October 29th, 2009 at 11:56 am

The Popularization of the PC and How It Drove the Third and Fourth Shocks

The Second Shock was the popularization of personal computing, mainly in the 1980s. With the digitization of information in the 1930s, building computers started to become a commercially viable enterprise. By the ’60s and ’70s, living room-sized mainframe computers were being manufactured to be smaller, faster, more efficient. The mainframes that could only be used by a few select technologists were replaced by minicomputers that were usually about the size of refrigerators, but could be used by four or five people. With the ’80s came the personal computer. The Altair 8800 from Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems in 1975 is credited as being the first commercially successful personal computer. But it was really with the 1981 release of the IBM Personal Computer that people really began to consider keeping a computer in their living rooms.

The commercialization of the PC – which is the Second Shock – changed business completely. By the mid-80s it was not uncommon for almost everyone at a larger company to have a computer at his or her desk. This pushed a computing power that until recently had only been reserved for a select few across the business enterprise. It also created the need for the networking of all of these PCs within a company.

These importance of these two aspects to the general scheme of the Fourth Shock cannot be overstated. With the popularization of the PC, the potential of computing for every business became more apparent, and it was invested in heavily. The idea of networking the ever growing number of computers was a forebear of networking outside of the company – say from one company to another. From there it is not difficult to see that the creation of the Internet – a network to connect the whole globe – was imminent. Thus the Second Shock, as with the First, was the direct factor in the onset of its successor, the commercialization of the Internet, the Third Shock. But it was not only Second Shock’s preparation for the Third that allows us to see its importance to mobility. In the pushing of computing power across the business enterprise we see a precursor of the connective and data generating power that is about to be pushed across the entire globe by the onset of mobility in the Fourth Shock.

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  • About The Fourth Shock

    This site contains articles related to alqemyiQ CEO Ron Bienvenu's book titled The Fourth Shock.

    Bienvenu's book explores how mobility brings with it the opportunity to both interact with consumers and capture demand data in real time. These real-time interactions will change the historically reactive supply chain into a pro-active one. By leveraging this information, companies will be able to interact with consumers and pro-actively influence purchasing choices to squeeze the most profit from all parts of the supply chain.