Happy Birthday PC!

Photo Credit laptopmag.com

30 years ago today the PC was born.  My father has been working in the computer industry for about that long as well, so we have had a PC in our house pretty much that entire time.  Some of my earliest memories include playing around on a PC, long before there was a graphical interface.  Back then you had to know what you wanted to do, because you had to type it in instead of selecting it from a pretty image.

Each kid in my family had their own password protected folder.  Everyone knew my sister’s password though, which had to do with her favorite snack (which really wasn’t a true “snack” at all, but she made it one!)

PC has changed a lot over the years, and it’s very hard to conceptualize what it will look like 30 years from now.  Many are saying, including one of PC’s original creators, that the PC is dead.  I disagree.  Many at Microsoft are also disagreeing.  With tablets coming on the scene in full force, and laptops having the amount of power of any desktop, the desktop PC is becoming less relevant.

Windows 8 is bringing tablet functionality to PC’s, as more screens become touch enabled, and I believe we’ll see more tablet/netbook hybrids, as people fight to give up hardware keyboards.  I know I can never do with just a software keyboard.  I type too fast for that to make any sense for me.

Will laptops have 500 Terabyte (1 Terabyte equals 1000 Gigabytes) hard drives?  Will we see a Petabyte (1000 Terabytes) in a personal computing device?  How much faster can the internet get?  Will it pull up the site before we even think we want it.  Time will tell.  In the meantime lets celebrate the wonderful things having a Personal Computer at our disposal has done for us over the last 30 years!  Happy Birthday PC!

-Sarah Kimmel