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The American Empire in a Changing World



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Friday, August 12, 2011

Personal Computer Turns 30

from cnet....

"Most people in the Western world walk around with a powerful computer in their pocket or purse, otherwise known as a smartphone. It's not unusual to see someone clutching a legal pad-size gadget on airplane flights, such as an iPad, to read books. It's nearly impossible to walk into a coffee shop without finding someone pecking away at a trim notebook computer, checking e-mail and surfing the Web.



The lineage of all those devices, in one way or another, flows directly back to a press conference some 30 years ago tomorrow. On August 12, 1981, IBM rented out a ballroom at the elegant Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and introduced its landmark 5150 personal computer.

Looking at the beige box today, nothing seems particularly remarkable. The rectangular CPU, with two black bays for floppy disks, isn't a marvel of design brilliance. There's nothing striking about the lines, the graphics, the color palette. The 5150 wasn't even the first PC. Apple, Atari, and Commodore produced so-called microcomputers that preceded it. And IBM's creation was inferior in some ways to those rivals"..............READ MORE



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