Not many 25-year-olds can reasonably claim to have changed the world. The IBM personal com
puter, which was launched in 1981 and celebrates its 25th birthday in August, is a rare exception. Other personal computers had been launched before; but it was the IBM PC that ended up defining the standard around which a vast new industry then coalesced. IBM, the titan of the computing World at the time, quickly lost control of its own creation, allowing others to reap the benefits. But leave aside what the PC has done for the fortunes of particular companies, and instead step back and consider what the PC has done for mankind.
The PC's most obvious achievement has been to help make computers cheaper, more widely available and more useful than ever before. Before it appeared, different computers from different manufacturers were mostly incompatible with each other. The PC's architecture was not perfect, but its adoption as an industry standard made possible economies of scale in both hardware and software. This in turn reduced prices and enabled the PC to democratise computing.
But although the PC has its merits, it also has its faults. Its flexibility has proved to be both a strength and a weakness: it encourages innovation, but at the cost of complexity, reliability and security. And for people in the developing world, PCs are too bulky, expensive and energy-hungry. W. hen it comes to extending the benefits of digital technology—chiefly, cheap and easy access to information to everyone on the planet, the PC may not be the best tool for the job.
Look on the streets of almost any city in the world, however, and you will see people clutching tiny, pocket computers, better known as mobile phones. Already, even basic handsets have simple web-browsers, calculators and other computing functions. Mobile phones are cheaper, simpler and more reliable than PCs, and market forces—in particular, the combination of pie-paid billing plans and microcredit schemes—are already putting them into the hands of even the world's poorest people. Initiatives to spread PCs in the developing world, in contrast, rely on top-down funding from governments or aid agencies, rather than bottom-up adoption by consumers.
All kinds of firms, from giants such as Google to start-ups such as CellBazaar, are working to bring the full belle, fits of the web to mobile phones. There is no question that the PC has democratised computing and-unleashed innovation, but it is the mobile phone that now seems most likely to carry the dream of the "personal computer" to its conclusion.
Why dose the author hold the opinion that the IBM personal computer is a rare exception?
A.Personal computer is an amazing invention.
B.IBM lost control of personal computer.
C.The birth of IBM personal computer makes drastic changes in our society.
D.Among the firms making the biggest splash in personal computer world is IBM.