IBM PC and MS-DOS

A comparison of clock speeds can be seen here. While the 8086 was about 5 to 10 MHz, the latest Pentium is a little bit over 3,000 MHz (3.2 GHz). There is a logarithmic increase in microprocessors since the release of the 8086 as indicated by Ray Kurzweil. The plot below depicts the evolution of microprocessor clock speed, using the data provided by Ray Kurzweil. As per the output of the R analyses of the data (note that 2 nonlinear equations are provided), the speed of microprocessor clock is doubling about every 4.1 years (i.e., 0.693/0.17). Exponential growth can in fact become a serious problem depending on how it is used. This doubling speed was likely not possible or feasible to continue at that exponential scale. As the data was likely from before 2005, everything above this mark was “expected” and therefore not observed data. The fastest IBM PC in 2015 was likely less than 5 GHz, not the 25 GHz predicted by the equations below and implied on page 61 of Ray Kurzweil's book.

In fact, in the essay entitled “The Free Lunch is Over” released in March of 2005, Herb Sutter showed a more realistic plot of trends of transistors and clock speed. He clearly indicated why we won't have a 10 GHz microprocessor: while the number of transistors is still climbing, the clock speed has reached a plateau since 2005. So projections using exponential curves are dangerous and can lead to erroneous conclusions if the “system” is not taken into account and other feedback loops are allowed to kick in. In fact, it looks like clock speed hit a “wall in 2005 and parallelism is now mandatory” to increase processing speed, and heat seems to be the main problem.

Anyway, as we figured out above (in agreement with Paul Allen) that the world will not end in a singularity and machines will not become smarter than humans and take over the world (at least for now), let's get back to some flashback mementos... A lot of MS-DOS games are available at the Internet Archive, RGB Classic Games, PC-Games archive, My Abandonware, The ISO Zone, 80's Top Games, the DOS Spirit among many more. MobyGames has a complete list of games. Some of my favorites are listed below; pictures are from the MobyGames website. I was able to retrieve my originals and upload them to be playable by using the jDosBox emulator (but cannot save games :-( at this time). A list of LucasArts games can be found here and a list of the five best games can be found here. Click on a game below to immerse yourself again in the MS-DOS world flashback...

If you have a zip or jar file containing a game you wish to try out, you can click here to run JsDOSBox. JsDOSBox is a JavaScript port of jDOSBox, which in turn is based on DOSBox. The jsDOSBox versions of all the games above are linked as “JavaScript” under each game.

YouTube has videos of playthroughs (longplays) of many incredible games such as Another World, Prince of Persia 1, Prince of Persia 2, Monkey Island 1 (The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition), Indiana Jones 2 (Fate of Atlantis), and many more.

The history of the PC inherits the history of operating systems (OS) developed by Microsoft. Since the 1980s, Microsoft has developed OS for IBM-PC compatible machines. In 1981, MS-DOS (disk operating system) was released in response to the IBM-PC, and in 1983, Windows 1 was announced; it was released in 1985. The history of OS by Microsoft was provided by Jamie Hinks' article “Microsoft turns 40: here's every milestone since 1975”, and Kelly Sheridan's article “Microsoft at 40: 5 Successes, 5 Failures”, but others may not share the same perspective, such as Dave Schuler.

Emulators. There are many MS-DOS emulators, but the most used these days likely is DOSBox. Several customized versions exist for DOSBox, including the DOSBox Game Launcher (DBGL). Some Java versions of DOSBox allowed users to run their MS-DOS programs within Internet browsers (such as the ones above). Common Java DOSBox emulators are the jDosBox emulator and the EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator.