 128MB for $265. Such a deal.
Whatever the cost, installing the memory into the computer could be a frustrating exercise. For instance, if you tried to install the proprietary memory sticks for the IBM PS/2 the wrong way, the little plastic clips that held in the sticks would pop off. (Guess how I know?) You could "fix" that broken motherboard with a rubberband. However, rubberbands don't like to get warm, and eventually they pop off, too. (Guess how I know that, as well?)
Perhaps the biggest choice most of us made was in regard to the monitor, and video card to support it. Certainly, it was the most visible difference between one computer and another. Almost anyone could appreciate the speedy evolution in graphic standards (from CGA to EGA to VGA, and onwards), if not the rate at which the technology we chose became obsolete.
Each video adaptor, of course, had a different price point. Did you want to spend $89 on a basic VGA card, or invest $379 for better resolution and faster video refresh rates? (By the time of the above 1998 ad, prices had dropped significantly.)
Gamers always justified the fastest video. But it was harder to convince the boss in a large enterprise that your productivity would be significantly enhanced when you could see 10x10 cells in Lotus 1-2-3, instead of 6x6. As a result, most of us had a faster and more powerful computer at home than we did in the office.
In every era, computer storage follows the law of closet space: No matter how much you have, it isn't enough.
As a result, we expended a significant portion of our time, in the early days of microcomputers, trying to fit 10 pounds of data into a 5-pound bag.
Early innovators were successful, by which I mean that in only a few years we went from floppy diskettes that could hold 360K, to diskettes that could hold four times as much. Then we had hard disks, which used ever-more-efficient technology so we could store more data. Though, in my experience, whether the hard disk stored 10MB, 40MB, or 120MB, it always seemed to cost $850.
All that data needed to be backed up, whether on diskette, with a portable medium (ZIP drives were common) or, ideally, on (expensive) tape. Backup to the cloud? Ha! We didn't have a cloud. At best, on a fast network, the important data would be copied to a data center.
And, of course, each of those technologies meant another card inserted into one of those precious slots on your motherboard. Need RAID? SCSI? A floppy-disk controller? Each of those cost something, and rarely was it a trivial amount.
The computer needed to interact with other hardware. Printers generally used a parallel port (intimating the manner in which data traveled), so you needed a parallel cable with the right adaptors. If you had two printers, that meant two parallel ports -- and an adaptor card supplying such a thing. That led me to create one of my most popular Halloween costumes: I spent the evening carrying around two bottles of fine fortified wine (parallel Ports, get it?).
RS232 serial ports were the common choice for other devices, such as modems, mice, and (eventually) plug-and-unplug devices, such as digital camera connections. The technical specification was exhaustive (and the basis for much of what we see in USB devices today). The connections? Not so much. That led many of us to collect adaptor cables and gender changers, especially if you had, say, an older-era computer mouse that needed to plug into a newer PC.
As with so many other "standards" in microcomputing, the rapid pace of innovation (and marketing clout) meant that every company had to choose a "standard" in network topology on which to place its bets. IBM's Token Ring? ARCNet? Ethernet? Each needed its own network cabling, too. And that's without regard to the software options, such as Microsoft LAN Manager or Novell Netware.
There were also adaptor cards to make a PC emulate other, older equipment. For instance, the IRMA board was a brand of coaxial interface cards for PCs and Macintosh computers. They enabled 3270 emulator programs to connect to IBM mainframe computers.
I don't know how many years we spent proclaiming that this would be "the year of the network." It probably didn't really arrive until 1995, after the "year of the Internet" in 1992.
Until then, if we wanted to connect to the outside world, we used modems. If we bothered.
Plenty of people saw no reason to dial into a BBS, or a paid service like CompuServe. If they needed to transfer a file to another computer, they copied it onto a diskette, the way you might use a USB key today, though the tiniest USB key today is bigger than an early PC's hard disks.
Modems weren't always an internal card, like this D.C. Hayes Micromodem 100, first produced for S-100 systems, which sent data at speeds ranging from 45 up to 300 baud. Some folks (including me) preferred an external modem, as long as there were enough serial and parallel ports to go around. The last modem I used transferred data at 14,400 bits per second, which today would seem slightly faster than the rate at which grass grows.
For quite a while, personal computers didn't play music. Well, not unless you were willing to create music using the computer's built-in speaker, which could only produce a simple tone at a fixed volume. That sufficed for a status beep ("Change the diskette for your backup!"), but little else. While the IBM PC's BASICA had a PLAY statement that would generate real notes to create a melody, it wasn't exactly melodious.
So if you wanted music to, say, accompany a computer game, you bought a multimedia card. This was always an optional item, and not cheap. Few enterprise computers had one, in part because it would never have occurred to anyone to buy headphones for a company computer.
Through much of the 1990s, the market leader was Creative Labs' line of Sound Blaster cards. The first of these were full-length cards that consumed one of those precious motherboard slots. Before long, the Sound Blaster Multimedia Upgrade Kit supplied an audio card, a CD-ROM drive, and software that enabled you to upgrade 386 PCs and above to the Multimedia PC Level-1 standard. Yes, I remember when that was a big deal.
All these cards stuffed into a metal chassis had an unavoidable effect: We ended up with boxes crammed full of cables and other connectors. I had adventures that began with a missing SCSI terminator, an errant jumper, a hard drive ribbon cable that wasn't long enough, or a motherboard whose standoffs didn't line up correctly with the holes in the case.
Then, too, was the predictability with which a case refused to slide back together once you opened it. The hardware struggle inevitably would pinch you and leave an angry welt. I was reminded of this fact while I took the photo above, and it caused me to say, "I don't miss this at all."
I've left out plenty of elements that were required in building one's own computer system. Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments section below -- or tell us about the pieces that make you, too, appreciate how much better things are these days.
All these cards stuffed into a metal chassis had an unavoidable effect: We ended up with boxes crammed full of cables and other connectors. I had adventures that began with a missing SCSI terminator, an errant jumper, a hard drive ribbon cable that wasn't long enough, or a motherboard whose standoffs didn't line up correctly with the holes in the case.
Then, too, was the predictability with which a case refused to slide back together once you opened it. The hardware struggle inevitably would pinch you and leave an angry welt. I was reminded of this fact while I took the photo above, and it caused me to say, "I don't miss this at all."
I've left out plenty of elements that were required in building one's own computer system. Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments section below -- or tell us about the pieces that make you, too, appreciate how much better things are these days.
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