The engineer who was on the team who built the first PC, 30 years ago, has said that its time has been and gone.
IBM engineer Mark Dean said that he was proud when IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling its PC division to Lenovo.
He said that he has switched to a tablet and that the PC is going the way of "vacuum tubes, typewriters, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs."
If he is using a tablet we can't think that he is getting much work done. The clock speed of a tablet is slow and there is no keyboard.
According to Business Insider, Microsoft's PR head Frank Shaw was a little more optimistic.
He said it was not the "post-PC era" because 400 million personal computers will ship this year.
However Vole is also looking away from the PC. The outfit's software will run on the Xbox, phones, embedded devices like ATMs, and Vole wants to develop services like Bing, Office 365, and Xbox Live.
Shaw thinks that the "brave new world" will come about when Microsoft releases Windows 8 which will "re-imagine Windows" and make it less PC dependant.
Of course, Windows 8 is still an operating system and you will need something that has PC qualities to get it to go, but the times they are a changing.
We got rid of the mainframe by going n-tier, then we got rid of that by going to the PC with Visual Basic (MFC42.DLL anyone?), then we got rid of that mess by going with browsers, and when they turned out to be boring we re-invented VB with Java so we could have more support issues than ever before...
They seem so utterly pointless, occupying a netherworld between a smartphone and a 'real computer' - all with the performance of the former and the pricetag of the latter.
The only thing tablets are good for is making mac drips feel special.
In my day, we didn't have those thinsy whimsy tablets to keep you up nights and. The closest thing we had were our floppies and Post-it® handmade flip porn. That was the closest we got to a touch interface. We entertained ourselves autonomously and We Loved It! That's the way it was and we liked it! Progress?! Floppy-de-flea! Hallelujiah look at me, I can (wait for it...) boot from a floppy to a greater-than prompt and you liked it! You loved it! and you asked for more than 640k 'caus we were ignorant morons! Just a bunch of BAT shites! and that's the way we liked it! We'd sit for hours staring at a blinking cursor on a dark screen and pondering about how life would be once one attained his own personal infernal hard disk drive. It was a blinking state of Nirvana, and we creamed over the Mike Magees who would explain the magical mystery of chips until we were fried glazed over and our oily faces lit up with radiation. Whoopee! look at us now mum 8MHz with 2MB RAM! I want it Iwantit Ivonit! You can't have it. You must stay to your own walled garden, and leave what's under the hood to that Atari tribe. But Mother! In my day, we didn't have UAV drones! We just sat around and watched a tatta' bake! Cuss you, Steve Gates! What have you done?
To Bleurgh, who wrote: "I have never been so disinterested in any other computing device than in a tablet...The only thing tablets are good for is making mac drips feel special." Your lack of vision and understanding is why you are not the CEO of the world's most valuable company. You disparage a fantastic success story without understanding WHY it was successful. Instead, you ought to think a little deeper about why the iPad is so successful instead of dismissing its' customers as "drips". You are a blowhard idiot.
To Bleurgh, who wrote: "I have never been so disinterested in any other computing device than in a tablet...The only thing tablets are good for is making mac drips feel special." Your lack of vision and understanding is why you are not the CEO of the world's most valuable company. You disparage a fantastic success story without understanding WHY it was successful. Instead, you ought to think a little deeper about why the iPad is so successful instead of dismissing its' customers as "drips". You are a blowhard idiot.
Sorry to break it to you, but the first PC was built long before 30 years ago. One might argue as to exactly what the first PC was, but the first one to be mass marketed was in January, 1977, almost 35 years ago.