25 years of PC Pro

Its been quite a ride. Back in 1994, we had computers running MS-DOS 6.22 with Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Windows 95 was about to arrive, bringing 32-bit GUI computing to the masses. Windows NT was still in its early days.

A typical laptop had a 486DX processor at 33MHz, 4MB of RAM and a 240MB hard disk. Screen resolution was VGA only and battery life was around 2.5 hours. Weight was around 3kg. Networking was LAN only, with a bit of dial-up for the enthusiasts.

Roll on, and everything has changed. We have instant access to information in a way that was unimaginable back in the mid-1990s. Access to larger documents and streaming video. And we can do all of that while on the move on our mobile phones.

Given that everything has changed, and changed by true multiple orders of magnitude, have the underlying fundamentals changed too? If you take out the children of the revolution such as web browsing, streaming and so forth and ignore the huge rise in personal and pocket computing, the bedrock tools for most businesses are still there. Spreadsheet, word processor, email, calendars. And here I have to ask: why? Why am I typing this into Word, which is, to all intents and purposes, the same thing as Word for Windows 2.0 that shipped in December 1989? Is that really it?

And then you realise that in that core area of computing, the common bedrock tasks, there has been remarkably little innovation at all. Everything has come from outside: web, videoconferencing, streaming. We had social media back then, even before users had TCP/IP stacks in place.

Is it “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”? Maybe. But if the last 25 years are anything go by, the next 25 will be even bigger, more impactful, more revolutionary. And more terrifying.