Development of the Personal Computer

Although the raw technology for personal computers had been known to high-technology specialists for decades, and large-scale mainframe computers were in fairly wide use by industry and government by the 1960s, the real onset of the PC industry can be dated to the mid-1970s, when Intel Corporation put the 8080 8-bit microprocessor on the market. It was at that time, too, that Bill Gates and his partners were refining the BASIC computer language for use on the Altair personal-computer kit that was being marketed through the magazine Popular Electronics. They also wrote versions of BASIC for "other microcomputers as they came to market, leveraging their core technology" (Cringely, 1996, p. 55). That practice of leveraging persisted through the 1970s, by which time Microsoft Corporation had been formed by Gates and Paul Allen.

During the 1980s, Microsoft developed the MS/DOS operating system for IBM-PCs; IBM's hardware became the industry standard for DOS (and later Windows) software (Davis, 1986). The IBM/DOS platform ran 8-, 16-, and 32-bit processors in succession, as well as the Pentium and other high-speed processor configurations, and remains the most widely used and imitated PC structure

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s' experience of cyberspace. Privacy is compromised, on one hand, because of the ability of official agencies to spy on Internet users' behavior, and access is compromised on the other to the degree online information must be purchased (Lessig, 2000). The broad use of PCs inevitably had an enormous social and cultural impact. Three consequences present themselves, two of which have to do with the Internet per se and one of which has to do with the more general picture of ubiquitous PC presence in the culture. As Turkle (1997) points out, the Internet has enabled unprecedented opportunities for entire communities to socialize in cyberspace. However, she cautions that these communities are "virtual" in character and are simulated rather than actual communities. Interaction takes place not interpersonally but as it were intradynamically, with the individual users projecting themselves onto others instead of really creating relationships with them. That implicates the status of human identity, which in cyberspace becomes a self-created entity, and of reality itself, which inevitably is called into question when the "real" experience is simulated. Turkle also notes the evolution of discourse of artificial intelligence (AI), which ha
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2646
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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