So today marks the 25th birthday of the personal computer—yes yes, Happy Birthday to you too, Ray—call me when you’re 40, okay?
[Ahem] So as I was saying… Looking at the above photo of the first IBM PC makes me lament the lack of innovation in the basic form factor of the PC over the years… Sure, there have been many updates to the basic set-up of monitor, CPU and keyboard—you can check out PC World’s 25 Greatest PCs of all Time for proof of that. But it seems to me that there’s a lot more innovation going on these days in the design of mobile phones… Maybe because they haven’t quite been standardized yet?
At any rate, I won’t argue for a second that personal computers haven’t changed the world, but I will point out that the ones I used have definitely risen in status beyond glorified calculators and word processors thanks to a certain series of tubes…
