The Future of Personal Computing, Part 1

clipped from baselinescenario.com This week, Apple passed Microsoft to become the most valuable technology company in the world (measured by the market value of its stock).* Rather than recap the entire history of computing (hilarious synopsis here, hat tip Brad DeLong), I’ll start in the early 1990s. At this point, many people had personal computers, but for the most part they weren’t connected to anything except maybe a printer. (Actually, in the early 1980s my father brought home one of those primitive modems where you actually placed your phone receiver into a socket to communicate, so we could log into the mainframe at his university, but that was the exception.)