The MUST-KNOWS you should know!

I love the fact that as a kid I knew computers to be huge boxes that filled rooms. Traffic stopped as they were lifted by crane into buildings. I love it that they used punched cards for programming. I love it that in my first real job I used a "terminal", an Olivetti machine with no visual display, just an impact printer, a modem the size of a small cupboard and a keyboard with helpfully coloured keys. I love it that in another job mini computers did whiz-bang number crunching and stored data on huge, truly floppy disks. And I loved the early PC kits, the TRS-80, CP/M and the early Apples that began to proliferate inside universities. And I loved the first IBM PC, with its tiny 64Kb of RAM, green screen, single mini-floppy and no hard drive. And then those wonderful full-size hard disk drives, the Winchesters, which slimmed down and yet grew to a massive 20Mb. Wow, all that and we are only up to maybe 1984.

Having lived through all that, the trip to today's PCs has been a rocket sled. Tom Yager gets excited about AMD's new quad-core-but-with-so-much-more "Barcelona" chip. It's faster yet greener and really takes it up to Intel. Read on, and buy one when you can.

Labels: AMD, computers, Intel, tech