IBM: At 30 Years, The PC Is Dying

Technology • August 2011 • Views: 1,300

The IBM PC will turn 30 tomorrow and can be looked back as an astonishing accomplishment that has changed billions of lives. Yet IBM believes that the PC is already dying and will soon share its fate with the typewriter.

That statement doesn’t come from just a random company. It comes from a company that pioneered the PC and has often led new ideas and has been copied frequently by rivals such as HP. If IBM says that the time for its brain child, the PC, is over, we are listening.

Happy Birthday. Now drop dead.

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7 comments

Daniel Ballard Thu, Aug 11, 2011 2:27:53pm

The writer might be premature here. If the PC is dead, and the Ipad (and its competitors) are described as media consumption devices, how do we create or generate content? On a PC of one description or another.

Losing half your monitor to the keyboard is not really a great answer. Reading is great on a pad. Writing is a pain in the butt.

Bob Dillon Thu, Aug 11, 2011 2:35:55pm

re: #1 Rightwingconspirator

I've always been partial to a personal mainframe.

shutdown Thu, Aug 11, 2011 2:50:22pm

re: #1 Rightwingconspirator

Note that the headline says the PC is dying, not yet dead. But computing power is becoming more portable, memory and storage more fungible, and the computing environment is more important than the computer itself.

Mostly sane, most of the time. Thu, Aug 11, 2011 3:13:20pm

I'll be honest; I only like to write, really write, on a real keyboard. I can't stand using a laptop keyboard.

Having to enter payment information on our tablet is a lot harder than on our real computer, and I can't get email to work properly.

My take? Unless they get a real keyboard for it, the tablet is a nice way to watch video, read books, and fling birds at pigs.

CuriousLurker Thu, Aug 11, 2011 3:54:42pm

From the article:

“These days, it’s becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact,” the executive wrote. “It is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people’s lives.”

They say the PC will not be "substituted with another device", but that the role of hardware will be reduced. What does that mean? Are they talking about moving things into the cloud, or are they saying that the only the form of PC's will change? Moving things to the cloud presents HUGE security & privacy concerns.

Tablets & such don't currently have enough power to handle the graphics work I do. I have a 13" MacBook Pro that's powerful enough, but it would need an external keyboard & large monitor in order to be comfortable enough to work on for 8 hours a day, which is why I currently only use it as a secondary machine. Something like a 21" Cintiq might work, but I'd still need a keyboard.

freetoken Thu, Aug 11, 2011 4:05:40pm

Some historical revisionism going on in the quoted sections of that article.

As anyone out there old enough to have read the original Byte magazine can attest, IBM not only did not invent the personal computer but in many ways it slowed down the evolution of the process. IBM used its corporate muscle to foist upon the world an less costly, slightly more intelligent front end to it's corporate systems and labeled such device a "personal" computer.

Not only that, but IBM quickly (in hindsight) left that market, as it did many others.

jhrhv Thu, Aug 11, 2011 6:50:26pm

My first PC was pretty much like the one in the picture in the full article. I loved that machine with it's 2 360k 5 1/4" floppy drives. I had that machine for a lot of years. Totally ripped it to pieces over the years. Added a full hight 70 MB hard drive. Full length 2 MB memory card. Chopped out part of the case so it would fit a 286 motherboard in place of the pc XT board with an 8088 chip it came with. I swear that those text games on that machine even the ones I used to play over the phone lines with a 2400 Baud modem were the best ever. I don't miss the the hercules text only green screen display.

The PC might die one day but it will always live on in my memory.

Image: ibm5150.jpg

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