Java man, they were marvels of stature and stamina, and servitude, but
by late Java man, and early Perl man standards, they were only useful as
footstools and coffee rests. Others used them to show off as trophies in
their dens - lairs often filled with newer dinosaur prototypes and knock
off replicas such as the Power-pc-mac, the Gateway-o-saurus, and the
Pentium-pc-dactil.

The 486, as it is known to historians, is this old dinosaur. It ate too
much, and in huge bytes, consumed loads of juice, but did very little in
response. Often, when they got caught in "Web's", they seemed to take
forever to get down. Loads of time were spent by them, simply wandering
around trying to find useful information. On lines, in the wild woolly
wilderness (or WWW, for short) they would fight to get packets of food
transfer provisions (or ftp) from the others - the faster, and the
dedicated. Servers of early man, these beasts were almost utterly
useless.

The 486 was defensless against small infectants, like viruses, and they
would try in vain to ram their way into storage caches of others on
board buses, which were plentiful at the time. Try as they might to
overcome their limitations, they often went hyper. Text written of these
creatures indicates they liked to build mud and stick walls which early
man would set aflame. These so called firewalls would protect the 486
for a time. Only to be put out as they were by being hacked to pieces by
hordes of ravenous young bacteria, called generation X (referring to the
unique strain of silliphilias in that generation of bacteria - a strain
so large, it wore boots, tongue-piercings, and could dye its hair).

Alas, the 486, and its blind, mute and deaf cousin the 386, went the way
of the dinosaur, the TRS-80, Apple IIe, and Fortran terminals. The
stories of its replacement in evolution is broad. Bands of these 486
hordes were wiped out and in their stead, a new promising, chip off the
old block of time emerged.

Vivienne Mc Laughlin
 

                   The Low-Cost PC Phenomenon
                   Low-cost PC's have existed for many years. The IBM PCjr* cost less than
                   $1,300 when it was released in 1983. But why didn't sales take off until just
                   recently? The answer is simple--the low-cost PC's of 10 years ago were
                   annoyingly slow. In contrast, low-cost PC's of today are "fast enough" to run most
                   general productivity applications.

                   The IBM PCjr came with a 8088 processor running at 4.77 MHz, and 64 KB of
                   memory. This setup was barely enough to run a text editor and simple games. But
                   for the same amount of money today, you can get a system with an Intel Celeron
                   processor, or an AMD K6-2 processor, and 64 MB of memory. This setup is
                   "fast enough" for most general applications. 

August 12 1981 IBM PC was launched.

Excerpt from CNN article by by Marsha Walton

Several popular home computers existed before the 1981 IBM PC launch. But the regimented business world considered Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack's Tandy products "toys."

The IBM stamp of approval on a personal computer changed that mentality for good.

"Almost overnight, with IBM introducing the PC, it became OK to use it for real business applications,"

"In 1981 I had an IBM PC, two-floppy system," Howle said.

"To give young people these days a comparison: It would take 10 of those floppy disks to be able to hold the music that is on one MP3 song," he said.