Happy Birthday PC

11-08-2006

by Maxim Kelly

Readers are ill-advised to place candles on their PCs on Saturday, but do give the ubiquitous little desktop a pat on the monitor casing for its 25th birthday.

It's been a quarter of a century since IBM released its first personal computer and kick-started not only a colossal global PC industry -- now reckoned to be worth USD200 billion annually -- but also a new epochal development in how humans use technology for the storage and retrieval of information and society's accumulated knowledge.

It's estimated that 1.6 billion computers have been sold since 12 August 1981 when IBM launched its brand spanking new PC for USD1,565 at a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom in New York.

Housed in a beige casing, and displaying only one shade of green text, model 5150 made by International Business Machines made history as the first electronic device with real processing power available for the consumer to carry home, or to the office, in an era when mainframe supercomputers took up entire buildings. It was powered by an Intel microprocessor and contained 40KB of read-only memory (ROM) and 16KB of user memory. This meant it could store about as much data as a three or four page Microsoft Word file today.

No doubt in another 25 years the personal computer (if it's still called that) will be a completely different beast altogether.

Thin-client computing is one development which may slow down PC sales. This is an approach where the desktop unit is merely a terminal for displaying the processing performed on a client server.

The rise of the mobile phone may also become a challenger to the PC, but Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo, which acquired IBM's personal computing arm in 2005 has "taken up the baton" and believes the PC is a "vibrant, continuously-evolving machine that eats technology innovations and is ever-hungry for more," the company said in a statement.

"The next 25 years of the Lenovo PC will still have many surprises in store for us and our customers", said Fiona O'Brien, Lenovo's country manager for Ireland, adding that ubiquitous computing is now a fact, particularly thanks to wireless networking.

However analyst group Gartner has warned that the primacy of the PC is under threat not from smartphones or virtualisation, but from the source of its success -- flexibility and innovation.

Gartner warns that as operating systems and applications improve with ever-more hidden complexity, the user is increasingly unaware of incremental improvements. And from a business perspective the increasing complexity of PCs sometimes means configuration and maintenance costs far "outweigh" original capital costs.

As a result Gartner predicts that in coming years the growing availability of cheap bandwidth and processing power, combined with web-based services will make a new style of application delivery possible, which could "unravel" some of the complexity surrounding PCs.

Indeed no discussion of the modern PC is complete without reference to the internet, and the world wide web is also celebrating its birthday this week. On 6 August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee released the internet protocol concept on which the present-day net still mainly relies upon.

So while the PC is now in its mid-twenties and looking to settle down, the internet is still only 15 years-old and looking for something to do.