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Dave's Computer Musings.

Being a Set of Reminiscences Concerning the Author's Personal Experience of Computing

The Nineties

Yes, it's happened at last. My reminiscences have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 1990s, just before the 1990s themselves become, metaphorically speaking, yet another old mattress in the Skip of History.

(I'm not entirely sure what the equivalent of a rubbish skip would be outside the UK - a dumpster, perhaps? Do people park one of those outside their house when they carry out major renovations, and does someone always throw an old mattress in when no-one is looking?)

Anyway, where were we?

We'd reached the end of the eighties with most of my professional computer usage still on mainframe computers. My own department was unique in that it possessed not one, but two - two! personal computers. The first, chronologically speaking, was an Ericsson 8086 based machine with 512kb of memory and no hard drive (but it had two 5¼" floppy disk drives by way of compensation). The second was an IBM AT - 80286 based, with 640kb of memory and a hard disk drive, the size of which I can't remember - but in those days, 20Mb was considered big. These PCs were used for a small collection of ad-hoc programs written in BASIC, and also to read data from paper tape and transmit it to the mainframe that did the actual work.

At home, I was still using a Sinclair Spectrum which originally saved its data to tape. However, I'd acquired a nifty little piece of kit called the DISCiPLE - this plugged into the back of the Spectrum and allowed you to save data to floppy disks - either 5¼" floppies or those new-fangled 3½" disks.

Changes at Work

Changes were afoot. At work, for some time wiring conduits were being opened up to allow the installation of a new cabling system. When the covers were replaced, the conduits had received new sockets. The next stage was the delivery of enough PCs to fill a medium-sized room. Over the following weeks, these were unpacked, tested, and distributed around the site.

The new machines represented quite an advance on what had gone before, being 16MHz 80836 based PS/2s. The PS/2 was IBMs attempt to launch a new generation of PC, complete with its very own new operating system - OS/2. At the time (1991), PCs came in two main categories - IBM PCs and "clones".

Leaving The Nest

IBM had been the first to launch the 80?86 based personal computer, and during the 1980s their main competitor had been Apple with their Mackintosh computers. Apple retained much tighter control of their computer and operating system design, with the result that, if it was a Mackintosh, it was made by Apple. In contrast, IBM made use of other companies to supply crucial elements of the PC hardware and operating system. The result was that it was technically feasible for other companies to buy in the same or very similar hardware and software, and build a computer that wasn't an IBM PC, that operated using different built-in operating software, and yet would do the same things as an IBM PC, including running the same operating system (DOS and, later, Windows) and applications software. And, since it was technically feasible, many companies did exactly that, creating "clones" of the IBM computers that were considerably less expensive but remained compatible with the genuine IBM machines.

IBM then introduced their PS/2 range, retaining much greater control over these machines than they had over the earlier PCs. The idea was that these would represent such a significant advance in personal computing that the users would fall over themselves to buy them - and, with no clones of PS/2s, the users would buy them from IBM. In fact, the users preferred to stay with the clones, or "IBM-compatibles". Price was an important consideration, and the clones had by then reached so far into the market that users were more interested in faster and faster versions of what they were already used to than in a new generation of personal computing.

The end result? Well, how many people immediately associate "IBM" and "PC"? Walk into any computer store - how many of the PCs on display are made by IBM? Does anyone now speak of "clones" or "IBM-Compatibles"? They're simply know as "PCs", or "Wintel" computers (from Windows, the most common operating system, and Intel, the manufacturers of the 80?86 processors, although there are now plenty of "Intel-compatible" processors around!)

Issues of Control

IBM weren't the only ones trying to regain control over the brave new world of personal computing. Returning to work, all those IBM PS/2s turned out to have an extra lead that connected one of their expansion cards to the new sockets that had just been installed. This allowed them to access printers scattered around the site, and access hard disks on other computers several hundred yards away. In short (as Mr Micawber might say), we now had a Local Area Network, which allowed the Information Technology professionals to regain control of computing.

It's time now to take an overview of just what effect the spread of personal computing had on those who ran computer systems. Rolling back the calendar to the early days, a computer filled an entire room, and a room that had to be kept under fairly tightly controlled environmental conditions at that. If you wanted to use the computer... Well, you had to get permission to use it, and you'd be one of many, many users sharing the use of that machine. In the very early days, you'd get what you wanted to do encoded on paper tape, or punched cards, which you then handed over to the high priests operations staff. They would decide how important your work was, compared with everybody elses'. Eventually, they would feed it into The Computer, and eventually give you your output. Come to think of it, most of the time they'd post it to you.

Then (after, I freely admit, a fair amount of intervening time), along come personal computers. Now, if you want to use a computer (and your budget will stand it), you buy a computer. It will happily sit on the corner of your desk, and do more of what you want it to do much faster than that huge computer that now lives in your local science museum. The great thing is... you don't have to share it with anybody! It's yours! When you want to use it, you switch it on, sit down, and get on with what you want to do.

Now, if I were a cynic, I might imagine that those who previously ran big computers might see this as a loss of control and get ever so slightly worried. If I were even more of a cynic, I might suspect that the concept of networking is the way that operations staff try to regain control of computing.

Suspicion

If that sounds a rather Luddite sentiment, I would point out that I am joking... well, 98% joking. The other 2% represents just a little nagging doubt. Networks bring enormous benefits - electronic mail within a site or company and, through the Internet, to anywhere else (that is connected to the Internet) you may care to mention. Why plug a printer into every computer when ten or twenty computers can share one printer? Why have only printer connected to your computer when you could choose from one of half a dozen? So why am I just a little cynical? Generally speaking, a network does need tighter control than a collection of stand-alone machines. After all, if the computers aren't connected to any others, then any virus that infects that computer can only spread to other PCs via floppy disks - a slow means of propagation - and is quite easily blocked by (say) putting a lock on the disk drive. On a network, the potential exists for a virus to spread itself very rapidly, by infecting a common resource and then transferring to any computer that uses that resource.

Then there are licensing issues for software. Again, this is easily controlled on stand-alone machines - if it's not installed on the machine, you can't use it. On a network, if the software is on a central server, any machine on the network might be able to access it - and a system of controlling access to the software needs to be put in place if the software publishers are not to come down on the unwary Information Technology Professional like a ton of bricks.

Finally, many networks are set up so that a user can use any one of several workstations on the system (in some cases, any workstation anywhere on the system). If the users are not to be confused by different configurations (screen size, location of icons and so on), then there needs to be some degree of standardisation, which means in turn that individual users have to be denied much of their ability to "personalise" their workstations.

This, then, is the source of my nagging doubt. To start with, Information Technology professionals (even if they weren't then known by that name that) exercised a fair amount of control over computing facilities. Personal computers removed much of that control, allowing anyone with the money and a reasonable amount of knowledge to buy a computer and set it up how they wanted, with little reference to anyone else. Local area networks require greater administration, restoring the power of the Information Technology department. Or so I might think if I were paranoid.

Home Again

By 1990, it was becoming clear that home computing had moved on from the Sinclair Spectrum. My own set-up had proved serviceable over the years, and I was able to do my home accounts on it, using a program of my own devising that looked like a spreadsheet, and used a joystick in much the same way as other computers used a mouse. It might have looked like a spreadsheet, but it was much less flexible as the cell colours and formulae were all fixed by the code itself. Nonetheless, it worked, and writing it gave me a real sense of achievement.

At the time, computers still seemed to be divided into two categories: home computers and business computers. The two main home computers (available in the High Street electrical stores) were the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. These would be running to impress the customers, showing some high-quality graphics on the screen. On the business side were the Apple Mackintosh and the IBM-compatibles. These tended to be available from more specialist office suppliers, cost more than the "home" machines, and had much less impressive displays (unless you were prepared to pay *really* high prices - a top-of-the-range PC then probably cost about four times, in real terms, as much as a top of the range PC does now).

Eventually, I settled on a PC - an Amstrad 2386, for those who really need to know these things, with 4Mb of memory and 65Mb of hard disk space. It was supplied with DOS 4 - an operating system that acquired something of a poor reputation, but in fairness I have to point out that I had few problems - perhaps the version I had included a few patches. It also had Windows 2, which had a truly awful user interface - imagine the Windows Explorer in lower resolution and fewer colours, and perhaps the best advertisement for the Apple desktop I've ever seen. Small wonder that replacing that system with Windows 3.1 - still not perfect, but vastly improved on Windows 2 - took place early in the lifetime of that machine.

Creeping Obsolescence

Of course, computer technology continued to move on at its usual rapid pace, and before long that computer - which was ahead of those we had at work at the time - was looking quite dated. Eventually, the inevitable happened and I started getting hard disk errors. Reformatting and re-installing everything worked for a while, but the errors became more and more frequent, until it finally gave up the ghost.

The choice was between replacing the hard drive, and replacing the whole machine. To replace the hard drive, I'd have had to fit a new interface card (all right, not that difficult a task) and probably upgrade the BIOS (trickier, and to this day I'm not convinced it would even have been possible). I might even have had to fit a new motherboard, which in turn would mean a new video card, as the old motherboard had integrated video. I also had grave suspicions that the motherboard was a non-standard size... basically, what I'd be carrying forward from the old system to the refurbished system would have been the floppy disk drive. It hardly seemed worth the effort, somehow. So, a new computer it was - and a 120MHz Pentium with 1.6Gb hard disk drive and 16Mb memory sounded quite good in those days.

Which brings me up to date. Fundamentally, that system (which is getting a bit long in the tooth now) is the one I'm still using, with one or two extras added over the years. Will I ever replace it? I expect so, some time. For the time being, even if its financial value these days is next to nothing, it serves its purpose.

And, having come up to date, it's time to take a look at what the immediate past didn't hold, and what the near future might hold, in my thoughts on the Year 2000 and beyond.

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