What does the future hold for the PC?

The date is significant not because it was the first PC on the market, as there are a number of contenders for that distinction: The Apple 2, the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Commodore 64, and even the MITS Altair 8800 of 1975, among many others, predate the IBM product as early "personal computers."

But all these earlier machines were dismissed as mere toys by most businesspeople, who contended that PCs couldn't perform the work they did every day on huge and costly mainframes and minicomputers.