IBM OS/360 to Windows 3.1: Software that Changed Computing Forever
Posted 07/08/09 at 09:00:00 AM by Erik Klein
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Application Spotlight: Electric Pencil
Circa: 1976
These days word processing is an expected use of a Personal Computer but this wasn’t always the case. Early text editing was clumsy and was often hampered by the medium used to communicate with the earliest computers – typically old teletypes, dumb terminals or similarly cumbersome devices.
Electric Pencil, written by Michael Shrayer in 8080 Assembly Language, was designed to work, instead, with the earliest graphics cards on machines like the Altair 8800, IMSAI 8080 and Sol-20.
Most expected features were present in this software including find and replace and various formatting options but the application was text based. WYSIWYG was a still several years away.
Application Spotlight: dBase II
Circa: 1978
In 1978 C. Wayne Ratliff, borrowing from his mainframe experience, created a database program in order to try and track and win his company football pool.
In early 1980 he entered into an agreement with Ashton Tate to sell the product as dBase II (there was never a dBase I.)
This program quickly grew to define what was expected from a personal computer database and database language. Before the advent of SQL it was the de-facto database standard across PCs of all kinds.
Millions of copies were sold for CP/M, Apple, DOS and a wide variety of other platforms and the compatibility was incorporated into numerous other products including FoxPro and Clipper.
Countless programs are still in use today running newer versions of the xBase standard.
Application Spotlight: VisiCalc
Circa: 1979
While at the Harvard Business School Dan Bricklin saw a chance to make a program that would remove the tedium from creating financial models. This program evolved into VisiCalc for the Apple ][ computer.
VisiCalc was, as it turns out, the first “Killer App” and it redefined what people could do with computers, instantly turning them from toys to tools in the eyes of business people the world over.
VisiCalc was quickly ported to numerous other platforms and was eventually copied with applications like SuperCalc, Multiplan, Lotus 123 and eventually Excel building on the original concept.
Application Spotlight: Wordstar
Circa: 1979
WordStar was released by Micropro International in 1979. Designed for CP/M systems using dumb terminals, all of the software functions, including cursor movements, had to be controlled by the alphanumeric keyboard and the few “special” keys such as Ctrl and Esc common to most of these systems.
The company was formed by two engineers who left IMSAI to write the software and after its release it quickly became the top selling word processor and, for a time, the top selling program.
As a word processor WordStar did very well as it was configurable and expandable which allowed it to work with a variety of systems, printers and storage devices. There was even a SpellStar add-on; one of the earliest spell checkers.
WordStar was ported to the PC shortly after it was introduced but was soon eclipsed by packages designed specifically for that platform.
Missing a few
Submitted by Wily_One on Tue, 07/28/2009 - 11:10pm
Ultima but no Wizardry?
AmigaOS but no GS/OS?
Where's Oregon Trail?
Submitted by kzaske on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 11:19pm
There are a few minor omissions in the article. PC-DOS 4 was written, under license, by IBM. It was the ONLY version of DOS that IBM wrote. It was not the commercial success IBM had hoped due to pricing.Next, Internet Explorer was released several months after Windows 95, both of which are outside of the time frame discussed. At the time Internet Explorer was released, it was only as a component of Microsoft Plus for Windows95. Internet Explorer did not become popular until it was made a free download in late 1996. Internet Explorer was not intergraded into the operating system until version 3.0, about the same time as Windows98 hit the market.
To address OS2 and WindowsNT question posed above, both are outside of the time frame being discussed and are irrelevant to this article. However I do find it interesting that the original kernel for OS2 was written by Microsoft for IBM under a mutual marketing agreement. An agreement IBM terminated. Originally both WindowsNT and OS2 shared many features and were actually compatible with each others API.
Submitted by VaMage on Tue, 07/14/2009 - 7:00pm
I have to second that question. Without OS/2 Microsoft would probably still be running around calling Windows 3.1 an operating system, and Windows 7 would likely have DOS 22.2 running underneath of it in MAYBE 16 bit mode.
Not that stabbing IBM in the back wasn't the smartest move MS ever made. But come on do you really think MS would have hired Dave Cutler, of DEC VAX/VMS fame which is also notably absent, to build NT if they didn't have pressure to build a modren O.S.?
If you disagree then why are we still in 32 bit computing, why is 64 bit a red headed step child, and why does Windows still have all the stability of an alchohoic at his first A.A. meeting?
VaMage
American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.
Submitted by jbwhite99 on Fri, 07/10/2009 - 9:13pm
If you are going to put all of this "classic" software in there, where is OS/2?
And for that matter, perhaps I missed it, but Microsoft Basic should be in there, along with Turbo Pascal, and 123. 123 revolutionized business in the 80's, and how many people learned programming with Turbo Pascal?
Looking at people talking about their first computer - my personal first PC was the Radio Shack Color Computer (still have it in a box after 27 years). But the first system I used was a TRS-80 Model 2. Our school's PC had 4 500kb 8" floppy drives, and I used it to store our school's football stats on, back in 1981.
My First computer was Packard bell
Submitted by renodude18 on Fri, 07/10/2009 - 12:50am
The first computer i got was packard bell that came bundled with windows 3.1 and later i upgraded it to windows 95 and then i upgraded to the Compaq presario in 1998, the packard bell although it was old was a great computer up until its death just after getting the compaq, to this day i still dont know why it stopped working, the compaq on the other hand was much faster and was bundled with windows 98, later upgraded to ME (that was a mistake and went back 98 with much relief!) the computer was much crappier when running games but surfing the internet and writing CD's and playing music was great on it, i later upgraded it to windows xp just to see how it would run, the computer had a pentium 3 and it ran xp well and i upgraded the video card and it was finnaly a great computer and with more ram with the maximum of 768MB SDRAM and a upgraded 40GB IDE HDD it was a badass of its day, but i had already upgraded to a DELL Dimension 2XXX something it had a pentium 4 and it was a great computer that ended up dying right after the warranty ended.. a quick buy after that was my first AMD Computer which was a HP Pavilion, i was going to go with a Compaq but found out they had become crappy and taken over by HP, the HP works today as a Media center pc with a 512mb AGP graphics, vista, 1gb ddr ram and a 500GB Hard drive and a wireless card, i then upgraded to my first APPLE, it was a macbook, intel, i had used at work an ibook g4 but it really wasnt mine, i loved using it but didnt think it would work with my gaming, video editing, drafting... the new macbook or was new macbook had proved me wrong by letting me run windows for my drafting and gaming... on the desktop end i have now a gateway DX4200-09 a second AMD computer with a quad-core processing power... my next upgrade will be to a mac pro in a year thats if thats its name a year from now, i'm moving to mac because its becoming easier to use and i dont like the way windows is moving and i wont dare to use linux again, my media center is due to change to a mac mini in a month or two... i like windows 7 and am using it now because i couldnt stand the vista it came with and dont really want to go back to xp....
My first box was an Acer
Submitted by n0ctis on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 6:53pm
My first box was an Acer 486SX running at 20MHz (33MHz if you pushed the "Turbo" button). I forget how much RAM I had but the HDD was 83.5MiB and had MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.1 running on it (a configuration I emulate in VirtualPC for nostalgia).
.: vires et honos :.
Submitted by arch-chancellor on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 4:56pm
How much did this hardware, software, and OSes originally cost?
Submitted by pastorbob on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 9:25am
My first computer was a Heath H89 with a 2 Mhz Z80, 32k of RAM and a SSSD 5-1/4" Floppy disk drive that held 100K per disk. I built it from a kit that was much more complicated than the component level builds I do today. Soldering skills were an absolute necessity. I eventually upgraded it to a 4 Mhz Z-80, (again soldering skills required), 64K of RAM and a different floppy controller with external drives that allowed me to store 720K per disk. This upgrade allowed me to run CP/M 2.2 rather than the proprietary HDOS that came with the system. Heath eventually came out with a 10 meg. hard drive upgrade that cost $3000, which was way too pricey for me. I built the system in 1981 and used it until 1990 when I donated it to a church in Iowa. But before doing so I played the game Adventure through to the end several times. Not to mention Dungeons and Dragons.
One of the annoyances of CP/M was that any time you swapped disks, you had to do a Ctrl-C or you would get an error when you tried to read the new disk. But if you were interested in writing custom applications you had everything you needed to do so. It came with an assembler, Microsoft BASIC and there was also a Pascal compiler available for $$49.95 called Turbo Pascal. I did several programs in Turbo Pascal and wrote several articles for a magazine entitled Sextant Magazine sharing my software gems. Using Turbo Pascal I could include in line assemby code that would access directly video memory directly. This increased execuation speeds exponentially.
But alas I am rambling too far down memory lane. I find myself on a maze of twisty little passages all alike. Or is it a twisty little maze of passages all alike?
Wow. In 1994, when I
Submitted by tony487 on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 6:34am
Wow. In 1994, when I thought I wanted to be an engineer, I had a TurboPascal course. Fun times...
This is a hybrid. This is a cross, ah, of Bluegrass, Kentucky
Bluegrass, Featherbed Bent, and Northern California Sensemilia. The
amazing stuff about this is, that you can play 36 holes, take it home and just get stoned to the bejeezus belt
Submitted by tehR0XX0Rz on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 4:20pm
My first exposure to a real computer was at a buddy's in the early 80's: He had a Radio Shack computer, probably running an 8080. He showed me Adventure, which was like something out of Star Trek at the time. I couldn't believe you could communicate with a machine like that. I was hooked.
Submitted by AZWizo on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 5:07am
Wow, I still have my original Windows 3.11 install floppies to this day. Gosh those were the days!
RT
DIV P {
MARGIN: 0px
}
www.be-anonymous.tk
Submitted by AhsGrad1973 on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 3:25am
When I was in the Air Force in the early years of the 80's, I worked with CP/M, using WordStar as a text editor to write programs using DBase II. Later, used Clipper to compile the code to create stand along executables. And when we received PC clones, using MS-DOS, we used the DBase III and ported our code over to run on those systems.
I remember PC-DOS on my PC-XT
Submitted by Elucidate on Tue, 07/07/2009 - 9:59pm
This may be too much information but when I see pictures of an IBM PC I have to reminisce back to my computer camp days in Modus Connecticut. I spent two sessions (i.e. 4 weeks) at a computer camp when I was early teens. That computer camp occupied a retreat for a few months that was patronized by dignitary's children from world wide countries. At that camp we learned to program IBM Basic and Apple Pascal on apple II, II+ and IIe. What was it...Zork the narrative game of choice back then? Our camp wrote a game for that as a project. Lightning did strike a tree right out side of my cabin. In any case, I may have the original IBM manuals shown in the article in addition to the Lotus manuals from back then. Ah, childhood days.
Yikes how lame...I even have a fully functional Summit K08 LED digital calculator from 1971 that my dad gave to me. You turn the dial to increase the significant digits. And it is rechargeable, even back then.
If you liked the Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, you'll love the Endless Universe- Beyond the big bang theory by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok.
Submitted by The Relic on Tue, 07/07/2009 - 8:57pm
A very good series of articles, but as for Wolfenstein 3D... Did ID popularize the FPS? Undoubtedly. Did they create it? Undoubtedly...not. Battlezone (for the arcades) predated Wolf 3D by 11 years in the arcades, and I don't think even that was the first (gaming from a first-person perspective has existed since at least Atari's Night Driver).
Different
Submitted by Asevening on Mon, 07/13/2009 - 8:51am
There is a difference, Battlezone was just some green lines and you were in a tank. It's still a first person shooter, but to me (and probably not to everyone) a First Person Shooter is spent more on foot. Like I said though, if it is a first person viewpoint AND you're shooting things or projecting something it's an FPS. I just never really think of Mechwarrior as an FPS is all. Wolf really brought the FPS into the limelight because it was done right. They used ray casting for developing the game that really changed the face of it all. If you're going to get all technical about it you could pick out Flight Simulator and even some earlier games that were FP viewpoints. Though Wolfenstein, by the way they had developed it, really did enhance and popularize the FPS.
so thisNight Driver was a
Submitted by nekollx on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 10:17am
so thisNight Driver was a First Person SHOOTER as well?
------------------------------
Coming soon to Lulu.com --Tokusatsu Heroes--
Five teenagers, one alien ghost, a robot, and the fate of the world.
Submitted by The Relic on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 10:35am
Didn't say it was...I just said it was gaming from the first person perspective. Battlezone WAS an FPS, however. But I recall hearing about an earlier FPS (I just don't remember the name of it, however).
more visually sexier That
Submitted by Jox on Tue, 07/07/2009 - 7:24pm
more visually sexier
That sentence couldn't be more wronger.
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