June 2010
Intermediate to advanced
272 pages
6h 5m
English
The history of personal computing is to a large extent a story of increasing mobility, both of hardware and of data. With the original personal computers, the “personal” part referred not only to the idea of a computer that belonged to and could be used by a single person but also to the fact that, unlike its mainframe and minicomputer predecessors, the PC could be relatively easily moved from one room to another, as needed. Truly portable PCs arrived just a few years later, and the past quarter century has seen PCs shrink to ultra-lightweight netbooks and to what will perhaps be the PC form factor’s smallest incarnation, the smartphone.
Netbooks and smartphones are amazing inventions, but what they offer in terms of mobility ...