25 years ago, when PCs started appearing, no one could imagine what they would look like a quarter of a century later. They used to be like some awkward devices capable only of editing texts and managing some simple databases. But now they have turned into very convenient high-speed devices with the whole bunch of features and applications, with excellent graphics, high-quality sound and much higher computing power than what the first super-PCs had.

According to analysts from Gartner Digest, the number of PCs sold in the world has recently hit 1 billion units. And that appeared the case only 25 years after the launching of the first commercially successful Altair PC based on Intel i8080 processor. Of course, the features of Altair PC against the background pf the today’s monsters can only make you smile. But we cannot deny that it was the first sign, the one to start the PC boom, which we are witnessing up to now. 25 years passed and over 1 billion gray boxes were sold, and today the PC from a massive calculator turned into a multimedia entertainment center with the whole bunch of features.

At present, the PCs get spread in such a way that over 60% of the US citizens have a PC at home. This rate is a bit lower for Western Europe (49%) and Asian and Pacific region (38%). The analysts claim that there will be about half a billion people by the end of this year who will be able to connect to the Internet right from their home.

The number of PCs in the world doesn’t grow linearly. The analysts from the same Gartner Dataquest claim that the number of PC owners will reach 2 billion in 6 years already, in 2008, and which is even more surprising, the highest growth will be observed in the markets of China, Latin America, Eastern Europe.

According to Intel, the developers should continue focusing on the new high-performance CPUs and technologies, which will allow making the work with PCs even simpler and more intuitive. Well, it means that we will be able cope with this plan in 6 years, especially if some companies drop the CPU prices and some – the OS prices.