Alex Kefford

In 1981 a mainframe manufacturer launched a new computer, a machine so successful that it killed off the inventive spirit of the generation.

Technologically speaking it wasn't particularly advanced, but somehow it has been the basis of personal computing ever since.

We know it today as the IBM PC, but back then it was merely a cheap way to provide computing power to businesses across the globe.

From that day on, the industry has done little but concentrate its efforts on refining the original design. Sure, clock speeds have been cranked up a notch or two, but the watchword has been evolution, not revolution.

The justification for this evolutionary path has been that of compatibility. Our PCs are saddled with compromises to maintain compatibility with the original. We still have the same basic motherboard layout, the same processor instruction set, and operating systems that contain lines of code old enough to vote.

Assuming that you could find a copy, it would still be possible to run an early version of MS-DOS on your brand new 3GHz PC.

Even keyboard design has remained largely unchanged since the 102-key layout debuted with the IBM AT in 1984. And the reason the Office Paperclip springs to life when you hit F1 is no more logical than the fact that Lotus 1-2-3 used the same key for help way back in 1982.

But do we really need that level of legacy compatibility, or has the industry simply become too frightened to innovate for fear of losing market share?

During the 1980s, colourful characters such as Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar were busily bashing away at the home market, and in the process making computers available to everyone.

In the great scheme of things these weren't large companies, and they certainly didn't dominate the market like Intel, Microsoft and the other modern-day giants do now.

Yet they were still able to lead the IT industry in new and exciting directions with compelling and innovative products. More importantly, though, they were keen to take risks.

In 1986, Amstrad's newly launched 1512 brought a fully featured PC within the reach of the average consumer.

It wasn't especially compatible with anything that went before it: the graphics system was riddled with non-standard modes, some of the ports were proprietary and it was bundled with a previously unheard-of graphical user interface called Gem. But it was a runaway success, capturing 25 per cent of the European market.

The scene was set: PCs soon became a commodity developed by companies with more than a passing interest in the bottom line.

The fastest way to market is to use existing products as the basis for development, and today our PCs are assembled from a range of generic components, each one an evolution of its predecessor.

Take AMD's latest processor, the Opteron. Designed to bring 64-bit computing to the enterprise and workstation markets, the "breakthrough architecture" of which AMD is so proud is, in fact, an extension of the same x86 instruction set we've been using for over 20 years.

Indeed, the Opteron chip is itself just an evolution of its predecessor, the Athlon.

What passes for innovation these days is nothing more than evolution in the face of competition. Marketing departments square up to each other and try to knock their opponents out of the market in the IT equivalent of Sumo wrestling.

Intel and AMD are busy racing each other to the next highest clock speed, while ATI and Nvidia are nailing texture buffers and wider pipelines onto their graphics chips like there's no tomorrow.

Which, of course, there isn't, because tomorrow's hardware will be the same as today's but with more bandwidth and higher frequencies.

We'll be using our PCs in the same way, too. Windows XP's assortment of buttons, scrollbars and pull-down menus is still based largely on research conducted at Xerox Parc in the 1970s.

Spreadsheets and word processors, the cornerstones of modern software, have remained almost unchanged since their introduction to the world.

Even with a new version of Microsoft Office just around the corner, it's unlikely that we're going to see an innovative variation of the paper or grid metaphors.

Shouldn't we have moved on? A truly innovative approach would be to produce a user interface which people would actually want to use.

While the wild gesticulations of Tom Cruise in Minority Report might not be the style of computer interaction we'd want in our homes and offices, it points towards an alternative method of communicating with our silicon friends.

In the absence of any real innovation, our computing experience hasn't become any more enjoyable or more productive.

Can you achieve more in your day because your PDA can synchronise with your PC and mobile phone? Or does it merely allow you to carry the problem around with you?

It's time the industry produced innovative solutions to the problems we all face every day. The old idiom of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' has applied for too long.

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