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CNN Sunday Morning

PC Celebrates 20th Anniversary

Aired August 12, 2001 - 08:32   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Well, long before CNN.com, before the Internet was a global community, there was the lowly PC. As the world marks the 20th anniversary of the personal computer, our thoughts turn to the future as well as the past.

Here's CNN's Garrick Utley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARRICK UTLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was the next big thing back in 1981, that first IBM PC with its glowing green screen and large floppy disks. But it did the job, bringing the digital information age into our homes and workplaces.

(on camera): And who should get the credit for changing our lives with this thing? Is there the equivalent of the Wright Brothers or a Thomas Edison? How about a weaver working at his loom? We'll get to him in a moment.

(voice-over): First, we should acknowledge that Apple and others were already making computers in the late 1970s, but they could not interact with each other, so IBM can claim credit for allowing their competitors to make their computers IBM-compatible, which made the PC the dominant computer.

Intel can claim credit, because its chips drove that first PC, even if today's chips are 300 times faster. And, of course, there was the young Bill Gates who provided the operating system which created his fortune.

But what would Bill Gates and others be without those who went before them, way before them? Those who built those bulky room- filling mainframes and the first electronic computers back in the 1930s and '40s.

(on camera): And why stop there? The origins of the computing power that we have today are so much older than we might think. How old?

(voice-over): A weaver works at a loom, a demonstration of the first time that the programming of information, the heart of computers today, was used to run a machine. Information on punch cards controlled the patterns woven on the cloth. Where? In France. When? In 1805. And then there are those digits we never see, the zeros and ones on which all computing operates. That key to our information age was devised by the mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz in Germany in the late 1600s, who saw it's potential for calculating machines.

(on camera): But Leibnitz was also a philosopher who felt that numbers should have some universal meaning, so he said that one should represent God and zero its opposite, the void.

(voice-over): Today we may not put much spirituality into computer technology as we tap out our zeros and ones via the keyboard, but before that first PC 20 years ago, the man who made it all possible did, more than 300 years ago.

Garrick Utley, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN ANCHOR: Now we turn to a man who can tell us exactly how the first IBM PC was created. He's David Bradley, one of the 12 original team members at IBM who created some of the first commercial PCs for the home and office. He's still working for IBM and he joins us from Raleigh, North Carolina. Thanks for -- thanks for joining us, sir.

DAVID BRADLEY, IBM: Good morning, Frank.

BUCKLEY: Good morning. Tell us, have you -- you've got to be somewhat proud. Here we are, 20 years later, tell us about your accomplishment.

BRADLEY: Well, it's really great to be celebrating the 20th anniversary. When we started the PC way back in 1980, we had no idea it was going to be as successful as it turned out to be. We just knew that as engineers it was a really great project to be working on.

BUCKLEY: David, you must have encountered, as some people do in big organizations and in government and such, some obstacles. Any obstacles you can relate to us?

BRADLEY: Actually, one of the things that IBM did very well for the personal computer was gave us a great deal of autonomy. We could go out and create the personal computer that we wanted, and they withheld the judgment until the end to decide whether it was worth of the IBM name. Fortunately, they gave us the permission to go ahead and announce it.

BUCKLEY: Well, the PC concept has certainly expanded, perhaps at a more rapid rate than even the analysts thought. I think at the end of this century, they said that they thought there'd be some 80 million PCs around the world and instead there were some half-billion. Does it surprise you how quickly the concept grew?

BRADLEY: Well, it's somewhat surprising how fast the concept grew, although if we had taken the blinders off somewhat and just allowed our imagination to run wild a little bit more, it think we could have foreseen it. But, still, it's a surprising number.

BUCKLEY: We've heard from IBM about this thing called the grid, what is it, grid computing.

BRADLEY: Grid computing.

BUCKLEY: Give us a better sense of that.

BRADLEY: Well, the idea behind grid computing is that you take a large number of computers, which happen to be connected together via the Internet or some other networking method, and you can use them as apply to a very large problem, and break the problem up into small pieces, have each one of the computers do their own piece. And you can add or subtract computers as necessary to work on the problem. It takes advantage of both the large number of computers and the network to which they are attached.

BUCKLEY: What about any brick walls in the technology that folks like you may face in the years ahead? What are the brick walls that may stand in your way?

BRADLEY: Well, there's always the challenge of how you're going to make more transistors on that same piece of silicon. There's always the challenge of how we're going to develop programs that'll take advantage of all that capability.

But we see the way clear for perhaps the next five to ten years, on the same course that we're on, and amazingly we've always been able to surmount these problems when we've seen them before, so I think the future is going to be just as progressive and as outstanding as the past has been.

BUCKLEY: IBM has described the post-PC world as "Planet Blue." How far along are we in that quest for "Planet Blue"?

BRADLEY: Well, we're well along that way right now. We have a number of projects that take advantage of the connected world, allow business to do commerce over the Internet, consumers to do commerce, and so I think we're moving right along in that regard.

BUCKLEY: All right, David Bradley, thanks very much for joining us from Raleigh, North Carolina. Have a good morning.

BRADLEY: Thank you.

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