Personal computer

• 1. Introduction

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  A personal computer is a computer designed for one person to operate directly, not a technician, administrator, or company. That simple idea once sounded like a fantasy. In the early years of computing, an institutional or corporate owner in the 1960s had to write their own programs just to make a machine do anything useful. A machine that could fit on a desk was remarkably small for its time. The phrase "home computer" carried the same novelty through the late 1970s and 1980s.

  The number that captures the change is stark. In 1977, around 48,000 personal computers shipped in a year. By 2001, that figure had grown to 125 million. By 2002, more than 500 million were in use, and one billion had been sold worldwide since the mid-1970s.

  How did a tool meant for experts become something almost half of Western European households owned? Who built the first true personal computer, and who decided ordinary people deserved one already assembled? And why, after decades of explosive growth, did sales begin to fall as people reached for phones instead? The answers run from a single laboratory demonstration in 1968 to a market that would one day total tens of billions of dollars.

• 2. Seeds In Silicon

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  In 1959, the silicon integrated circuit chip was developed by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, and the metal-oxide-semiconductor transistor was developed by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs. These advances in semiconductor technology made the personal computer possible. RCA commercialized the MOS integrated circuit in 1964. Then in 1968, Federico Faggin developed the silicon-gate MOS integrated circuit at Fairchild.

  Federico Faggin later used silicon-gate MOS technology to build the first single-chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004, in 1971. The first microcomputers, based on microprocessors, followed during the early 1970s. From the mid-1970s onward, the widespread commercial availability of microprocessors made computers cheap enough for small businesses and individuals to own.

  In 1946, ENIAC became operational and could be run by a single, highly trained person. That mode pre-dated the batch programming and time-sharing methods that connected many users through terminals to mainframe computers. Laboratory and engineering machines such as the Bendix G15 and LGP-30 of 1956, and the Soviet MIR series developed from 1965 to 1969, could also be operated by one person interactively. By the early 1970s, academics and researchers could use a computer system alone for extended periods, though such systems were still far too expensive for one person to own.

• 3. The Mother Of All Demos

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  In 1968, SRI researcher Douglas Engelbart gave a preview of features that would later become staples of personal computers: e-mail, hypertext, word processing, video conferencing, and the mouse. The event was later called the Mother of All Demos. It showed the future before the hardware to deliver it existed cheaply.

  The demonstration depended on technical support staff and a mainframe time-sharing computer, both far too costly for individual business use at the time. The ideas were ready long before the price was.

  In 1973, another vision of computing appeared at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. The Xerox Alto had a graphical user interface, which later served as inspiration for Apple's Macintosh and Microsoft's Windows operating system. The Alto was a demonstration project and was never commercialized, because the parts cost too much to be affordable. Its influence would outlast its obscurity.

• 4. Kits And Contenders

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  Early personal computers, generally called microcomputers, were often sold in kit form and in limited volumes, of interest mostly to hobbyists and technicians. Minimal programming was done with toggle switches, and output came from front panel lamps. Practical use meant adding peripherals such as keyboards, displays, disk drives, and printers.

  The Micral N was the earliest commercial, non-kit microcomputer based on a microprocessor, the Intel 8008. It was built starting in 1972, and a few hundred units were sold. It had been preceded by the Datapoint 2200 in 1970, for which the Intel 8008 had been commissioned but not accepted. The CPU design in the Datapoint 2200 became the basis for the x86 architecture used in the original IBM PC and its descendants.

  In 1973, Mers Kutt's company Micro Computer Machines demonstrated the MCM/70, which shipped in 1974. Priced between $3,500 and $9,800, it was the first personal desktop microcomputer. It used the Intel 8008 processor, a 51-key keyboard, and a Burroughs Self-Scan plasma display that could show 32 characters per line. It ran the AVS/EASY operating system, held 8 kilobytes of RAM and 14 kilobytes of ROM, and could add cassette drives for more than 100 kilobytes of external storage.

  1974 saw the introduction of what many consider the first true personal computer, the Altair 8800, created by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. Based on the 8-bit Intel 8080, the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that ignited the microcomputer revolution and the first commercially successful personal computer. Its bus became a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus. Its first programming language, Altair BASIC, was Microsoft's founding product.

• 5. Assembled And Sold

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  In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak sold the Apple I computer circuit board, fully prepared and containing about 30 chips. Paul Terrell, owner of the Byte Shop, gave them their first purchase order, for 50 Apple I computers, but only if they were assembled and tested rather than sold as a kit. Terrell wanted machines for a wide range of users, not just hobbyists with the soldering skills to build a computer themselves. As delivered, the Apple I was still technically a kit, since it arrived without a power supply, case, or keyboard.

  The Commodore PET, revealed in January 1977, was the first successfully mass-marketed personal computer to be announced, though it was back-ordered until later that year. Three months after the PET, in April, the Apple II was announced, with the first units shipping on the 10th of June 1977. The TRS-80 from Tandy Corporation followed in August 1977 and sold over 100,000 units during its lifetime. Especially in the North American market, these three machines were called the "1977 trinity." Ready-assembled computers had arrived, shifting attention toward software and away from processor hardware.

  In 1977 the Heath company introduced personal computer kits called Heathkits, beginning with the Heathkit H8, followed by the Heathkit H89 in late 1979. Buyers of the H8 assembled the chassis and CPU card themselves and could add hardware such as the H8-1 memory board with 4k of RAM. The Heathkit H11, released in 1978, was one of the first 16-bit personal computers, but its high retail cost of $1,295 led to its discontinuation in 1982.

• 6. Giants Enter The Room

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  IBM's first PC, the IBM 5150, was introduced on the 12th of August 1981 at a price of US$1,565. It ran on the 5 megahertz Intel 8088 chip, later 16 megahertz, with a Microsoft-produced operating system later dubbed MS-DOS. The word processor EasyWriter and the spreadsheet client VisiCalc came preinstalled. For an extra $3,000, customers could add a printer, a display, and two diskette drives. IBM encouraged third-party software and peripherals, and the 5150's open architecture set a mass market standard for PC design.

  In 1984, Apple Computer launched the Macintosh with an advertisement during the Super Bowl. It was the first successful mass-market mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface, or WIMP, meaning Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers. Based on the Motorola 68000, the Macintosh borrowed many of the Lisa's features at a price of US$2,495. It shipped with 128 KB of RAM, with a 512 KB model arriving later that year. To cut costs against the Lisa, it had a simplified motherboard, no internal hard drive, and a single 3.5-inch floppy drive. It came with MacPaint, a bit-mapped graphics program, and MacWrite, which demonstrated WYSIWYG word processing.

  The Macintosh found lasting success, helped by the introduction of desktop publishing in 1985 through Apple's partnership with Adobe. That partnership brought the LaserWriter printer and Aldus PageMaker to personal computer users. During Steve Jobs's hiatus from Apple, models including the Macintosh Plus and Macintosh II were released to great success. The Macintosh line was IBM's major competition until the early 1990s.

  In 1982 the personal computer, dubbed The Computer, was named Machine of the Year by Time magazine. The honor marked how far the machine had traveled from the laboratory bench.

• 7. Homes Full Of Computers

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  During the early 1980s, home computers were developed for household use, with software for productivity, programming, and games. They often used a television already in the home as the display, with blocky graphics, a limited color range, and text about 40 characters wide by 25 characters tall. Sinclair Research, a UK company, produced the ZX Series: the ZX80 in 1980, the ZX81 in 1981, and the ZX Spectrum in 1982, which totaled 8 million units sold. The Commodore 64 totaled 17 million units sold, followed by the Galaksija introduced in Yugoslavia in 1983 and the Amstrad CPC series.

  The NEC PC-98 was a very popular personal computer that sold more than 18 million units. On the 23rd of July 1985, Commodore unveiled the Amiga 1000. It featured a multitasking, windowing operating system, color graphics with a 4096-color palette, stereo sound, a Motorola 68000 CPU, 256 KB RAM, and an 880 KB 3.5-inch disk drive, for US$1,295.

  Eventually the IBM PC's influence erased the technical distinction between personal computers and home computers. Business computers gained color graphics and sound, while home and game system users ran the same processors and operating systems as office workers. Mass-market machines reached graphics and memory comparable to dedicated workstations of a few years earlier. Even local area networking, first a way for business computers to share expensive storage and peripherals, became a standard feature of home computers.

  Communication became an increasingly important use. Experimental public access to a shared mainframe was demonstrated as early as 1973 in the Community Memory project, and bulletin board systems and online services spread after 1978. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in the late 1980s. In 1991, the World Wide Web was made available for public use, joining powerful personal computers to a network that would reshape daily life, from bus timetables to free videos to online user-edited references.

• 8. Boom And The Tipping Point

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  By 2002, of the one billion personal computers sold worldwide, 75% were professional or work related and the rest were for personal or home use. About 81.5% of shipments were desktops, 16.4% laptops, and 2.1% servers. The United States had received 38.8%, or 394 million machines, with Europe at 25% and the Asia-Pacific region, the fastest-growing market, at 11.7%. Almost half of Western European households owned a personal computer, and 40% of UK homes had one, compared with only 13% in 1985.

  In 2011, Deloitte predicted that smartphones and tablets would surpass PC sales, which happened starting in 2012. By 2013, worldwide PC sales had begun to fall as consumers moved to tablets and smartphones. The first quarter of 2013 brought a 14% year-over-year decline, the largest on record since IDC began tracking in 1994, and double what analysts expected. "This is horrific news for PCs," one analyst remarked. "It's all about mobile computing now. We have definitely reached the tipping point." Windows 8, designed to resemble tablet and smartphone software, was cited as a contributing factor.

  The market did not simply collapse. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed people to work and learn at home, PC sales grew 26.1% over previous years, according to IDC. According to Canalys, 2020 was the highest growth rate for the PC market since 2011. The recovery continued into 2021, with global shipments passing 340 million units, a 14.6% year-over-year rise. By late 2022, demand cooled, and third-quarter shipments fell 19.5% from the year before, the steepest decline Gartner had documented in more than two decades.

  In the first quarter of 2025, global PC shipments grew 9.4% year-over-year to 62.7 million units, partly because manufacturers rushed shipments to the U.S. ahead of new tariffs under President Donald Trump's trade policies. Lenovo led with 15.2 million units, followed by HP, Dell, and Apple, which posted a 22% increase. As prices fell over the decades, another cost stayed hidden. Personal computers became a large contributor to the 50 million tons of electronic waste generated annually, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.