Personal Computer

A personal computer, or PC, is a computer designed for use by one person directly, running the software needed for tasks such as word processing, web browsing, email, and spreadsheets, rather than being shared through time-sharing the way earlier minicomputers and mainframes were. Its roots include the silicon integrated circuit developed by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959 and, in 1973, IBM's SCAMP prototype and the Xerox Alto with its graphical user interface. The 1974 Altair 8800 is widely credited with sparking the microcomputer revolution, and the 1977 machines often called the 1977 Trinity, the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80, established personal computing as a mass market. Since the early 1990s the pairing of Microsoft operating systems with Intel's x86 architecture, known as Wintel, has dominated the market, alongside Apple's Mac platform and Linux-based systems.