Living Information

TOM HAYNES, CNN Anchor : But first today, can you believe it, 20 years ago this past weekend the wild-eyed passions of some hobbyists and engineers went mainstream. IBM marketed its first personal computer. Well, with a look at what the PC has promised, delivered and where it’s headed, here’s Steve Young.

STEVE YOUNG, CNN Financial News Correspondent: It’s relatively small so you could say the Bendix G-15 back in the 1950s almost qualified as a personal computer, but its price tag was 60,000 bucks. In the 1970s, the Altair, hobbyist computer kit put a gleam in Bill Gates’ eye. Then some guys named Jobs and Wozniak thought different. But it wasn’t until 1981 that the PC became legitimate.

ROD CANION, Founder, Compaq Computers: When IBM introduced their PC, one of the things that just really became clear was this is going to change the industry, it’s going to cause it to explode.

YOUNG: The PC promised us the paperless office. Well, get a load of a colleague’s office next to mine. Analysts say what happened to the paperless office was, until recently, we never had technology we could put in our pocket and carry away. Economists used to have pillow fights about whether PC’s increased productivity, but this economist and most others now agree mission accomplished, except for two hitches.
ESTHER DYSON, “Release 1.
0”: The guy next to you is more productive, too, so it doesn’t give you a competitive advantage, it just means you have to do more to catch up. And the second is, from a company’s point of view, the same issue, the competition exists.

YOUNG: Despite the increasing gaggle of handheld gizmos, most experts agree 20 years from now the PC will still be around, it just won’t look like or act like anything we have today. The acronym DWIM sums up the dream computer of 2021. It’ll be a PC so smart it’ll be able to do what I mean. Steve Young, CNN Financial News, New York.

HAYNES: While personal computers have been a force driving America for 20 years, the technologies that led to the PC’s invention date back much further. Garrick Utley looks at a few people and inventions responsible for the high-speed Internet PC world we live in today.

GARRICK UTLEY, CNN Correspondent: It was the next big thing back in 1981, that first IBM PC with its glowing green screen and large floppy disks. But it did the job, bringing the digital information age into our homes and workplaces.
And who should get the credit for changing our lives with this thing? Is there the equivalent of the Wright Brothers or a Thomas Edison?
First, we should acknowledge that Apple and others were already making computers in the late 1970s. But they could not interact with each other. So IBM can claim credit for allowing com-petitors to make their computers IBMcompatible, which made the PC the dominant computer.
Intel can claim credit, because its chips drove that first PC, even if today’s chips are 300 times faster. And, of course, there was the young Bill Gates who provided the operating system which created his fortune.
But what would Bill Gates and others be without those who went before them, way before them? Those who built those bulky room-filling mainframes and the first electronic computers back in the 1930s and ‘40s.
A weaver works at a loom, a demonstration of the first time that the programming of information, the heart of computers today, was used to run a machine. Information on punch cards controlled the patterns woven on the cloth. Where? In France. When? In 1805.
And then there are those digits we never see, the zeros and ones on which all computing operates. That key to our information age was devised by the mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz in Germany in the late 1600s, who saw its potential for calculating machines.

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