Saturday, December 12, 2009

1996 - 2000: The Personal Computer

The period that the personal computer became 'accessible' (read: affordable) for the average household to buy, was also the period I 'gently persuaded' my parents to buy one. Around this age i acquired the ability to influence my parent's buying behaviour. So i thankfully took advantage of my newfound leverage.

The first personal computer my parents bought, was of IBM.
They were the leading players in the computer industry in the 90's.
IBM pioneered the first personal computers for home and office use. The technical specs were still weak and barely better than what you encountered on the Commodore 64 10 years prior. But the first PC we owned, had 124 bits of memory, which was an significant upgrade to what we knew before.



This PC however, was quickly outdated, and a new generation of superior computers was released in 1998. One of which was the Packard Bell i-Media



This was also the period Microsoft really took off; they started to develop and sell important software needed to run a PC, this software is called 'an operating system' it is an interface between hardware and user that acts as a host for computing applications so you can manage and coordinate activities.
Microsoft released several operating systems in this period: Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows 2000. I mainly used Windows 98 but the functionality was nothing short of amazing. Name something and Windows 98 could do it.




I would like to refer to this era as the 'Golden Era' in gaming.
The Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 were released in The Netherlands in 1996.
All the games were in 3D, and playing games was becoming something of an new experience, graphics really began to take shape and more realistic.
Ofcourse as the geek that i was (and still am), it didn't take long for me to own a Playstation and Nintendo 64.

I am very grateful for the technological innovations made in this period, because it paved the way for its successors that i hold so dear in my life.

No comments:

Post a Comment