PC Authority takes a trip down computer memory lane and discovers just how PC technology has evolved... and how Microsoft and IBM nearly destroyed each other.
Way back in November 1994, we were worried about how our PCs would cope with the new-fangled plug-and-play features in the forthcoming Windows 95, marvelling at how thousands of new Internet users signed up every month, and praising those PCs that included a CD drive.
Jump forward to the present, and we’re wondering how our PCs might cope with Vista’s 3D user interface and lavishing praise on laptop makers for bundling HD DVD drives. The dizzying speed of progress in the PC industry is astonishing, as you’ll see over the following pages, where we benchmark a classic 486 system against a cutting-edge powerhouse, and spend a fortnight working with Windows 95 in a bid to explode the myth that nothing much has changed in PC software since the mid-1990s.
However, our feature isn’t only a nostalgia-filled view of life from the days when 56K modems were being touted on shows like Beyond2000: we also canvas the opinions of some of the industry’s brightest minds to find out what we can expect to see over the next couple of decades. If we’re wondering how we ever survived without our quantum computing robots in ten year’s time, remember that you read it here first.