25 years of the PC, and we've bought a billion

By RICHARD WOOD

Sales of the popular PC computer reached a billion in April, says industry researcher Gartner Dataquest.

According to chipmaker Intel, the milestone comes 25 years after the first 8080-based Altair computer was introduced.

The 8080 chip was the forefather of today's Pentium processors.

By comparison, cars are not at one billion yet, although bicycles are, and it has taken since 1959 for Barbie dolls to reach that figure.

According to the Computer Industry Almanac, PCs are used by 60 per cent of households in the US, 49 per cent in Western Europe and 38 per cent in Asia Pacific.

And according to Nielsen/Netratings, half a billion people have internet access at home.

According to last year's NZ Household Economic Survey, 47 per cent of New Zealand households have a PC. Last year's Census showed that 37 per cent of households have internet access.

The author of Gartner Dataquest's report on the billionth PC, vice-president Martin Reynolds, says the PC has become something that almost everyone has to have.

"In the industrial revolution, we learned how to take Machines and leverage human physical effort to gain great economic advantage. The PC brings the same advantage to people's minds."

Gartner Dataquest predicts the second billion will creep up on us in 2007, thanks to explosive growth in China, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The global growth rate is estimated to be 9 per cent a year.

Intel thinks PCs will become more human friendly in the future, using speech, gesture and video recognition, and expects wireless technology and the internet to continue to develop as a force for social, economic and political change.

Gartner attributes the biggest growth in PC shipments to the introduction in 1993 of Microsoft's Windows 3.1 operating system and the software-hardware upgrade spiral, driven by Intel and Microsoft, that it began.

Another boost was the mass upgrading for the year 2000, which subsequently led to the first dip in purchasing since the only other year of negative growth in 1985.

The history of the PC market has been one of fights over leadership between huge multinationals and high-growth upstarts including IBM, HP, Compaq, and Dell.

Gartner Dataquest expects direct seller Dell to continue to put pressure on the industry by the way it operates, but said the new HP-Compaq merged company would provide a giant competing supplier.

Along with the growth in broadband internet access, the researcher highlights two technologies from Microsoft that it believes will be at the heart of a new stage of home PC development.

The first is Mira tablet devices, which use thin client technology to run the software on a host computer and communicate wirelessly.

The second is Freestyle, which receives multimedia streams over wireless networks and directly connects to home entertainment devices through the home PC.

Gartner says threats to advancement exist in established industries in telecommunications and entertainment that depend on paid minutes and copyright royalties for revenue.

Their profits are threatened by the mass deployment of high-speed broadband technologies.