The rest of the 1980s and the 1990s saw a flurry of new releases from most of the computing leaders of the time, but the new buzzword was the “portable” computer. The term portable had been used years earlier to describe Compaq’s portable PC in 1982, and Radio Shack’s TRS-80 Model 100 in 1983. The form factor and weight would continue to decrease into the early 1990s, when IBM introduced the ThinkPad line of portables, and Apple released the Macintosh PowerBook, which established the modern form of the “laptop” computer. It was light, had a longer-life battery than previous systems, and included a built-in pointing device.

Again, the computing giants began to follow suit, releasing new laptop computers, all of which became increasingly smaller throughout the 1990s, helped in part by the advent of the CD-ROM drive, which already was being built into most PCs. In the late 1990s, the Apple iBook was sold for $1,599, a relatively inexpensive cost for a laptop at the time. IBM countered that with the ThinkPad R30, which sold for $929, and featured a 13.3" screen, a 900-MHz Intel Celeron processor, a 10- GB hard drive, and 128 MB of RAM.

But computers would continue to get smaller thanks to the 1992 introduction of a product that had been in development for five years. The Apple Newton was the first PDA, or “personal digital assistant,” a term coined by Apple’s then-CEO John Sculley. Unfortunately, the Newton product was dropped four years later. But in 1996, a new PDA was introduced to the market: the Pilot from Palm Computing. Soon renamed the PalmPilot, the device fit in a shirt pocket, stored thousands of addresses and appointments, and was inexpensive enough to appeal to a mass market. Palm succeeded where Apple did not, selling more than 1 million Pilots in the first 18 months. It outsold cell phones, pagers, and even TVs, becoming the fastest-selling computer product ever.

Computing Today and Tomorrow

Following the development and evolution of the personal computer, we saw the widespread use of new operating systems such as UNIX from Bell Labs/Lucent, and Linux, which was developed by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to be a freely distributed operating system.

This decade has seen the merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, the emergence of carbon nanotubes as a transistor technology, dual-core processing, WiFi, blade servers, iPods, wireless supercomputers, and Macintosh computers with Intel microprocessors. While space prohibits detailed descriptions of the various computer interfaces developed in recent years, such as USB and PCI, or the myriad of peripherals and input devices, they also played an important role in the evolution of personal computing.

Today, we’re playing video games on computer consoles that are faster and more powerful than anything we could have imagined even 20 years ago. The computer age continues, with more inventions sure to come that will “change the world.”