Today, DOS celebrated its 30th birthday. It was bought for US$25,000 from a company selling a bit of code that they called the Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS), and that code was written in just two months way e-back in 1980.[break]
A year later, that code would become the standard for the IBM PC Operating System, and was the underpinning for the first version of Microsoft Windows.
The rest is history – and the computing world has never been the same since.
At the time, I had just started working at IBM, fresh out of school, and still remember my fascination with the 5 1/4” floppy disk. Once inserted, that disk brought up DOS on a monochrome monitor with a blinking green cursor.
Oh, the joy of typing in “copy myfile lpt1” and watching in wonder as your plain black & white text zapped out over a noisy dot-matrix printer that was the size of small refrigerator.
Back then, it took much less to excite folks than with today’s iCrowd.
I bring this up as I recently read that Nepal has one of the youngest populations on the planet, with a median age of 21. So most of you reading this are probably wondering what the heck I’m going on about – monochrome, command line, floppy disks, typing...
But short of sounding like a SLC history exam, let me just say that in the olden days, tech was just as exciting as it is today, sans touch displays, swipes and wipes, and music players the size of your wristwatch.
You would be amazed by how much fun we could have with a disk that held 720kb in total, which is probably about the size of your last email.
In that space, we could calculate our mortgage rate and maybe play a game of pong – whoo-hoo! But today, with 1,389 times more space, we’re hard pressed to hold all our baby photos, home movies, and CVs with cover letters on our one-terabyte hard drives.
So as I flipped open the lid on my Windows 7 system this morning, I was struck by how far computers have come in just 30 short years (but not necessarily people). I watched a screen that rivals my own eyeballs, and that can produce more colors than I could ever possibly see.
My web-browsing program opened in the blink of an eye, instead of waiting five minutes on a blinking cursor.
Considering where computers were 30 years ago, today’s computing environment is nothing short of a miracle. Or so I thought, until I started reading some online comments on the news of the day.
But a friend did tweet me something tasteful: a new iPad app called PADD was just released that turns your tablet or phone into a device that was seen first in a 1987 episode on the set of Star Trek (The Next Generation).
The creators of the series placed this device in the year 2376, but in reality we have the working model in 2011.
It seems, if one uses Star Trek and other Sci-Fi visualizations as a gauge, we are far far ahead of schedule.
But where are we going so fast? One has to wonder...
In the 30 years since DOS was introduced, poverty hasn’t been reduced for most of the world’s population.
In fact, in a recent World Bank Development Report, it’s estimated that 1.5 billion people are worse off than before.
And not one low-income country (suffering from ongoing violence) has achieved a single Millennium Development Goal (MDG).
So ends this birthday celebration of Microsoft DOS, which was an initial effort worth US$25,000, and has allowed a single company to now profit an estimated US$74,000,000 each day of the year. Progress? You tell me.
Jiggy Gaton is quirky kinda techo-expat who hopes that someday software technology advances humankind, instead of the silicon kind.
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