It was twenty-five years ago this month that the PC was born.  In August of 1981 IBM launched the Personal Computer.  This of course was five years after Jobs and Wozniak came out with the Apple 1, but it was the PC, and it’s rapid acceptance first in the corporate world and then in homes that ushered in the explosive growth of personal computing.  The importance of the introduction of the PC cannot be overstated from the vantage point of 2006.

Prior to 1981 computing basically was mainframe computing.  Corporations and universities had air conditioned rooms housing large computers that were …

Modern man has moved through three different ages in the last 10,000 years. The Agricultural Age was from around 8,000 BC until the 1700s. The Industrial Age was from the 1700s to the last two decades of the 20th century, when the Information Age began. The great Alvin Toffler referred to these ages as the First Wave, Second Wave and Third Wave. Each wave or age had different economic characteristics. The dominant economic structure in Second Wave societies was a centralized hierarchy. The dominant structure in Third Wave societies are flat networks.

In …