A Brief History Of The Computer

It has been a fast paced ride as well, with the most interesting things happening in the last 20 years or so. We’ve gone from 486 processors running at 33 MHz to 6 core monsters running at over 3 gigahertz. We didn’t just go from one point to another however. There have been some important milestones along the way.

Early PC’s

One of the first great milestones in the computers history was Windows 3.0. This finally brought a graphical interface to the masses. While other companies like Commodore had been using a Graphic User Interface for some time, this put the new technology in the hands of many more users. The next milestone was likely the Pentium processor. This was a huge step forward in the CPU power available on home computers and was a threat to much more powerful CPU’s of the time. More Information about the history of the computer can be found at http://www.historyofthepc.com/.

The PC Boom

This was started with Windows 95. This was a 32 bit operating system that could address more memory than previous OS’ as well as send data to and from the 32 bit Pentium chip in 32 bit word lengths. This ability ushered in a whole new level of performance and capabilities for the PC.  Graphics acceleration was another great milestone that PC’s met in the 1990’s. The ability to hardware accelerate 3d graphics rendering using a dedicated processor meant that the images on the screen were nothing like they had been before. Hardware sound cards marked a big milestone as well. This began the ability to actually record and compose music using the PC as recording studio. This was a large change in the history of the computer.

Windows XP began the home 64 bit revolution when it came to operating systems. While the 64 bit option was little used, the ability was their first and in either format this was likely Microsoft’s biggest selling operating system. People actually liked it enough that many are still resisting change today. Intel’s Core 2 Duo was the next great milestone. Sure Intel had released a dual core variant of the Pentium IV, but there was little to get excited about in those chips. They ran hot, used tons of power, and didn’t deliver a great deal of performance. This all changed with the core 2 duo.

The Cutting Edge

Another CPU milestone would likely be the push away from dual core CPU’s into the multi core arena. You can now get CPU’s with 4 or 6 cores, and 8 cores CPU’s are just around the corner. Microsoft’s Windows 7 finally gives users the kind of security and performance they have been promised in previous iterations of the companies OS’. The current milestone of interest in the PC world has been the adoption of 3D displays. More information can be found about this at http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d-vision-main.html