The PC is 25 years old, and the Internet is 15

[dracodraconis]

August 13th marked the 25th anniversary of the first PC to go on sale. Do the math, that's 1981, folks. What were you doing then?

http://www.gizmag.com/go/5991/
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/08/13/1725252.shtml - the 25 "greatest" PCs of all time (according to PCWorld.)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126692-page,14-c,systems/article.html# - The list in order of "greatest" to "least"
http://r-101.blogspot.com/ - The evolution of the computer interface (progressing through Mac, Windows and Linux graphical interfaces)
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Technology/story?id=2306109&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312 - According to ABC, the first PC (ignoring the Commadore and the Apple) was the IBM 5150, clocking in at a blindingly fast 4.77-MHz and had 15-Kb of RAM. No harddrive though, but a floppy drive was included.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/biztech/08/11/ibmpcanniversary/ - More about the first PCs from CNN
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2309109,00.html - New York Times article which notes that the Apple II came out in 1977.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC - wikipedia has a timeline for the history of the IBM PC


Meanwhile, the Internet turned 15 on August 6 (http://slashdot.org/articles/06/08/07/1218223.shtml). That's 1991, the year after I graduated from university.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5242252.stm - The "birth" of the Internet was measured from the date on which the code for hypertext was published in a Usenet discussion list called alt.hypertext (for those of us who remember Usenet lists).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5243862.stm - A slider that lets you review the historical highlights of the Internet
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=10300 - History starting from the idea of the WWW back in 1989.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051104-5528.html - November 1990 was the invention of the first web server
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/firstpages.shtml - Examples of early web pages
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/News/9201.html - Copy of the first "web page" from 1992


http://www.gizmag.com/go/5777/ - While on a historical note, in the past decade the number of people (in the US) considered "online" has risen from 7% in 1995 to more than 77% today. (related: http://www.gizmag.com/go/2732/ - US population raidly approaching ubiquitous internet connectivity)

http://www.gizmag.com/go/2426/ - More amusing factoids: in 2003, more than 50% of email received by the average user would be classified as spam.

Comments

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

When the PC went on sale... I was crawling.
When the internet was invented, I was getting ready to go into my first year of the gifted program.

[siderea]

Meanwhile, the Internet turned 15 on August 6. That's 1991.

WTF? In Aug 1991 I had been on the Internet for 2 years.

[siderea]

P.S. In 1981 I was coding on my Vic20.

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

And I had been using NetNorth since about 1986, followed by CANet in about 1988/1989 so your timeline makes more sense o my personal recollection. I'm not sure what they used as a criteria.

[siderea]

No idea. But we were calling it "Internet" in 1989, and somewhere I still have an email from Jan 1990. Actually, I may have older emails than that, somewhere.

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

I had been using email since 1986, but they were sent once per hour via BitNet.

[siderea]

Yeah, the email I'm thinking of was from a poor schlub on BitNet, connecting through a gateway to the Internet. It was on an email list, where we'd gotten a bit off topic and were discussing popular music. The email in question was addressed to those of us on the Internet proper, asking us to please stop using the tab character to indent our song lists, as the combination of BitNet gateway + ASCII to EBCDIC turned the tab into some magic escape character which was being parsed by his operating system; that when five of these escapes happened in a row, it would log him out of his system, and since the system remembered his state on logout, would drop him back into the same email on login, and promptly log him back out. Sysadmins then had to be involved.

I have a print out of this email somewhere, which lived in my swank leather resume portfolio, so that when I was sitting waiting for job interviews, I'd have something hysterically funny to read to keep my spirits up.

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

To some of the younger generation (my wife included), this discussion is probably akin to two old hunters arguing about whether passenger pigeon or dodo tasted better.