Since the introduction of electronic computers, Personal Computers (PCs) have changed, tremendously. By the early 1970s, individuals in academic and research institutions had the opportunity to individual use of a computer system, in interactive mode. Leading to the wide use of PCs after 1975, the introduction of the microprocessor entered the computer industry, a single chip with the circuitry occupied by larger scaled computers. In 1968, Douglas Englebart, began to enhance technology with advancements such as e-mail, hypertext, the mouse, video conferencing, and word processing. In fact, PCs that included peripherals such as computer terminals, keyboards, disk drives and printers were known as microcomputers; they were sold in limited volumes of electronics kits. As a result, Micral N became the first commercial Personal Computer (PC), based on the Intel 8008 microprocessor.
Moreover, a PC is a general-purpose computer with the capabilities in size and sales price to make it useful and operable by any end user, directly. In contrast, mainframe systems and large data processing systems are used by many users at the same and require a full time staff to operate, respectively. Hence, a PC can be a desktop, laptop, tablet or a palmtop computer. In addition, the most common operating systems for PCs are Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris. Hence, the most popular microprocessors are x86 compatible Central Processing Units (CPUs), ARM architecture CPUs and Power PC CPUs.
Even more so, for PCs, the software applications include word processing, spreadsheets, databases, Web browsers and e-mail customers, games and many versions of special purpose software for multiple personal purposes today.
Modern PCs have high speed or dial up connections to the Internet. Thus, access to the World Wide Web is available and a variety of other resources.
Furthermore, PCs can be in homes or in offices. PCs can be connected to a local area network by a cable or by wireless technology also. Even though PC owners often had to do their own computer programming with these computers, today’s users have access to both commercial and non-commercial software. Therefore, since the 1980s, both Microsoft and Intel have dominated most of the personal computer market with the Wintel platform.
Conclusively, in 2001, 125 million PCs were shipped and handled, compared to 48 thousand in 1977. More than 500 million PCs were in use in 2002 and one billion PCs have been sold on a world wide scale since the mid1970s until modern times. About 81.5% of PCs shipped and handled were desktop computers, 16.4% percent were laptop computers, and 2.1% were servers. The United States of America received 38.8% of the computers shipped and handled, Europe 25% and the Asia-Pacific Region received 11.7% which was the fastest growing personal computer market since 2002. The second billion of PCs was expected to be sold by the year 2008. Lastly, almost half of all the homes in Western Europe had a PC and a computer could be found in 40% of the households in the United Kingdom, compared to 13% percent in 1985.
