Believe it or not, PC Pro first hit the newsstand in 1994 — and back then it would have landed with a thump. (It was massive.)
As we prepare for our 20th anniversary (issue 241, on sale mid-September), I’ve been flipping through that first issue and marvelling at the sadly spec’d PCs, hilariously cheesy advertising, and interesting design choices. We had a bit of a thing for Word Art, it would seem.
Aside from the intriguing lady holding a condom in one of the ads is (no, really — what an odd sales pitch), our first issue saw us eagerly awaiting Windows 95, impressed by laptops with CD-ROMs, and pondering whether we really needed 16MB of RAM, or could get by on eight. My, how times change.
Here are the highlights — and check back each Thursday for the next few weeks as we look back at more from PC Pro’s past. (If you have any requests, let us know in the comments.)
Plug and Play
So, back in the day, it would seem that simply connecting devices to PCs was a bit of a pain. (As a 32-year-old, this is hilarious to me; I know, I’ve lived a spoiled, charmed life.)
Back in the autumn of ‘94, we were seriously excited by the advent of Plug and Play (or as we dubbed it, PandP), which was set to hit the mainstream in Windows 95. We mention the glory of PandP in the very first Prolog column on page 19, go into further detail in the news section on the following page, and return to the theme several times more elsewhere in the magazine. That includes the introduction to our first ever reviews section, written by one James Tye — now CEO of Dennis Publishing — with quite the fetching picture.
“The PC of 1995 will be a Plug and Play (PandP) device,” we declared grandly. “The 16-bit Windows 3.1x programs will not exploit the PandP capabilities of new PCs, and though Chicago [Windows 95's codename] will run on older, non-PandP PCs, it will be less than complete. Any older PCs remaining without PandP are expected to be shifted at knocked-down prices.”
Not everyone agreed. One unnamed hardware vendor predicted in our pages that Plug and Play would be a “disaster” for Microsoft, because “it will realise it can’t dictate to hardware vendors.” “Microsoft must be totally crazy,” added this mysterious doubter, “if it believes it can ship Chicago on all PCs in the market. I’ll still be selling Windows 3.1 a year after Chicago [ships].”
While we hope that vendor had a good ‘95, the OS formerly known as Chicago did turn out to be pretty successful: Microsoft sold a million copies in the first few days on sale, and shipped 40 million in the first year — making it the most successful OS ever, at the time. It was also the operating system that introduced the Start menu, still loved by many users, despite Windows 8’s best efforts.
CD ROMs… in a notebook!?
Optical drives are all but gone in modern laptops, but in 1994 we were so amazed to see one in a notebook that we put it on the cover of the magazine, calling it a “breakthrough”.
Inside we gave the TI Travelmate 4000m a four-star review, highlighting its CD-ROM, which wasn’t strictly speaking built into the laptop, but included in a docking station. The TI cost £3,523 inc VAT — and, as ever, the docking station was extra, adding £821 inc VAT.
That review also featured a wonderful paragraph on the physical resistance of the disk-eject button on the floppy drive: “It’s comforting to know that your floppies aren’t going to fall out, but maybe this takes things a little too far.” Indeed.
Meanwhile, our news section — which was weirdly called “Horizons” — highlighted a clever Panasonic notebook that had a CD-ROM drive hidden underneath the keyboard, which lifted up to allow access to the disks. Such innovation cost a whopping £4,900, but it featured the then-upcoming Pentium 75MHz, up to 450MB of storage, and four hours of battery life. We’ve come a long way, baby.
RAM limits
I’m ashamed to admit it, but I have no idea how much RAM my home PC has — it’s enough, and that’s all I need to know. (I do know that my work PC has a solid 4GB, but that’s mostly because I hate it, and have been sussing out its weaknesses in the hopes of begging for a new one. Yeah, you heard me, machine: start behaving or you’re out.)
The point is, modern laptops and desktops have rather a lot of RAM, and it’s been many years since any of us have had to check if our machine has enough to run a new piece of software. Back in 1994, however, this was a pressing matter.
“It’s inevitable we won’t have an ideal configuration for every application,” our Labs editor Ian Mason noted in our round-up of high-end PCs. “Photoshop would like to be on a machine with at least 16MB of RAM.” Elsewhere, he described an 8MB system as “reasonably powerful”.
The sweetest thing — and I don’t mean to be condescending — is how advanced PC Pro’s reviewers considered the machines in the Labs. “Some are disappointing for their class,” we noted, “but we’re still looking at a group of of computers that are close to the mainframe computer power of only a few years ago.” That’s a description of a group of 486-powered computers, mostly clocked at 66MHz and offering a maximum of 128MB of RAM.
Now, even my low-end Moto G smartphone runs at 1.2GHz and packs 1GB of RAM. What other industry would have seen such technical achievement in a mere two decades? Simply amazing.
You can download a PDF file some of these pages from issue 1 of PC Pro by clicking here.