On August 12th, 1981, IBM entered the world of personal computers with its 5150 personal computer. It wasn’t the first home computer to go on sale (by 1981 we already owned a TRS-80 Model III and Apple II computers were beginning to show up in schools) but the name “IBM” lent a certain amount of prestige and credibility to a market that hasn’t been the same ever since.
Prior to IBM’s arrival in the home computer market, home computers were mostly viewed as expensive toys for tech-minded hobbyists. But with an IBM brand computer, consumers were given the opportunity to use the same brand of computer both at work and at home. I’m pretty sure I remember advertisements that said just that.
As I’ve previously mentioned in the early 1980s we owned both a PC Jr. and an IBM XT clone, neither of which originally came with a hard drive. I remember the days of monochrome monitors and four-color graphics and all sorts of horrible graphic modes and audio beeps and boops. Our Apple II had better graphics than our PC, and my Commodore 64 had better graphics than our Apple. It was a long, long time before the multimedia qualities of our PCs caught up with the other machines we owned.
Definitely by the time I reached mid-high in the mid-1980s I was using computers for more than just entertainment. By 6th grade, I was typing whatever school work I could get away with typing into the computer, something I much prefer to “writing” things out in long-hand. I have read that Google is changing the way our brains think and remember, and I believe that. I think owning a computer early on definitely changed the way I wrote and I organized my thoughts and words. I can type almost as quickly as I can think, and edit at the same time. Writing things out is frustrating because I cannot easily reorder my thoughts, or highlight large sections of text and delete them, or easily spell check my words. It’s much more difficult for me to write without having those tools as my fingertips.
In 30 years we’ve seen computers go from being big bloated machines that sat on top of (or sometimes under) our desks to becoming portable, in the form of laptops. Laptops have shrunk to the point that a new category, netbooks, was coined. Between touchscreen tablets, interactive televisions, and telephones with more processing power than many people need, many industry professionals are predicting the impending death of the PC. I guess I see things differently than a lot of people. Back before people had personal computers, we had “thin clients” (machines with very little to no processing power) that connected to mainframes or servers. The big machines in the background did all the heavy lifting, and the thin clients were just interface points. Update the technology slightly and we’ve almost come full circle, with things like cell phones and tablets being our interfaces to more powerful back ends and storage points like the Internet and “the cloud”.
Whether or not the death of the PC form factor lies just around the corner remains to be seen. What I do know is, the last 30 years have been incredible, and I can’t wait to see what the next 30 years of technology holds.