As we move further and further towards the technologically dependant, perpetually linked 21st century, computing paradigms are shifting. Big, ungainly desktop computers without any mobility and overall flexibility are little by little being edged out in a number of ways by products that are smaller sized, do the job harder, consume less energy and can be carried everywhere you go at a lower price and less work.

For quite a while the notion of everybody possessing a home computer was seen as a pipe dream by those shelling out a long time facing a screen: during the nineties, years after the introduction of the internet, home personal computers cost thousands of pounds and were frequently only found in the realm of game players, web designers or those working at home. Nowadays, just under 60 years after the first semiconductors, more than 70% of households in the UK possess a computer or notebook computer according to the BBC.

Personal computer prices crashed in the late nineties and early noughties, and pc possession went through the roof. The web became reputed as a method to buy and sell goods, connect with family, learn interesting things and ply their trade. The globe went wild for personal computers and individuals couldn’t get adequate: promotional USB pen drives, external DVD drives and MP3 players, things that scarcely existed fifteen years ago, became standard household merchandise. Just as analysts expected the PC manufacturing market to peter off, laptop computer sales overtook pc sales in 2008 and we were ushered into a far more mobile, and more adapted, computing environment.

Mobile computers were very quickly seen as the fresh new way to study, to share and to make purchases – proof that individuals were getting fed up with sitting down at a workdesk to have things done. At the variety height of the laptop computer mania that was going on at the end of the past decade, netbook computers started to saturate this marketplace. These compact, cut down laptops were extremely mobile than their much larger counterparts, promising large battery lives for a trade-off in storage space and computer power. Netbooks were dirt cheap, and they were customisable. Small hard drives were in conjunction with extra storage space through memory cards, cloud storage or extra space available on promotional USB pen drives given by inventive organisations, and all of a sudden the personal computer was under real threat from becoming defunct by its innovative, ultra-portable siblings.

Nonetheless, the netbook phenomenon was short-lived. People noticed that surfing the net and carrying out work on confined displays and cramped keyboards belonging to heavy devices wasn’t a very good way of accomplishing things in any way, and smartphones became the brand new way to keep in touch and in touch on the go. Big companies like HTC and Apple began making superphones, providing fast processor chips that blazed in comparison to their pc grandfathers found a decade back. Smartphones rapidly saw ownership. Around 60% of Americans now carry models that do mini netbook things without the drawbacks, all the time – their phones.

The turn of the decade found tablets appear in greatly. Devices such as the iPad brought people a different way to have interaction with the world wide web, their media and their work, promising greater-than-netbook life of the battery, uncompromising thinness with an interface like the phones that individuals were already using day in, day out. The very first quad-core tablet is launched in the UK in 2012, and this could be the push that finally causes desktops to fall down the pit of technological defunctness, like the VHS and digital photo frames. Tablets are gaining knowledge from the different slips generated by netbooks and smartphones alike, as well as those carrying Android will even exchange data files with your custom USB drives sitting at your home, if you’ve got the appropriate cable. Ultrabooks are tipped to be the next big, computing thing, but whichever comes around… It’s not good news for the personal computer.