The IBM Personal Computer is now five years old and personal computers in general are getting pretty close to ten. I thought that this might be a good time to move away from discussing application software and take a look at some of the more recent advances made in the actual computer equipment or “hardware.”

Today’s Hip, With lt PC

In many ways, the PC that I’m writing this on doesn’t remotely resemble the first computers that were available back in the early days, and some of the things I’ll do to this article weren’t even invented yet. Here’s what I mean: I am typing this article while sitting in my Hotel room in So. Lake Tahoe, California. I’m typing on a “laptop portable” IBM compatible computer with an LCD screen, two 3.5-inch disk drives, and internal 1200 baud modem. When I finish with the article, I’ll connect the phone line in my room to my computer and send the article to my “electronic” mailbox in Columbus, Ohio. When I get back to the office, in central California, I’ll use my EGA and hard disk equipped IBM to retrieve the article from my mailbox, do some final editing, run it through my spelling checker, and print it out using Microsoft’s Windows Write word processor.

Well, Back When I Was A Boy...

Now, of the equipment and processes that I mentioned above, here are the ones that either weren’t invented yet or were in very short supply just a few years ago. Back when the IBM PC was first introduced there were no ?EUR??,,????'??laptop portable?EUR??,,????'?? computers. If you were adventurous enough to have invested in a personal computer, it was a very heavy, fragile piece of equipment that you didn’t even like to move from one room to another. It has a maximum of 64K worth of memory, a large green phosphor screen and probably one 5.25-inch disk drive. Modems were available, at quite a price, and the fastest blazed along at 300 baud. The large national electronic mail services such as Compuserve and The Source were still in their infancy.

The first PCs came with a monochrome monitor, and could not display anything except the alphanumeric characters “A” through “Z” and “O” through “9.” All storage was on floppy disks and we were still over two years away from the Enhanced Graphic Adapter (EGA) and reasonably priced hard disks. I remember the first time someone told me that there was a program that would correct your spelling; I said, “Impossible!” Highly graphical applications programs like Windows Write were years into the future.

New Ways of Doing 0dd Jobs

It seems that there has not been innovation in the computer industry, there’s been in-o-explosion. New things are now coming along at a rate that is most impossible to keep up with. Here are three that I feel have a direct application to the practice of Landscape Architecture.

1. Hard disks on card. Hard disks on expansion cards are one of those ideas that makes everyone say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” What these units do is to allow a computer owner to install a 20 or 30 megabyte fixed disk drive in his computer without having to get a hard disk controller card, a hard disk, and to take up one of his floppy disk ports with a hard disk and controller are both contained on one expansion card that the user just plugs in like additional memory or an internal modem.

2. Ultra high resolution adapters and displays. When IBM first introduced the Color Graphic Adapter and the Color Monitor, the maximum resolution when you were using color was 320 by 200 pixels (a pixel is short for “picture element” and is the smallest unit of measurement on the screen). The EGA adapter was the next step and was an immense improvement. The EGA allows resolutions of up to 720 by 480 pixels. The Professional Graphic Adapter (PGA) is even better for design work and can display resolutions of 1058 by 1058.

3. High speed CPUs. The original IBM PC operated at 4.77 megahertz (4.77 million cycles per second). This was fine for word processing, but for detailed design work you wound up waiting on the machine rather than it waiting on you. The new 80286 and even 80386 micro-processors that operate at 8, 10, 12, and even 16 megahertz are going to be the CPU to use for serious design work.

How About Five Years From Now?

What will the personal computer look like five years from now and what kind of capabilities will it have? That’s a question that is impossible to answer. l think it’s safe to say, however, that the dramatic changes of the last five years are probably over. The computer industry has matured and stabilized. This is good news for the average computer user or potential user. More stability and maturity means that more standardization will occur and if there is anything the computer industry needs, it?EUR??,,????'???s standards.