TASK: Twenty years of the PC. Has software been held back by hardware limitations, or has hardware developments been held back by shortcomings in software.
             Over the years, computer systems have been built with two main components. Firstly, hardware, being the physical mechanism allowing manipulation of data and the controlling of various inputs, outputs and storage capabilities. Secondly, software, dividing into two parts, application and system. This has the task of letting the hardware know what jobs it would like to be undertaken and in what specific order. Software is the term used for the programs which operate the hardware. They contain instructions which have been written by somebody in a language for which the computer can understand.
             Through the years the computer industry has advanced rapidly in its development and this has been more so evident in the last twenty years. However the industry has been seen as a high risk area in terms of investment due to the large sums of investment capital needed. In both areas of hardware and software design, manufactures are consistently trying to out do each other to produce the smallest, quickest, cheapest and technology adapt products on the market.
             The year of 1981 saw the introduction of the IBM PC which revolutionised the area of computing, making the PC readily available to the everyday person. The first PC was provided with 64 Kilobytes of RAM, 5 ¼ ² floppy disks, no hard disk drive, keyboard, low resolution display and no support for floating point arithmetic. Hence these calculations would need to be done in the software. They were powered by Intel 8088 CPU, supporting 16-bit processing, 16-bit registers and 16-bit integral buses. Memory addressing was limited to 20 bits for 1MB. DOS version 1.0 could be added of required as a operating system.
             Soon after, 320KB double sided disks we...