20 years down the lane, this is DQ’s list of the HW and softwaare products that redefined the tech-march

PDP-11:
The PDP-11 from Digital Equipment created a new era in computing, and spawned an entire industry, the era and industry of mini computers. The famous VAX series from digital arose out of the PDP-11, and the C language was first implemented on a PDP 11. The first of the 11’s, the PDP-11/20 came out in 1970, at a cost of $10,800, as a sixteen bit computer. Interestingly, DEC at that time never called them computers, preferring instead to call them Programmable Data Processors (PDP), because conventional wisdom at that time held that the market for computers was not large enough, and they anyway took too many people to operate!

CD-ROMs:
Ever tried installing Win 95 from the 15 floppies that it used to come in? Old timers would. And what if the fourteenth turned out to be corrupt? Ask the aforesaid old-timer and they’d have many a horror story to recount. Forget the old timer, even today, people who go around with presentations in floppies are leading life on the treacherous edge. The floppy, like its name indicates, is a fragile medium, and that too with limited storage.

Rescue came in the form of the CD-ROM. Surprisingly, the CD-ROM wasn’t even meant for distributing software. It was developed in 1980 by Philips and Sony for music storage. The 74 minutes of music that the disk could hold converted to approximately 650 MB of data, and proved to be a Godsend for the software industry. The CD-ROM first appeared as a software medium in 1983. the 650 MB has been stretched to 700 using the overburn feature on CD writing software. CD-Rs have become cheap and are fast becoming the medium of choice.

DVDs have started moving in on CDs, the way they themselves started replacing floppies three, four years back.

The Macintosh:
Sure, the PC changed the world. But for years, it played catch-up to another machine – the Macintosh, or the Mac. Launched by Apple in 1984, the Mac soon became a cult figure. Its single USP throughout has been ease of use, which is best exemplified by the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and the mouse, both of which the Mac sported many years before the PC. And it had plug-and-play, way before the PC got to plug-and-pray!

Unfortunately for the Macintosh, it remained a fringe system, thanks to the closed-door policies of Apple. Briefly in between, others vendors were licensed to build Macintosh systems, populated with Apples operating system, but the plug was pulled soon enough.

The iMac followed the story of innovation, becoming the first system to be USB only. In fact it is the iMac that made USB, developed by Intel, a popular interface.

Mouse:
From minimizing a window to surfing the Web, you can do it all with a click, thanks to the mouse. By making everything "just a click away", the mouse has had a major part to play in the computer revolution. The mouse too has come a long way – with one, two, and then three buttons, rollers, and more recently cordless mice.

Where did the mouse come from? Douglas C Engelbart demonstrated the "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display system" way back in 1968. The mouse had to wait for 16 long years before finding widespread application with the Macintosh. Today, you can’t even think of a computer without a mouse of some sort.

Today, we are exploring newer methods of man – machine interface, but the mouse will be around for quite some time to come.

AS400:
Another legend in the world of computing, the AS400, is perhaps the most popular and longest business computer. The AS400 evolved from IBM’s System/38. It had two concepts, which made it unique and created a killer system. First, a database (DB2) was built into the operating system itself, and second, the system architecture promised that applications would be insulated from changes in hardware. That is, an application once written for AS400, would always run on an AS400. Recently, in a change of branding strategy, IBM renamed the AS400 as the eServer iSeries. But the image of the AS400 endures.

Ethernet cards:
Today, a network is a given. And Ethernet will have a significant if not complete share of the network. With technologies like ATM and FDDI being restricted to the backbones or to specialized networks that require high bandwidths, Ethernet is today the only option that spans the entire spectrum – covering small, medium, and even large networks.

Bob Metcalfe – the inventor of Ethernet named it so, after ether, the medium that was once thought to permeate everything, to signify that it could carry signals to all types of computers. This is something Ethernet does with consummate ease even today. In keeping with the times, it’s grown from transfer rates of 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and with Gigabit Ethernet – to 1,000 Mbps. Without Ethernet, the world would surely have been a different place.

PC+DOS:
The terms PC and computer are used interchangeably. That in effect, sums up the impact that the original IBM PCs had on computing. It took computing away from being something that could be done only by a few institutions that had the millions to invest in a mainframe, and converted it into something that you and me cannot live without. The PC was also the first computer to have an open architecture, letting others to add features to the machine by way of add-on cards. This architecture is one of the reasons why it became so popular, and more importantly, laid the foundations for a multi-multi-billion-dollar industry. The world was never quite the same again after the first PC was introduced in 1981.

The Modem:
Man is a communicating animal. Some of the greatest inventions of all time, including the telephone and the television, have risen out of his need to communicate. Extending the role of the telephone into the cyber world is the modem.

Starting off as a now-lowly 300 bps "modulator-demodulator", the modem’s come a long way indeed in connecting up the world – first to bulletin boards and then to the Internet. As connect speeds increased, so did the varieties and technologies in modems, all the way through ISDN and up to DSL.

Sound Blaster Sound Card:
All PCs today are multimedia capable. That is, they can run video and animations, and can reproduce audio. It’s the Sound Blaster card that made multimedia possible and affordable on the PC. The early multimedia kits from Creative – incorporating a sound card, a CD-ROM drive, and a pair of speakers – were hot sellers, as PC users raced to extend their machines into the new frontier of multimedia. In fact, for a couple of years, multimedia (represented by a CD-ROM drive, a sound card and two speakers) was considered to be the prime driver of computing, particularly for the home market, and every other vendor had to be SoundBlaster compatible.

Now, you no longer require a separate card if you are not into professional sound work. Sound capability is beginning to be built into the motherboard and the chipset itself. But the Sound Blaster will have a special place in personal computing history for having ushered in the age of affordable multimedia.

Tape storage:
If you happen to see photographs of old mainframes, what’ll strike you will be the spools of tape loaded on them. The visual prominence is indeed matched by reality. Tape storage has had a very critical role to play in computing, almost from the very beginning. Consider this. Before the advent of tape, the option was paper! Remember the punched cards and the paper tapes that computers and calculators of yesteryears used?

One of the disadvantages of tape is that it’s sequential access technology, and is therefore slow. But when it comes to taking backups, this works out to be an advantage. Also, the compact nature of tape makes it possible to store very large volumes of data in very little physical space.

Today, tape-based backup devices support the entire spectrum of computers from desktop computers to enterprise servers and mainframes. Like good wine, tape technology has also improved with the passage of time, and as yet there’s nothing yet on the horizon that can replace tape as the preferred option for mass backup.