The PC Informant » History of technology

The secret history of Windows

Vic Laurie — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:30:27 +0000

Following up its collection of opinions on the future of Windows, Technologizer has a story, The Secret Origin of Windows. Tandy Trower, who was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, tells the story.

How the PC began and Xerox lost an unprcedented opportunity

Vic Laurie — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:01:35 +0000

The way the PC is set up today is a very old concept. Windows is 25 years old but the basic design for the PC goes back further to the early work done at the Stanford Research Institute and the Xerox PARC lab in Palo Alto, California. The story of how Xerox could have been the founder and behemoth of the computing industry but whose top management had no clue about the extraordinary opportunity before them will forever be a prime case in business history. With all the discussion of where Microsoft might be going, it is worth noting that Microsoft played no role in the earliest days. In fact, there was no Microsoft then. It was Steve Jobs who really got the PC going when Xerox dropped the ball. The video clip below relates some of the history.

The desktop metaphor doesn’t work anymore

Vic Laurie — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:52:31 +0000

When PCs were introduced, their prime function involved what might be called office work. There were word processors, spread sheets and data bases. The desktop was the metaphor for the workspace. Information was stored in files and folders, just like in an office. PCs were standalone work stations with no connection to anything else. There was no Worldwide Web. Users of PCs in business were trained to use their software and had to be adept with it.

Household PC owners of the time were enthusiasts and hobbyists and owned PCs because they loved to tinker with them. Many had technical backgrounds. They understood a great deal about how the PC worked and enjoyed learning about computers and computing. A typical PC was expensive and relatively few households had one. Most of these were in North American or western Europe.

Then came the revolution—the Web. Almost as important was the ever cheaper and more powerful hardware as well as the availability of broadband connections. The number of PCs grew exponentially; they became interconnected; they spread all over the world. And a complete shift in the type of person using PCs happened. No longer the exclusive purview of enterprises with IT staffs or technically oriented and affluent home users, the PC became a common household item. But the PC did not get simpler and easier to use to accommodate all these untrained newcomers. What other common household item requires so much maintenance, has so many ways to go wrong, has so many configurations, and so often baffles its users? What other complex device is sold to untrained buyers with no manual and no instructions?

And there is the security problem. PC security became a nightmare because the technology was never designed to cope with everybody being connected to everybody else. The Internet has provided access for criminal activity on an unprecedented scale. Large numbers of uninformed or naive individuals are exposed to sophisticated criminal gangs from all over the world. Computer security requires a proficiency and awareness that is missing in hundreds of millions of users. These users are not adept at applying the security measures that PCs require.

The present-day PC is mismatched with both the average user’s skills and with their interests. In view of this discordance, what path is personal computing going to take? Can the roadblock of the Windows hegemony be overcome? There are stirrings that suggest a possible shift in what is considered to be the best personal computing device. Actually, the name “personal computer” is almost archaic. What people do more than anything is communicate and surf the Internet. And they do this while on the go. A PC tied to a desktop is fine in the enterprise environment but is less and less interesting to the consumer.

Because of the development of smartphones and other mobile devices, there is growing recognition that the desktop metaphor doesn’t work anymore. For example, Rob Enderle writes at TechNewsWorld :

I think it means the PC experiment has run its course. It did have a number of advantages in terms of dropping price and initially getting technology to the masses, but the standards process slowed it substantially, and innovation often became more of a joke then reality.

I’ll be pursuing this subject in a future post.

Will UEFI replace the BIOS?

Vic Laurie — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:31:05 +0000

Most PC users have little contact with the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) but it can be useful to know a little about the subject. I have posted a number of times on various aspects of the BIOS (for example, here and also here). The basic structure of the BIOS has been around a very long time by computer standards and there is a movement to replace this ancient way of getting a computer up and going with something called the United Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).

The idea of a change in the way we start up computers was given impetus by the Intel 64-bit Itanium project, which was intended to break away from the venerable X86 processor architecture. A new approach to booting up was involved and was called the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). However, the Itanium never really caught on. Still, the project EFI continued to evolve with many companies getting involved and it became the United Extensible Firmware Interface. (An introduction to UEFI is at this link.)

Modern computers are very different from those that the BIOS was first designed for. So will UEFI replace the BIOS? Apparently, there is support for UEFI in 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and 7, as well as in Apple OS X and many versions of Linux. But I get the impression that there aren’t many motherboards that support UEFI. For now, it looks like the BIOS will continue. But the BIOS is 16-bit real mode and some day will be replaced although servers will probably get there first.

How your CPU works

Vic Laurie — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:28:34 +0000

This won’t be everybody’s cup of tea but, if you are curious about how a computer does what it does, here’s a link that explains how the arithmetic unit of a CPU works.

In simplest terms, a computer is an adding machine together with simple logic functions that can choose different operations depending on whether one electrical signal is bigger than another. Amazingly enough, adding/subtracting plus simple logic functions and a stored program are all that is needed to carry out the enormous array of tasks that computers do today. Of course, it takes a lot of clever programming to put together all the steps needed and it takes modern hardware to do the many millions of additions and subtractions that even a simple task requires. Mathematical whizzes like Alan Turing and John von Neumann laid the theoretical foundations and the integrated circuit made the hardware possible.

Windows Start-up & Shutdown Sounds from Windows 3.1 on up

Vic Laurie — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:41:49 +0000

It seems that people will collect almost anything. Vince Bognot has put together Windows Start-up and Shutdown Sounds from Windows 3.1 to Windows 7. I am not sure who cares but here is his collection:

Via the Windows Club

Gopher still lives

Vic Laurie — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:03:31 +0000

Unless you were using the Internet before the World Wide Web came along, you probably never heard of the Gopher protocol or the search facilities called Archie and Veronica. I didn’t realize that Gopher still lived until I saw an Ars Technica post, The Web may have won, but Gopher tunnels on. It brought me back to the days when almost everything was text and modem speeds were a few kilobits/sec. The name “Gopher” came from the University of Minnesota mascot. Here’s an excerpt from Ars Technica:

So it was no surprise that when University of Minnesota researchers developed an early protocol for organizing and sharing documents over the Internet, they named it “gopher.” The initial version of the protocol appeared in 1991; by 1993, it had been codified as a Request for Comment (RFC 1436) that laid out the protocol in some detail.

According to the RFC, gopher was designed as a client-server protocol running over TCP/IP. Much lighter than HTTP and HTML, gopher provided essentially two options: menus and documents, both of which were accessed through port 70. The system was initially text-based, though basic image serving ability came later. There was no decorative markup for menu pages, which all looked basically (and boringly) the same; on the other hand, gopher was quick and consistent.

The post goes on to describe how you can still use Gopher. A few servers remain and Firefox still supports the Gopher protocol. Internet Explorer does not. If you have Firefox, try pasting “gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/world” (without quotes) into the address bar. Note how the term “gopher” is used in the URL instead of “http”.

The first real browser

Vic Laurie — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:25:43 +0000

The Web is so much a part of our lives today that it is hard to remember that not long ago we managed without it. One thing that was instrumental in the development of the Web was the Netscape browser. It was just 15 years ago that this first example of a popular browser was released. Microsoft may have eventually killed it but Netscape deserves a place in Internet history. InfoWorld takes a look back.

Unix is 40

Vic Laurie — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:03:19 +0000

Most home PC users are unaware of what is the most important operating system ever developed. Yes, it’s Unix and not Windows. That takes nothing away from Windows because Unix has played a unique role in general computing. Unix has reached its 40th birthday and eWeek commemorates it with a slideshow:

Forty years ago, a new operating system called Unix was created, and a new revolution in computing began. Today, Unix-based operating systems still run many of the biggest and most important computing systems in the world. In fact, the core of Unix can be found in every major operating system in use today, from Apple’s Mac OS X to Linux to, yes, even Windows. If Unix itself hadn’t forked into many different versions, it might very well be the dominant OS in use today. In honor of the 40th anniversary of Unix, we’re taking a look at some of the many different iterations of Unix operating systems.

The Internet Archive

Vic Laurie — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:22:14 +0000

I’ve previously mentioned the Wayback Machine, an archive of old Web pages. An even more comprehensive digital collection is being constructed at the Internet Archive. The site is described:

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

Via the Computer Learning Center at Ewing.