I surf the Net somewhat obsessively when I have spare time, and I often read various discussion forums such as Slashdot and Neowin. Now, the journalism at those sites isn't always the highest quality, and I have noticed a marked lack of perspective on the level of changes that have occurred in this industry. Working at Microsoft over the past 20 years has given me a unique point of view on the magnitude of these changes. Many people are unaware of what the computing universe was like in the dark ages.

When I started working in the industry, computing was dominated by big iron machines. Mini-computers had made some impact, but mostly only at universities. The personal computer was a toy; the floppy drive on the original IBM PC was only an option—you could buy them with just a cassette interface.

In 1984, when I started at Microsoft, PCs had a 4.77MHz processor. Most of them came with 256KB of RAM and a 10MB standard hard disk. It was a huge improvement when the IBM PC/AT came out with a 20MB hard disk. I remember clearly a developer in the Xenix division running down the hall with a rectangular object the size of a shoebox exclaiming that it was a 70MB hard disk! Nobody had ever seen anything with that kind of capacity before, especially nothing that big for a PC. The highest quality PC display that you could buy in 1984 (the IBM EGA) offered 16 color images at 640¥350 resolution. While Microsoft and a couple of other companies made mice, having a mouse on your computer meant adding an adapter board to support it.

Corporate networking was in its infancy, and the modern Internet had literally just been created. They deployed DNS at Carnegie-Mellon shortly after I left; before that, the Internet used static host tables. Microsoft didn't have a corporate network; there was an ad hoc network between the offices of the people who were working on the networking support in MS-DOS® 3.1, but that was about it. Since PCs didn't have the horsepower to do anything, we built our product on Sun mini-computers (running Xenix, for example) and downloaded the images onto our machines to test.

When Windows® debuted in 1985, it was the start of the first of the tidal waves that rocked the PC industry (if you include all PC-class machines, the tidal wave started when the first Macintosh shipped in January of 1984). With Windows, the computing paradigm shifted from text-based to graphics-based. Mice were required equipment rather than options, and computer manufacturers started including them in their systems by default.

Even so, systems were still primitive. A fast computer in 1990 was a 66MHz 486 machine. In 1995, the machine I used for development was a 120MHz Pentium, with 4MB of RAM, and that was considered a beefy machine at the time. If I remember, it came with a 200MB hard disk, which was huge. Later in 1995, the second of the tidal waves hit—the Internet. In six months the number of active Web sites quadrupled.

The Internet didn't just change the computing industry, it changed the world. Now every machine was connected to every other machine. Suddenly, everyone and anyone could publish data. The world's largest reference library became available to all. Now you can find out anything with very little effort, but of course you still have to use your good sense when evaluating this vast information. For example, http://www.buydehydratedwater.com is a wonderful site that tells you of the evils of tap and well water and will quite happily sell you cartons of dehydrated water.

The Internet in its current form has barely existed for 10 years. People forget that it's only been in the past few years that computers have had enough horsepower to be able to render 3D graphics. They forget that it's only been in the past three years that digital photography has been a possibility for nonprofessionals. They forget that just eight years ago, CD-ROM drives were optional features on new computers. They forget that the DVD has only been around for 10 years. They forget that MP3s and ripped music have only been around for about eight years. And they forget that although CDs have only existed for 20 years, in that time discs have managed to practically eliminate all the storage forms used in the 80-plus years of recorded music. They forget that it's only been in the past five or so years that hard disks have been cheap enough to even consider keeping large libraries of audio files.

There are times that I sit back and marvel at all the changes that have taken place in the industry since I started at Microsoft, and there are times when I wonder how we got by before. And then I try to imagine what will happen over the next 20 years.