The Personal Computer Past, Present and Future 1975/2021: Third Edition

By Peter Farwell

This book relates the story of the Personal Computer, from 1975 to 2021. It discusses the spectacular growth in sales over the first 36 years to 2011 and the techniques used by entrepreneurs to make this happen.
The next six years to 2017 are years of precipitous decline in Personal computer sales. We explain the causes of this decline.
We conclude by an examination of PC sales to 2021, when they enjoyed a resurgence and speculate on why this has been happening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664192058

Peter Farwell

Peter Farwell is a chartered professional accountant and certified financial analyst. He was an early purchaser of an Apple II and an avid user of VisiCalc. He is a retired partner of public accounting firm Ernst & Young. He was the leader of the Canadian firm’s services to the high technology industry for fourteen years. He is the author or co-author of numerous studies, articles, and speeches focusing on the technology industry and is also the author of IBM: Can It Survive and Artificial Intelligence and the Job Market.

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Copyright © 2021 by Peter Farwell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 11/22/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

833712

CONTENTS

Author’s Biography

Foreword for third edition 2021

Introduction

The Past

The Present

The Future

Furthermore

The Past

Introduction to the Past History of the Personal Computer

Apple Computers

The Apple I

The Apple II

VisiCalc

Mike Markkula’s contributions

Wozniak’s Graphics Capability

The IBM PC

IBM’s Personal Computer series

The IBM PC

Word Processing Software

The EasyWriter

WordStar

WordPerfect

The IBM PC/2

Word

The Graphic User Interface (GUI)

Dell Computers

The Next Great Leap Forward

The Internet and World Wide Web

The Internet33

The Internet Standards (Protocols)

E-mail

Dell revisited

Three Headwinds

Three Tailwinds

The World Wide Web (WWW)

The Web Browser

Search Engines

E-commerce

Amazon.com

Social Media

Facebook

Blogging

Twitter and Micro blogging

LinkedIn

YouTube

Skype

Other Social Media

The Present – Commodity Years

Intel and Moore’s law and diminishing costs

The Future of the Personal Computer

The Next Big Thing for the PC

The Internet of Things

The Cloud

Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Advances in collection and management of Big Data

Comparison of Personal Computers and Smartphones

Newer devices

Heavy users of personal computers, including laptops

Summary

Positive Things to watch For

Furthermore

The Cloud

Artificial Intelligence

Big Data

The Internet of Things

The effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Conclusion

References

Endnotes

Appendix A: PC sales in the Pre-Internet Era

Appendix B: A Hierarchy of Computer Hardware and Software

Appendix C: Personal Computer sales in the Internet era

Appendix D: A Hierarchy of Network Hardware and Software

Appendix E: A Hierarchy of Network Standards

Appendix F: The hardware and Operating System software that form the base of the Personal Computer

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Peter Farwell Is a Chartered Professional Accountant and Certified Financial Analyst.

He is uniquely positioned to write The Personal Computer, Past, Present and Future. Peter was an early purchaser of an Apple II and an avid user of VisiCalc.

He is a retired partner of Public Accounting Firm Ernst & Young. He was the leader of the Canadian Firm’s services to the High Technology Industry for fourteen years.

Peter was the co-author of several studies of the Canadian High Technology Industry. These included a study of trends in the Canadian Software Industry, conducted by interviewing 12 of the CEOs of Canada’s leading Software companies. He coordinated the Canadian Electronic Industry’s participation in a four country, four industry study of Total Quality Management practices.

Peter has written articles and given speeches on aspects of Strategic Planning and Financing for High Technology companies. These included a lecture to the Association of Canadian Venture Capital Companies on the six stages of growth of technology companies, based on a 1972 landmark paper on the subject by Professor Greiner of Harvard University.

In 2012 and 2013, he has coauthored three studies of Research In Motion that endeavor to determine its chances of survival and what changes management must make to do so.

In 2018, he published a book entitled Artificial Intelligence and the Job Market, which attempted to resolve the debate on whether AI would create more jobs.

FOREWORD FOR THIRD EDITION 2021

This third edition of The Personal Computer, Past, Present and Future is being published by Xlibris in the summer of 2021.

The first edition was published online in 2013 under the name: A Short History of the Personal Computer. It dealt with the spectacular rise of the Personal Computer from its beginnings in 1975 to its peak sales in 2011.

The second edition was published online in 2018 under the name: The Personal Computer, Past, Present and Future. It dealt with the seven-year period of precipitous decline in global Personal Computer sales from 2011 to 2017 and speculated on what developments might cause Personal Computer sales to grow again.

This third edition adds a discussion of Personal Computer developments in 2018, 2019, and 2020. From reports in those three years, we can see that Personal Computer sales are again on the upswing, and we explore the reasons for this.

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about the Personal Computer, its Past from 1975 to 2011, its Present from 2011 to 2017, its Future from 2018, and Furthermore, an update to 2021.

The Past

The Personal Computer’s past is taken primarily from my previous book: A Short History of the Personal Computer, published in 2013 and available online. It focusses on the growth in global sales volume from its inception in 1975 to the peak in its sales volume in 2011. In A Short History of the Personal Computer, our story stressed the importance of the sequence of Applications Software created for the PC. We believe it was this sequence of software innovations that was the key driver of the popularity of the PC, and led it to increasing sales, time and again, over the PC’s 36-year history from 1975 to 2011.

However, none of this success would have been possible without two linked series of computer innovations that provided the platform for the series of application software that we have highlighted in this book:

(1) The developments of the microprocessor hardware, led by Noyce, Moore, and Groves at Intel; and

(2) The development of the PC Operating Systems, led by Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft.

Because of the importance of these innovations to the success of the Personal Computer, in this book, we have included a review of the history of both the PC hardware and the PC software in Appendix F.

The Present

A Short History of the Personal Computer was published using Amazon’s Create Space publishing system in the fall of 2013. At that time, we concluded by observing that in 2011 and 2012 there was evidence of a peaking in global PC sales in 2011 at 365 million units. In 2017, we saw that this peaking had occurred and indeed we were in a period of precipitous decline in global PC Sales.

We added a section describing the continuity of PC global Sales from 2007 to 2017. It included some elaboration on comments in A Short History of the Personal Computer on the causes of the decline in PC sales after 2011, which we attribute to (1) the arrival of the Smartphone that took away much of the PC’s function as the primary digital communication device for internet users; (2) the lengthening of the PC replacement cycle, and (3) the lack of another mega App. In this book we elaborate on these causes of the PC’s decline.

The Future

In 2018, looking to the future, we explored possible sources of renewed growth in overall PC sales. We concluded with a list of positive things to watch for that might indicate a halting of the slide in PC sales and growth in the future.

Furthermore

In this addendum (in the summer of 2021), we look at the turnaround in PC sales taking place in 2020 and 2021 and examine the causes.

THE PAST

Introduction to the Past History of the Personal Computer

This story begins in 1975 and is still ongoing, although it is currently being overshadowed by the Smartphone story. It includes the development of the PC from the foundation of The Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, California, to the creation of the Apple II, the introduction of the IBM PC, the leadership of Dell Computers, the arrival of the Internet and the production of the low-cost models of Acer, Asus and Lenovo.

It makes the case that the growth of PC sales has been attributable not to the hardware developments, as remarkable as they were, as much as to the software developed for the PC. Key software came along at just the right times to take the use of the PC to rapid growth, again and again.

In 2012, the growth curve for the PC was flattening out. This essay attributed this largely to the creation of another Disruptive Technology (to use the term made famous by Clayton Christensen), the Smartphone first introduced in 2004 by Research in Motion in Waterloo, Canada, and now being made pervasive worldwide by Apple and Google.

APPLE COMPUTERS

The Apple I

This history of the PC begins with the formation of the Homebrew Computer Club. It was founded by Fred Moore and Gordon French on March 5, 1975, in the heart of what we