Cadalyst - June 2008 - (Page 29)

25yearshardware Figure 2. The IBM PC AT had more than 15 MB maximum memory, thanks to the 24-bit address bus of the 286 processor. (Courtesy of IBM Archives) Figure 3. MultiSync monitors, circa 1985. (Courtesy of NEC Display Solutions) costly means of storing data off the system. I used to have such a drive, and it worked well when it wasn' t in the repair shop. Cartridges were approximately $125 in the dollars of those days. The market was obviously ready for the writable CD and DVDs that were soon to transform the mediastorage market. If you wanted to get a data file to a colleague across the country, you could send it via mail or send it through the telephone lines via a modem. Early on you were limited to 300 baud modems, which soon gave way to 1,200 baud, 2,400 baud, and then 5,600 baud models from vendors such as Hayes and US Robotics. Small wonder that broadband communications helped the Internet take off and develop to the level of graphical sophistication we know today. In the early 1980s, the PC operating system of choice was one or another flavor of DOS (disk operating system), usually from either IBM or that upstart Microsoft. Then came Windows riding on top of DOS and then subsuming DOS entirely to be an operating system in its own right, and the graphical interface and mouse became a common way of interacting with IBM-compatible PCs. A system running an early version of AutoCAD typically had at least a 12º x 12º di gitizing tablet alongside the monitor; a folded AutoCAD template was included with early versions of AutoCAD just to use on these input devices. IBM briefly marketed a sophisticated operating system called OS/2 that was an accomplished competitor for MS Windows. Microsoft Windows was, and still is, a juggernaut. Love it or hate it, it' s the operating system you' ll find on most computers these days in one version or another. The dream systems envisioned by users when Cadalyst appeared during the mid-1980s had a way of becoming the standard desktop systems in fairly short order. The staggerJune 2008 cadalyst www.cadalyst.com ing pace of technology during this time made it all possible and secured for the PC a central place for everything from business operations to design studios. My early efforts at typesetting a book became much more easily accomplished with page-layout software such as PageMaker, Quark Xpress, and Adobe InDesign. An Eye on the Future Since I began writing for Cadalyst in the mid-1980s, things have certainly changed, and often in ways that were unimaginable in the early days of the publication. I watched as the systems being tested progressed from benchmarks that chugged along slowly, often with each step of the running script being all too painfully visible, to fully mapped objects that move and transition faster than the eye can follow Ð even dizzyingly at times. Having seen these transitions in hardware and its capabilities firsthand over the years, I naturally wonder what the next 25 years will bring. I' m reminded how inaccurate projections of the future can be in looking at Stanley Kubrick' s 2001: A Space Odyssey. While it was predicting a future some 33 years ahead, by the time 2001 actually did roll around, the folly of predicting the future was at times painfully obvious. My computer, while a true workhorse, doesn' t speak to me; TWA no longer exists as a transportation carrier; and the telecommunication displays and computer graphics are a lot more sophisticated than anticipated by the movie. Whatever does come next in terms of computer hardware, it will no doubt be as amazing as what has come during the past 25 years, perhaps even more so. Ron LaFon, a contributing editor for Cadalyst, is a writer, editor, and a computer graphics and electronic publishing specialist from Atlanta, Georgia. He is a principal at 3Bear Productions in Atlanta. 29 http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - June 2008

Cadalyst - June 2008 Contents Editor's Window CAD Central Tech Trends: Community Building in Progress A Quarter Century of Cadalyst Tracking a CAD Giant The Highs and Lows of CAD Hardware Industry Insights — Looking Ahead Cadalyst Lab Reviews: HP xw4600 Workstation with LP3065 30” LCD Monitor NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 — Graphics Card LaCie 324 — LCD Monitor CAD Manager: Making Standards Stick MCAD Modeling: Rational vs. Irrational Decisions AEC Insight: Data Collection in AEC CAD Cartoon Issue Indexes Hot Tip Harry: Just a Few CAD Renovations

Cadalyst - June 2008

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