For ages now, the PC has been more a matter of performance than style. A colorless, shapeless box that nevertheless changed the world! While there were attempts to give a more unique styling to the PC, all retained the PC’s boxy look and did not really catch the fancy of users till the iMac came along and proved that style can sell.

With nothing much to differentiate between competing brands, the success of the iMac acted as a clarion call to other PC vendors to evolve more stylish machines.

Even then, it took the big names quite some time to come up with workable alternatives to the all-pervasive beige box. In this piece, we will see how changes in technologies are bringing about these changes, and what changes are in turn being wrought to the basic philosophy of the PC in the bargain.

First, the philosophy bit.

The original PC, as designed by IBM, followed an open architecture. That is, the design allowed for others to improve the basic functionality of the machine by adding their own components and peripherals. It is this that led to the boxy look of the PC. After all, the PC had to accommodate add-on cards (ISA, EISA, and later PCI cards) that were plugged in on the motherboard. Anyone who has opened up a PC will have noticed that if these expansion slots were eliminated (and a slimmer power supply used), the PC could have become a lot slimmer.

Unfortunately, there was no way of eliminating the expansion slots, because quite a bit of the functionality that users needed of PCs (display, sound, network connectivity, etc) depended on these cards.

And there it stayed till the technology itself changed.

Earlier, the user base was small and manufacturers were not sure whether users would want to have extra cards like SCSI cards. Today, the PC has become a mass-market productivity tool, much like a TV or a calculator. And there are enough people out there who will not put any additional hardware inside the machine they buy.

Also, over the last couple of years, more and more of the functionality provided by add-on cards have been built into the motherboard itself. Sound, video, modems, networking… all of these are today built onto the motherboard itself.

It is this combination of factors that Apple exploited to create the iMac. Here was a machine that nobody could ever expand (but for RAM) even if their lives depended on it. But it looked different. It looked classy. And it sold millions.

It took some time for the rest of the industry to catch on. It is the Intel 810 chipset that built acceptable video and sound onto the motherboard in a large scale. Finally, everything that was required of a full-fledged PC could be placed on the motherboard, and there was no need to leave room for add-on cards.

Finally, the PC was ready for a less boxy, classier appearance.

Krishna Kumar