Le PC IBM

Source: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/ibmpc.html

Date: 1981. Intel 4.77MHz 8088 processor (16 bit segmented addressing, 8-bit data paths). Two 5.25" 160K floppy diskette drives. Basic in ROM. Boots DOS 1.0 from diskette. 16-64K RAM. Cassette recorder interface. Green 12"-diameter screen capable of monochrome graphics. No hard drive (adding hard drives to the PC would be a cottage industry until the IBM PC/XT was announced). This extremely modest machine and its successors – such as the IBM PC/AT and the IBM PS/2 – would dominate the desktop market until about 2000, when IBM withdrew from the desktop market.

The Columbia University Computer Center ordered 20 original IBM PCs sight-unseen on the day it was announced and presented them to high-ranking professors and administrators. Initially there was no way for the PC to communicate with our central mainframes (including, ironically, our big IBM machines), and this was a major impetus to Columbia's Kermit Project. MS-DOS Kermit, which was initially written at Columbia in 1981-82 so the aforementioned professors and administrators could communicate with our central IBM and DEC mainframes, and therefore with each other (by email and file sharing); for example, three of them who were collaborating on a multi-discipline textbook. MS-DOS Kermit was developed continuously until 1999, and was the subject of a series of best-selling computer books.

MS-DOS Kermit fonctionnait sur le PC d'origine ainsi que sur nombre de ses premiers concurrents tels que le DEC Rainbow, le HP-150, le Heath-Zenith 100, le Victor 9000, le NEC APC et de nombreuses autres machines DOS de milieu des années 1980 qui n'étaient pas compatibles entre eux en termes de code ou de disque, et bien sûr aussi sur le PC "standard" qui a évolué à partir de tout cela (par exemple Dell, HP). Bien sûr, Columbia a également créé une version Windows de Kermit, appelée Kermit 95 .

MS-DOS Kermit a été utilisé partout dans le monde - et au-delà - et constituait un banc d'essai intégral pour notre projet (pré-Unicode) permettant le transfert de fichiers texte dans différentes langues et systèmes d'écriture (par exemple, cyrillique, arabe) entre des plates-formes utilisant différents caractères codages, aboutissant à la première conférence internationale Kermit à Moscou, URSS, 1989.