Memoirs of My Old PC

Alright, here is where the true geek in me shines. Tonight I laid to rest my
very, very old PC. She was my first PC that I bought back in 1990 for
approximately $3,000.00 Cdn. Here is what she looked like:
 386SX 16 Mhz
 2 Mb RAM
 40 Mb Disk, "Stacked" to 80 Mb
 AAmazing VGA Monitor
 5.25" Floppy, 3.5" Floppy
 MS Dos version 4.01
 2400 Baud Modem
 BIOS 5.01

This baby even has a "Turbo" button on the outside of the case which
switches the CPU between 8 Mhz and 16 Mhz. I remember some games had to be
run with 8 Mhz because the 16 Mhz made them run to fast!

If anyone has any final thoughts on a possible use for it (Linux something?)
please let me know. I was wondering if this could be a significant piece of
memorabilia in the next 5 years.

I have not used it for about three years, but using it one last time and
sorting through the old programs/applications was a surprisingly interesting
reflection on the evolution of the PC, DOS/Windows and home computing. My
observations are below for those interested:

Hardware:
Slowness of the hard disk is incredible. Copying a 200K file from one
directory to another takes about 8 seconds.
VGA with 256 color is actually pretty good. Demo GIF pictures are definitely
grainy by today's standards.
The old PC speaker sounds system is still as annoying as it was 10 years
ago.

Software & Applications:
Utilities :  some very useful stuff; generally impressed with richness of
the command line utilities.
Utility to grab screen shots ("scrcap" Coloriz TM of RIX SoftWorks) ,
convert them to GIF files and then to bitmaps for was 'awesome' in 1990.
DOS Version 4.01 command-line commands are archaic. No command line help and
very limited switches. Moving files between directories is a nightmare -- it
makes the current Windows File Explorer look like a stroke of genius. DOS
commands seems to support the same switches as today's versions.
I forgot about the DOS "tree" command. I can still use that today!
Word Perfect 5.1. The .exe is 218 Kb!!  Its hilarious. The main screen is
just a blue screen with a blinking cursor; no borders or toolbars. The scary
thing: I actually remembered F6 turns BOLD on and off. I needed to look up
help to find out the F7 exits WP.
Harvard Graphics was the premier business and personal graphics package
(i.e. today's Microsoft Excel). The simplicity of use is very appealing and
impressive.
Stacker. The big rage in 1991/92. You could 'stack' (compress) your hard
driver and double the space.
RBPaint: a graphics paint program that works on TIFF files. Incredibly
simplistic which is actually nice.
Microsoft Quick Basic 4.5. Wrote many basic programs with this baby. The QB
4.5 runtime is 278 Kb. I wrote some great games and mathematics
applications.
Procomm 2.4.3 from DATASTORM Technologies Inc. was my modem communications
package. Remember VT100 emulation. You Unix/Linux guys probably still use it
from time to time.
Paradox 3.5 (from Borland) was the PC database application of the day.
Looking at it now, yuck!
RightWriter Version 3.1 from RightSoft: awesome simplistic spell and grammar
checker.
Prolog compiler
PKZIP (Version 2.04 from PKWARE Inc 1989 -- 1993). ShareWare. It was the
most popular zipping/compression package.
Electronics WorkBench (Version 2.0 from Interactive Image Technologies).
Great piece of software for building and testing electronic circuits.
TurboC from Borland. Yuck. Bulky and goofy.
I had a bunch of guitar tab music from when it was only available on hard to
find FTP sites. In 1993 when I worked at IBM in Toronto they were scared of
"The Internet". I had to do some eccentric telneting through 3 different
hosts all across North America to get to a machine in New York the had ftp
access to the Internet.

Games
Arkanoid (Revenge of DoH) from Taito. Great game.
Hoyle's Cards (Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Hearts, ...) from Sierra.
The best ice hockey game back then (1990) was FaceOff (from GameStar). The
copy protection was an obscure trivia question whose answer was in the
manual. Is that a photo-copied manual I see in my files?

Software Industry Observations
Software companies come and go. 90% of the software companies that had
applications on this PC are gone.
Microsoft's monopoly in the Windows world has greatly hurt the creative
development of the GUI's for Windows applications. The Microsoft Window GUI
guidelines have been good for standardizing, but I think we would be further
ahead in usability if a gazillion companies were still trying new things.
These old applications had some real creative and productive different user
interfaces.
Software applications were much simpler. Less feature rich but easy to use.
After re-using some of these applications, I would gladly forego many of
today's applications features to have the easy of use in these older
applications. It seems like 90% of what you would do was front-and-center
with these applications; largely not true today. Microsoft actually does a
reasonable job at this but I wish they would make their applications start
out really simple and use artificial intelligence to suggest features to you
and to tailor the application to your usage patterns.
Software applications were more specialized and less integrated. You
typically had an application that did the spell and grammar checking, and it
was not integrated with your word processor. The integration has resulted in
greater productivity for sure.
The biggest productivity gain by far is the multi-processing/multi-tasking
capability of the O/S. It was extremely painful in DOS version 4.x. You
would format  a 3.5" and couldn't do ANYTHING else with your PC until that
was finished.
I loved the fact that during the approximately pre-1994 period anyone could
right a cool valuable PC application and it would have a good shot at
becoming commercially popular. This is still true today but more difficult.
On a personal note, irregardless of computing knowledge, if I were to go
back and take a Computing Science (or other program for that matter) it
would be a lot easier. I remember doing a statistics lab which involved
writing a program to calculate the various probabilities of winning at
Roulette (which I had on this PC). Grasping the game Roulette was a task on
to itself. World travel (e.g. Las Vegas in this case), experience, and
education all develop the mind.

And lastly, the best thing about this PC:  **  It never crashed once  ***

Curtis.