There was an editorial about this milestone in one of the daily rags I read. The final sentence of it pretty much says it all:
Today the universe celebrates the 25th anniversary of the personal computer, a technological milestone that is as easy to ignore as it is necessary to commemorate. An estimated 1 billion PCs are in use today.
When IBM unveiled its first 5150 model in 1981, the techies responsible for its renegade development within the staid corporate world had no idea what they unleashed.
In the intervening years the PC has become one of the biggest influences in modern times on business habits and lifestyle convenience.
File-sharing, word-processing spreadsheet and e-mail are now everyday terms because of their affiliation with the PC.
Chiefly, the PC's glory is its dependency on a democratic and free-market atmosphere of hardware and software invention. In the workplace, the PC revolutionized data collection and processing to the point that now the U.S. Department of Labor predicts that some secretarial jobs face extinction because the PC has made bosses comfortable with word-processing duties like phone list management and data storage and retrieval.
It is so common that many of its once-exotic features are commonplace -- interchangeable rather than dealer-specific hardware parts and public-design specs that enabled garage geeks to tweak into entirely new software packages.
Our Blackberrys and cell phones, text messaging and ever growing Internet service providers are a testament to the progress launched by the PC.
Twenty-five years ago today it was all new and no one knew what habits it would eventually change.
U.S. Department of Labor predicts that some secretarial jobs face extinction because the PC has made bosses comfortable with word-processing duties like phone list management and data storage and retrieval.Interesting point. I am doing my dissertation on information transfer between administrative assistants and their manager; the goal is to inform knowledge management systems design. I'm familiar with this observation by the DOL.
For those admin staff who acquire the skills, they can move into a whole new realm of duties, many of which were previously done by managers. Computers enable them to do research, create and use databases, pull in info from other departments and write the reports that bosses once wrote.
From my research, although managers 'could' use a lot of the typical office technology, they often don't - they are too busy at meetings, making decisions from reports supplied by others, etc. All of my admin participants were quite adept at the technology and handed off work to their bosses pretty much complete.
This work was done in a city government, so it may differ in another type of organization. However, my participants' work covered a wide range of responsibilities, from accounting to animal management. I saw the same thing in every deptartment. I think technology will reduce the number of lower level clerical support staff, but seems to have created this sort of para-professional level of admin assistants who are tech savvy and have a very high level of responsibility w/n the organization.