The personal computer has changed the world in ways that were unimagined before its invention. Whether it was the beige box originally built by IBM in 1981 or one of the many clone PCs, the desktop computer transformed the world of work.

It has also driven a decades-long boom in productivity and spawned companies with market valuations today in the trillions of dollars — Microsoft ($2.5-trillion) and Apple ($3-trillion) are the most valuable companies in the world. Impressive, given that they were founded within a year of each other nearly half a century ago...

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