The ORIGINAL IBM PC: 25 years old this month

25 years.  Incredible.

The original IBM PC

was introduced on August 12, 1981. 25 years later or 9,134 days later, the personal computer has advanced so exponentially in terms of CPU speed, available RAM capacity and Hard Disk size that it truly defies description.

Consider for a moment, the following:

RAM capacity is 64,000 larger

The IBM PC had 16K (that's KILObytes, not MEGAbytes) of RAM.  A typical PC today has 1GB of RAM.  That is an increase factor of 64,000.  Don't believe me? 

Consider that 1 GIGABYTE = 1,000 MB.  1 MB = 1024 KILOBYTES. 

So, based on this, to get from the original 16KB of RAM to just 1 MB of RAM, you had to increase it 64x (1,024/16=64). To get to 10 MB of RAM, you had to increase it 640x and to get to 100 MB of RAM you had to increase it 6,400x. Finally, get to 1 GB of RAM, you had to increase it 64,000x.  When numbers are increased by a factor of 10, they get pretty big, pretty quickly

CPU Speed is 750 times as fast
Once again, the original IBM PC had a processor or CPU speed of 4.77 MHz.  Here again, we need to increase by a factor of 10:

A speed increase of 10x would get us to 40Mhz.  A 100x increase takes us to 400Mhz. a 500x increase takes us to 2,000Mhz or a 2GHz CPU speed.  at 3.6 Ghz, the last of the Pentium family of CPU's is indeed 750x as fast as the original 8086 CPU in the original IBM PC.

Hard Disk Space increase and cost reduction almost defies description
The original IBM PC did NOT have a fixed, stand-alone hard Drive.  It was not until the release of the IBM XT

 
in 1983 that a Hard Disk was included in the computer.  This machine was sold originally with a 20MB Hard Drive.  Again, calling up our old friend the 10x Factor, we learn that a  10x Increase = 200 MB Hard Drive. 100x increase = 2,000 MB (2 GB) Hard Drive. 1,000x increase = 20,000 MB (20 GB) Hard Drive. 10,000x increase = 200 GB Hard Drive.

So, for the original price of about $1,500, just 25 years later, today you can buy a PC at any consumer electronics store that is:

• 750 times as fast
• Has 64,000 times as much memory
• and has 10,000 times as much storage space.

Conclusion:  No other industry in the history of man has seen these kinds of advances in as short a period of time
Imagine, just for a moment, if the 2006 Ford Mustang was 750 times as fast as that Mustang you bought 1981.  Kind of of incomprehensible, is it not?

Very interesting time to be alive, I must say...

Comments

[Big Be]

Did the secondIBM PC hav a CD-ROM w/ a 5 1/4" Floppy Drive? If so, sweet!

Nice review of the IBM PCs