Personal Computing: Then and Now

黃怡嘉， 進英二 （209117174）

Over the last four decades, Personal Computers (PCs) have transformed dramatically to

become the information, entertainment, and communication hubs of our modern life.

Without a Graphical User Interface (GUI), the first PCs equipped with text-based green-

screen monitors and keyboards. Nowadays, the PCs comes with brilliant 4k monitors with

millions colors. Their user experiences are greatly enhanced by the GUI and pointing

devices such as mouses or pens

We also see dramatic changes and the PC’s storage media . The first PCs furnished with

fragile floppy disks or cartridges with capacities around 128k to 1Mb. Now the PCs

installed with terra-bytes mechanical hard-drives or solid-state disks. The storage

capacity have grown over 10,000 times or more. Their physical sizes or weights have

shrunk a coaster into a nail-size stripes.

The computing power of current PCs has improved over hundred-folds than the first PCs.

Not only with CPU, the current PCs have dedicated Graphic Process Unit (GPU), which

shares the workload for the graphic output or complex mathematic computation. The

memory capacities of the current PCs are more than thousand times than the ones of the

first PCs. In addition to dramatic-increased size of the main memory, there are dedicated

graphic memories in the latest PCs.

The spreadsheet application has helps the corporate world and accountants to accept the

first PCs. And the scientists and engineers have used them to solve their problems. After

their prices dropped, the PCs are gaining popularity in families for email and gaming.

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Even with ethernet or modem, the first PCs were still isolated from each other due

to the low-speed network. Today, we have wireless networking speed far more

faster than the initial ethernet. The home users enjoy online services such as

internet, searching, or map applications. With wired or wireless broadband network,

the streaming service of high-definition video are available to PCs as well as other

mobile devices.

With mobile devices such as smart phones or tablets, we have witnessed the Personal

Computing evolved from isolated and clunky boxes into in inter-connected hand-held

marvels. From isolation within a wired local network, we are connecting to the world-

wide network anywhere and anytime. One can’t image what will come next in the future

decade.