The 1970's brought Xerox's opening of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which pioneered a lot of the computer technology used in PCs (Personal Computers) today, as well as the Unix operating system, versions of which are still used today and considered the optimal operating system breed, and the C programming language, itself the grandfather to C++, Perl and PHP, all common script types used today throughout the Internet. Coincidentally, the TCP/IP protocols, which have become the foundations of the Internet and how data is still transmitted today, were developed to allow the small network of universities to expand to a global scale, which began the time where ARPANet became known as DARPANet, for its national defence applications as ARPA added Defence to its name.
Through the 1980's more home computers became available from makers like Osborne, Radio Shack, Atari and Commodore, which saw IBM become one of the largest and most dominant PC makers, and also saw Apple develop the Macintosh. That was a significant move that achieved two main milestones: it drew attention to a graphical user interface instead of text interfaces, leading to the development of Microsoft and it's Windows operating systems, and it also brought the price points of PCs down to the point where families could begin to consider a computer for their home as something other than a pure luxury. Internet development continued, with frame relay connections for T1s and T3s being tested and finally becoming more common by the end of the decade, and seeing speeds of 1.544 Mbps and 43.232 Mbps increase the amount of data that can be sent. Another major development was the growth of the BBS (Bulletin Board System) community, where small computer hubs grew with home users dialling in over phone lines to message each other, transfer files, and other peer-to-peer network possibilities.
Through the 1990's, the computer industry began to settle down, with IBM, Apple, Microsoft and Intel settling on the top, while the open source world began to truly grow around versions of Linux, a computer-community driven version of the proprietary Unix operating system which could be run on almost any type of hardware. The size of components began dropping and the first laptops were slowly rolling out of manufacturers warehouses, but were still heavy by today's standard. Also during this time, the development of the Internet expanded to become the World Wide Web as we understand it today, with top speed records being broken as optical fiber began it's development, allowing speeds of OC3 (155 Mbps) and OC12 (622 Mbps) to bring data much faster than before. Since the Internet began growing so fast and offered global networking, the BBS community began to shrink as the regional importance dropped.
Today has shown the continued growth and integration of computers into society, with a continued reduction in both the size of units and price, matched by increases in processing power and storage capacity, have led to a startling comparison: today's cell phones have more power and storage than the first computers four decades ago - startling, in part, because the size of the first computers were measured in feet, not inches. The proliferation of laptops and internet-enabled systems has made home computers and networks common enough to begin talking about them as home appliances alongside stoves, fridges and TVs, and the industry has come full circle and returned to its roots as more students in universities are taking notes on laptops and PDAs than using pen and paper, all while wirelessly browsing the web in their seats. Internet backbones have reached speeds of OC48 (2.5 Gbps) and OC192 (9.6 Gbps) allowing the entire contents of the US Library of Congress to be downloaded in seven seconds, and broadband connections like ADSL and cable, once the domain of corporations, are now very common in homes and throughout neighbourhoods. The only place to go from here is smaller, faster, and more powerful.
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