On August 12, 1981 the PC was born with the advent of the IBM 5150, not the first but the PC that set the standard for personal computing expectations at the time. For just over $1,500 a buyer got a cracking 16K (yes, not megs kids, kilobytes). In the intervening 25 years, personal computing has evolved at a faster rate than perhaps any human creation since fire, bringing us to the world of small convergence devices today, such as the average mobile phone, and global communicatioins. It has also revolutionized personal productivity, putting a university's worth of crunching power on an average consumer's desktop.

As I write this, I look around at 5 computers in my home office, two of which are unplugged in the corner as retired models but which would have outrun nasa's assembled computing power at the time (possibly a slight exaggeration, but only slight). Here's to the PC and all the disruption is has brought to modern civilization!