The year was 1991.
The radiowaves were blasting Bryan Adams, C+C Music Factory, Paula Abdul, Color Me Badd, and EMF.
Beverly Hills: 90210, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, In Living Color and Northern Exposure had all been renewed for second seasons.
Thinking about the computer industry from a 20-year perspective makes my head hurt, a lot. I can still wax nostalgic, but it takes more than three cups of coffee on a Sunday evening to pry the memories from the inner recesses of my 41-year-old brain.
For the technology industry, particularly as it relates to information technology and personal computing, 1991 was a year of transitions. By most accounts, nothing particularly important happened in 1991 per se that you could nail on a board that created a watershed event that we are still living with today.
(Okay, the Web was first turned on by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1991. But literally, there was nothing on it at the time. And yes, Linus started work on Linux.)
However, the year that preceded it, 1990 and year that followed, 1992, are particularly notable. Windows 3.0 was released the year before, and Windows 3.1 would be released in the next.
Still, the transition itself — to use the title from EMF’s 1991 hit song, was unbelievable, in the sense that a storm was brewing that would eventually change everything.
That storm was the Microsoft and the GUI storm that would eventually bring us to the computing model we are using today. If you believe the Steve Jobs iPad snake oil, the era that which probably began in 1991 — The Golden age of PCs and Microsoft Windows — is the one that is now coming to its end.
You’ll have to excuse me while I stare up in the sky with my reptilian eyes and look for the giant Apple-shaped fireball heading this way.
In 1991, I was 21 years old, just out of school and entering the workforce. My exposure to computers prior to that time were Apple ][’s, Commodore 64’s, TRS-80’s, Atari 800s, DEC Rainbows and the first IBM PC Clones.
During summer jobs, I also worked with small minicomputers like the DEC PDP-11 and the multiuser XENIX-based Altos 386. When I was in school, I was even able to get my hands on powerful graphical workstations like the Apollo and the NeXT, which was way ahead of its time.
But now it was time to hunker down and become an adult.
One of the first jobs I had was being a bench tech for a large retail consumer electronics and computer store in Yonkers, New York. People would buy computers and need software installed on them. We also repaired systems.
So this exposed me to an awful lot of stuff out in the wild.
This was the same year CompUSA started selling computers in retail, and had just begun to displace ComputerLand, a 1980s-era retail computer chain.
It really strains my brain when I think about the systems that were typical of that day. We were still on the Intel architecture, as we are today, but the state of the art chip generation at the time was the i486 (80486). Back then, clock speeds of CPU’s were still measured in Megahertz (Mhz).
So the fastest PC at the end of 1991, a 80486DX was 50Mhz, could execute about 40 million instructions per second and had a peak dhrystone MIPS output of 50. It had about a million transistors on the die, which was huge achievement for the time.
That was on the very high end of the PC scale.
If they were up to date, companies were running 386-based systems, which ran at 33Mhz, 25Mhz or less. And by and large, most places were still using 5Mhz or 10Mhz 8088s like on IBM PC-AT’s and original IBM PC’s. If you were doing engineering and CAD work, maybe you bought a 486.
A friend and colleague who was at NASA at the time told me they were just starting to replace their original PCs in the mail room with 12Mhz 286 systems in 1991.
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