It is often easy to overlook the origins of humanity with all that we have accomplished today. Take a look at where you are, see where you have been. Sometimes it is important to know the past, to greater understand the future. Undoubtedly, this phrase greatly applies to the computer technology of today. Rapid advancement of hardware has led to more capable software, along with more versatile uses. Unfortunately, we did not always have the power in computers that there is today. The first range of personal computers often did little more than run simple programs no more complex than word processors. Of course, the power we perceive in technology today will be dwarfed by what progress that is made in the future. By taking a look at how hardware got to its point today, you can gain better understanding of the computing field as a whole.

This motherboard was equipped with 8 256k simms, no onboard IDE, and supported a blazing 386:

Motherboards have come a very long way from day one. Current motherboard manufacturers often struggle to pack as many features into their new motherboard as possible. The more features a motherboard has, the more incentive there is to buy it. This was not always the case, many older motherboards were nothing but bare bones. Equipped with nothing more than four standard ISA slots, a few ram banks, and a CPU socket, its easy to see there was a lot of improvement to be made. IDE controllers were add-in cards, along with all other necessities such as serial and parallel ports. There was no easily configurable soft-bios, nor much room for upgrades. Now days you see everything from onboard sound, and video, to special hardware controllers such as RAID technology. Because of the need to buy many add-on boards for basic functions such as mouse support, expandability was very limited. After buying a card for serial ports, printer ports, soundcard, video card, and a hardware controller, if you were left with any open slots it was a stroke of luck. As such external modems were widely popular, as saving one slot was beyond useful.

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