It has taken 20 years to sell a billion PCs. The next billion are expected to be sold over the coming five or six years. The phenomenal growth of the personal computer has been driven by three forces, the first of which was the decision by IBM, then maker of the dominant mainframe computers, to license the manufacture of two key elements of personal computers in the early 1980s — the software and the microprocessor.
That spawned the two most dominant forces in the computer industry: Microsoft, whose software now runs on 95% of all new computers, and Intel, the hardware company that makes the processors that run most personal computers.
Ironically, IBM had been involved in a 13-year anti-trust battle with the United States Justice Department similar to the fight Microsoft is currently involved in, but the case was dropped when IBM’s rivals started cloning its hardware in 1981, eroding its mainframe business dominance.
IBM rebounded and is still the leader in computer consulting and a big-name vendor in the computer market. But the recent merger of Hewlett Packard and Compaq has catapulted the resulting new company into top spot for most hardware segments in the market for smaller computers.
Microsoft’s success story is one most people know. But Intel, which produces the core hardware, has been around longer. It made the chip for the first commercially successful and widely available PC, the Altair, which was launched in 1974.
“Intel’s contribution to the evolution of personal computing began with its 1971 invention of the microprocessor,” says Steve Nossel, Intel South Africa’s country manager.
“This path of innovation leads from the Intel 8080 chip used in the Altair to the 4,77 megahertz Intel 8088 processor that powered the watershed IBM PC in 1981 and into the era of the Intel Pentium 4 processor. This is the world’s fastest processor, delivering speeds of up to 2,53 gigahertz.”
That is 524 times faster than the processor that ran the first IBM PC.
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, postulated a law for all of this. Moore’s Law holds that technology evolves at a rate that every 18 months sees double the number of transistors able to be packed on to the same amount of silicon.
This means, in effect, that the speed of computer chips doubles every year and a half, as does the amount of memory packed in a chip. But computers are still difficult to use for the average consumer and are not as widespread in the developing world as in Europe, the US and Asia.
“Today, humans have to work with computers on the computer’s terms,” says Nossel. “Tomorrow, we want to make computers work with humans on their terms. That vision includes developing PCs that can recognise speech, gestures and video, and means achieving breakthroughs that will make the interaction between people and computers a truly immersive experience.
“Ultimately, we envisage a world in which billions of people are seamlessly connected to the Internet, all the time and anywhere, with a rich set of services that are enabled by wireless technologies,” says Nossel.
Such devices are more likely to resemble a souped-up cellphone than a computer and will use super-fast data networks to communicate with each other.
The rise of the computer has in part been fuelled by, and helped fuel, the Internet explosion that began in the mid-1990s. To get on the “information superhighway” then you needed the PC equivalent of the Model T Ford — the automobile that made cars accessible to the masses.
The computer industry likes to compare its innovation rate to the car industry’s. If the car had developed at the same pace as the PC, IBM estimates that a Rolls-Royce would cost R27,50 today and do 1,3-million kilometres on a litre of petrol.
It is fitting that this year a computer, the new iMac made by Apple, the originators of personal computing, appeared on the front cover of Time magazine, which in 1982 voted the PC “Man of the Year”.
“By the millions, it is beeping its way into offices, schools and homes. A personal computer … can send letters at the speed of light, diagnose a sick poodle … test recipes for beer,” Time wrote.
“The enduring American love affairs with the automobile and the television set are now being transformed into a giddy passion for the personal computer. This passion is partly fad, partly a sense of how life could be made better, partly a gigantic sales campaign. Above all, it is the end result of a technological revolution that has been in the making for four decades and is now, quite literally, hitting home.”
With a billion PCs sold and the next billion on the way, the predictions of past visionaries are reminders of how underestimated the computer once was. In 1943 Thomas Watson, then chairperson of IBM, famously said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”.