The personal computer has in the past 20-years turned the workplace upside down, transformed business, entertainment and communications and spawned the knowledge economy, the digital divide and the era of worker chained to the desktop.

In conjunction with the internet the PC has bridged the world bringing scattered family, friends and like-minded collaborators into close-knit electronic communities while giving us more reason to avoid to face to face communication with those in the same house, office or town.

It transformed high school drops outs Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and the founders of Intel and other previously unknown start-ups, into billionaires making software one of the world’s most lucrative products.

The PC has trebled the output of office workers for little or no pay increase, created a generation of workaholics who can’t relax unless they’re a mouse cable’s distance from an internet connection, and re-classified spotty, bespectacled youth with a penchant for electronica into perceived geniuses.

Initially the PC was not much more than a glorified typewriter or calculator – software was stored on one floppy disk, data on another. Today a high end PC with the right peripherals is a creative powerhouse for professional desktop publishing, photographic manipulation, web editing, running a recording studio, video editing, 3D graphics creation – your imagination is the limit.

The first desktop computer – the offspring of efforts to miniaturise the mainframe - was the CP/M in 1972 followed by the Apple in 1976 then the RadioShack TRS-80 in 1978. IBM is credited with legitimising the market for ‘personal computers’, a term borrowed from a 1968 Hewlett Packard magnetic card reading calculator.

IBM launched its PC in August 1981 and sold 136,000 units in the first year - last year 125 million PCs were sold worldwide. The advent was so significant that Time magazine ditched its ‘man of the year’ ritual to celebrate the PC as the ‘machine of the year’ in January 1983. By 1986 copycat machines or clones that would run Microsoft, Lotus and other applications were outselling IBM PCs.

New Zealand quickly rose to the PC challenge. Research company IDC suggests about 52 per cent of households have one, compared with 64 per cent in the US. Xtra - which polls 1000 people every month suggests closer to 60 per cent of the population have a PC, largely driven by demand for internet access. Top sellers locally are Compaq HP, IBM and Dell. Many of us are now on our second or even third machine.

That first PC cost the equivalent of $NZ12,000 with 64kb of RAM, no hard drive, a single 5 inch floppy disk drive plus a monochrome 14 inch monitor and the complex DOS character-based operating system. You almost had to be a programmer to operate it. Today a powerful entry level PC can be purchased for under $2000. A leading edge offering might feature a 1.5GHZ Pentium 4 processor, 40Gb hard drive, 256Mb of RAM, 56k modem, a 17 inch colour monitor, the latest Windows XP operating system, with a CD writer and possibly a printer thrown in, for about $NZ4500.

In 1965 Intel founder Gordon Moore first expounded his theory that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every 18 months through to 1975. Today Moore's Law has remained consistently accurate. IBM’s original 8088 chip had 29,000 transistors running at 4.7MHz a second. The latest Pentium 4 processor features 42 million transistors and runs at 2GHz. If all goes accordingly within 5-10 years desktop PCs are likely to run at 20GHz with hard disk space expanding to 20 terabytes.

Chip makers, box movers and software developers including IBM, Microsoft, Intel are facing declining profits. For the first time in 15-years sales of PCs have dipped. New Zealand has so far been cushioned with room for growth but the industry generally is looking closely at how to capture second and third time buyers by offering more than a standard plastic box with eternal speed and capacity upgrades.

Voice and handwriting recognition and flat screens have shifted the perception slightly and the future promises crash resistant, self-healing, friendlier computers that adjust themselves to the way we work. Either way the PC is now inextricably entwined with the ever evolving internet and smarter on-line applications, although sales may be eroded by TV set top boxes, PlayStation 2 and the X-Box consoles, along with numerous other mobile devices which double as internet appliances.

Technology, the PC in particular, was supposed to have relieved us of menial tasks and ushered in the four-day working week. Instead many of us are battling information overload and dreaming about the illusive ‘lifestyle’ while glued to a 17-inch window rather than a ranch slider on the bush or ocean

The next step in the PC revolution should empower users to claim back leisure time and their value as workers and creative individuals. Computer users need more intuitive time saving applications that allow us to remain in touch with essential data while roaming free rather than being chained like slaves to the desktop.

wordman@wordworx.co.nz