Great Expectations

Computer Life column for 6/21/97 by
Richard Gordon

I'm a notorious packrat. In 1995 my office was awarded a special departmental "worst mess" citation.

I would beg people to e-mail me things, knowing that I could use UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh utilities to find information in computer files but that my office seemed to eat all paper memos.

As I finally took 7 cartloads of rubbish to the dumpster, I passed out token gifts to colleagues, making me a pariah for a day or two. "Gee, thanks. A memo from June 1983. Just what I needed." But I kept some relics of the past, including the November 1985 issue of Popular Computing.

One columnist, Michael J. Miller, details the woes of several high tech companies up to that point in 1985. Apple was foundering back then, too: reeling from both of its co-founders' being forced out, layoffs galore, and slower than expected sales. About the time that this issue was on newsstands, Steven Jobs gave up and resigned, never to return to Apple-until this year, that is.

Apple was not alone; indeed, companies like Osborne, Eagle, Victor and Sinclair were all in critical condition. And one of the other articles in that issue was titled, in all seriousness, "Does Amiga mean business?"

This issue was published just before Microsoft Windows finally began shipping. Yes, Virgina, there was a time when not all desktop computers ran software from Redmond, Washington.

This was a time when there were several different operating systems floating about on people's desktops: MS-DOS, TRSDOS, Amiga, Apple II, Macintosh, CP/M, TPM, and other proprietary operating systems all made it difficult to share information between different computers. In fact, DOS users had to worry about "PC-AT" or "PC" compatibility.

The Web didn't yet exist. The killer application that fall was Aldus Pagemaker, the most powerful desktop publishing package to date. Like the hubub over the Web, the hue and cry over Pagemaker and its competitors was that ordinary workers could now combine text and graphics into one document. Of course, if you wanted to print your work on one of those new laser printers, you'd better have nearly $3,000 ready for Hewlett Packard's, or nearly $7,000 for Apple's.

Speaking of prices, you could buy a lightning fast 1200 BPS modem for about $350, allowing you to receive text at the rate of 2-3 lines per second! I remember that our boss spent over $1,000 to buy us two 2400 BPS modems-which we all had to share. They were so fast that you could get a whole new screen of text in only 5 seconds.

Need more space to store your work? A 10 megabyte hard drive cost between $1,100 and $2,200-depending on the system you needed it for.

And memory was still measured in Ks-kilobytes-512K systems could be upgraded to 1M of memory, but that seemed extravagant since most computers only ran at speeds of 4 MHz or 8 MHz .

Some questions posed in this 1985 magazine remain relevant today: For example, is on-line investing better than a broker? And which computer is the best to take home? Popular Computing's readers rated Macintosh systems easiest to use, but were happiest with the selection of software on DOS systems.

And do you remember luggable computers? The "portables" of 1985 were the size of suitcases, and most featured small screens suitable for displaying 6, 9 or 12 lines of text. For example, you could order a 4 MHz, 64K RAM, dual-floppy, 25 pound, Zorba system from Gemini Electronics for only $1,049.

I'm not sure my life is better because, for about the price of that Zorba system, I can now purchase a computer whose CPU flies at 166 MHz, contains 16M of memory, has a 1.6 Gigabyte disk drive and a graphics monitor or because I can buy a good printer for a tenth of the 1985 cost. But my expectations of what my computer can do are certainly beyond anything I ever imagined when that November 1985 magazine came across my messy desk.

Copyright © 1997, The News Journal Company

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