Compared to the Apple Macintosh, the evolution of the IBM PC and its successors and compatibles always lagged behind. The IBM PC had very limited sound capabilities, but a number of sound add-ons have become available, including the Ad-Lib cards and the Soundblaster. The display quality of the PC was poor (only 200 lines with CGA), and even the later standards EGA (640x350 pixels, and 16 colors) and VGA (640x480 and 256 colors) were very limited. Recent developments include better screen resolution (with 800x600 being common on laptops and 1024x768 or higher on desktop computers, and 64K or even 16M colors) and video import- and display cards.
Hyperties was the first major hypertext system for the IBM PC. It provided a usable authoring and reading tool for this limited platform without windowing capabilities.
The introduction of the Intel 80386 and Microsoft Windows turned the IBM PC into a more usable hypermedia platform. The PC has become a serious alternative for Unix workstations, and it also has become a Unix workstation itself. Netscape Navigator (and before that also Mosaic for X) have been used on a PC with Unix for the preparation of this course text, and many different graphical WWW browsers can be used on the IBM PC with MS-Windows, for studying this course or for reading other hyperdocuments written in HTML on a PC.