Personal Computers history

Time magazine called 1982 “The Year of the Computer” as the industry grew up.

By 1983, the industry estimated that 10 million PCs* were in use in the United States alone.

Apple introduces the Macintosh with a television commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl, which plays on the theme of totalitarianism in George Orwell´s book 1984.

In 1985 the Microsoft Corporation introduced Microsoft Windows, a graphical user interface that gave MS-DOS-based computers many of the same capabilities of the Macintosh.

Apollo was a leading innovator in the workstation field for more than a decade, and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989.

The 2200 used a built-in CRT, cassette tape for storage, and ran the programming language BASIC. The PC era ended Wang’s success, and it filed for bankruptcy in 1992.

Thousands of software titles were released over the lifespan of the C64 and by the time it was discontinued in 1993, it had sold more than 22 million units.

OPENSTEP was used as one of the foundations for the new Mac OS operating system soon after NeXT was acquired by Apple in 1996.

While it did not sell well, the operating system, Be OS, retained a loyal following even after Be stopped producing hardware in 1997 after less than 2,000 machines were produced.

The Newton line never performed as well as hoped and was discontinued in 1998.

In 2000 more than 50 percent of all households in the United States owned a PC, and this penetration increased dramatically over the next few years as people in the United States (and around the world) purchased PCs to access the world of information available through the Internet.

Lenovo, China's largest manufacturer of PCs, purchased IBM's personal computer business in 2005, largely to gain access to IBM's ThinkPad line of computers and sales force.

By 2011, over 2.4 million laptops had been shipped.

Worldwide PC sales grew through the early 21st century and reached a peak in 2012.