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INDUSTRIAL CODES
NAICS: 33-4111 Electronic Computer Manufacturing, 33-4112 Computer Storage Device Manufacturing, 33-4113 Computer Terminal Manufacturing
SIC: 3571 Electronic Computers, 3572 Computer Storage Devices, 3575 Computer Terminals
NAICS-Based Product Codes: 33-41111, 33-41117, 33-4111D, 33-4111W, 33-41121, 33-41124, 33-4112W, 33-41131, 33-41134, 33-4113W
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Origins of a Technology
Construction of the first electronic computer began in 1943. The device was called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator). ENIAC used more than 17,000 vacuum tubes and was built at the University of Pennsylvania. It was intended to help the United States defeat the Nazi forces in World War II. The device was completed three years later. It was massive, weighing in at 30 tons, eight feet high, three feet deep, one hundred feet in length—and it was slow, taking 35 seconds to pull a square root. The vast machine received its inputs on punched cards and punched fresh cards to communicate its wisdom. Four years after ENIAC took its first lumbering steps, in 1950, a baby boy was born in Sunnyvale, California, to a couple whose surname was Wozniak. His parents named him Steven. Steve Wozniak would become the best-known of several co-creators of a new category—the personal computer. Wozniak, with Steve Jobs, co-founded Apple Computer in 1976. The Apple Computer reached the mass market in 1977. It was a tiny device in comparison with its great-grandfather ENIAC, easily fitting on a desktop, and communicating with the user by means of a lighted screen.
Apple Computer began in a garage in Los Altos, California, when the two Steves (Wozniak and Jobs) began to make circuit boards for hobbyists. A local computer store owner, Paul Terrel, had little use for circuit boards but offered to buy 50 finished computers for $500 each. Armed with a purchase order for a shipment of that size, Jobs persuaded an electronics distributor to give him parts on credit. The company immediately began to flourish, in part because of Wozniak's creativity in squeezing performance out of a minimum of resources, and in part because of Steven Jobs' inspired notion to call the product Apple, associating a very formidable product category with a playful and down-to-earth image. The timing was right. Hobbyists everywhere were building home computers. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) began shipping the Altair 8800 in 1975. This device sold for $379 in 1975 as a kit for at-home assembly. Tandy's TRS-80, sold by Radio Shack, and the Commodore PET were introduced almost simultaneously with the first Apple. Computers had become so pervasive in the culture that customers, many of them in the computer field, immediately gave these products an intense and enthusiastic reception.
In the 31-year period between the completion of ENIAC and the introduction of the Apple computer, electronic computing was transformed. Tiny transistors had replaced hot, bulky, vacuum tubes. Magnetic media—tapes and magnetic drums—replaced punch cards for datastorage. Video devices displaced most printer-based terminals, churning out commands and responses on paper. Speeds had increased tremendously. In 1969, a fertile year in computers, Gary Starkweather at Xerox invented the laser printer, but it would be years before lasers became standard printers in the office. Control Data introduced the first supercomputer in 1969. In the same year the U.S. Department of Defense launched ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the forerunner of the Internet. In 1977 a hierarchy of computers were available, with supercomputers at the peak, intended for scientific work; mainframes serving industry; minicomputers being used in smaller companies; and microcomputers beginning to reach households. Despite the fact that IBM had invented floppy disks in 1967, and had introduced the first hard-drive in 1973, the first microcomputers used tape recorders for saving information.
The personal computer, referred to as the PC, took off dramatically as soon as it was introduced and, within approximately five years, developed into a fully functional office tool. Early models with relatively limited capacities, aimed initially at the recreational and hobbyist markets, improved substantially. IBM, the undisputed leader in computers, entered the market in 1981 with an operating system developed by a small company called Microsoft. This machine, dubbed the IBM PC, became the standard product used in offices. By 1983 an estimated 10 million small computers were in use.
So What Exactly Is a Personal Computer?
A PC is a small computer and is capable of rapidly obtaining, manipulating, storing, and calling up information for the user in a changed format if required. For these purposes, it has: (1) a central processing unit (CPU), (2) a memory, and (3) input and output ports. It acquires information and commands through input ports by means of stored data on disk, by keyboard, by mouse movements, and, if the device is so enabled, from any source capable of feeding it digitized information. It communicates through output ports to video terminals, printers, permanent storage disks, sound systems, and other devices capable of receiving digital signals.
The core of the computer is an arrangement made of transistors. All information in the computer is held by capacitors, tiny devices able to hold energy or to release it, to be on or off. Computers are digital devices. Everything is created from 0s and of 1s. Every capacitor needs something to switch it on or off. Transistors are such switches. By a convention used universally, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), defines the alphabet, numbers, and many special symbols as fixed binary values. For example, the capital letter A has the value of 10000001. These eight bits of information are treated as one unit, called a byte. To hold this number eight capacitors and transistors are employed. Indeed, to hold the text of this paragraph, including the spaces that separate the words, 7,952 transistors and capacitors will be kept busy until this paragraph is saved and the file is closed.
The heart of the computer is its CPU. Its control circuitry monitors ports and responds to commands, obtained directly from the keyboard, the mouse, or a stored program it has been asked to execute. In carrying out commands, the CPU sends messages to output devices, obtains information from and stores data to memory, interprets programs in memory by reading commands from them sequentially, and manipulates data using its arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) if required by the commands it decodes. The ALU operates on data placed in the CPU's special memory locations, known as registers. The CPU's controls permit it to recognize special interrupts. When an interrupt arrives, the CPU suspends the execution of the currently running program and picks up execution of another, keeping track of everything in specially set-aside areas of memory. The CPU's communication with the rest of the machine take place via special data highways known as busses.
Three hierarchically arranged instruction sets tell the CPU what to do. A built-in and hard-wired program, known as the kernel, becomes operational as soon as the machine is turned on. This program handles the basic functions, including booting of the operating system (OS) from the hard drive. The OS contains the second layer of instructions. It resides in memory. Once up and running, it displays its own visual interface and responds to user commands. The third level is represented by user-activated software programs. One or more programs may be running at any time. These might be, for instance, a word processor, a spreadsheet, and an Internet connection.
In modern PCs functions such as visual display, printing, and disk operations are distinct units with specialized processors of their own so that the CPU's capacity is not diverted to routine tasks. Very advanced functionalities are available to the user wishing to have high-end graphical, audio, or communications capabilities. These devices are integrated into the computer as cards, which are placed into slots left open for just such add-ons on the computer's motherboard.
Measures of Performance
Computer performance is measured by CPU speed, processor size, and internal memory available. Speed is measured in cycles per second, thus sequential single actions the CPU can perform in that time. The speed is measured in megahertz (MHz), millions of cycles per second. Computer speeds have increased, making it necessary to report speed in gigahertz (GHz), billions of cycles. The faster the processor themore instantaneous the performance of the machine appears to the user. But effective speed also depends on the performance of the computer's bus, of the memory, of the disk drive, and of other componentry that contributes to the computer's total action. A slow memory, for instance, will slow down the CPU by causing it to stop with interrupts until it has performed its job. The Apple I operated at 1 MHz. High-end PCs in 2007 were running at approximately 3,500 to 3,800 MHz.
The number of bits handled by the CPU processor size determines the number of bits the CPU can handle at the same time. The first Apple computer could handle an 8-bit number or single byte at a time. The high-end PCs at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century could handle eight bytes, or 64-bit numbers at a time. Most computers sold were 32-bit machines. Processor size or width, expressed in bits, is directly related to the amount of memory a CPU is capable of addressing. As a consequence increasing CPU width has resulted in making more and more memory directly available to users without using artful workarounds that characterized earlier machines.
Most modern PCs come with a minimum of 512 megabytes of random-access memory (RAM), mega meaning millions, and the unit abbreviated as MB. One megabyte is equivalent to 1,024,000 bytes—a number that, expressed in the base-16 hexadecimal numbers scheme is an even number (FA000). In the computer world, measurements are describe in hex, consequently their translations into the decimal scheme do not round up precisely. For this reason 512 megabytes are equivalent to 524 million bytes. We can get some feel for this number by expressing it as roughly equivalent to 75 million words separated by spaces. To read that many words we would have to devour roughly 1,250 moderately sized novels. High-end machines can have as much as 2,000 MB of RAM. The first Apple offered 8,000 bytes of RAM or approximately 1,000 words of storage, less than one page of single-spaced typing.
Product Evolution
The personal computer rapidly evolved over a 30-year period from a hobbyist's device and a game-playing utility into—initially—an office machine first used intensively with spreadsheets, for analysis and accounting, and word processing software, for correspondence. Apple introduced the first commercially available graphical interface with the Macintosh computer in 1984 and almost immediately created a new use for computers in visual arts and advertising applications, a niche it continues to dominate. The graphical interface soon replaced character-mode computing with the introduction of the Windows operating system in 1985. Graphical interfaces prepared the ground for widespread use of the Internet.
As part of the PC evolution, freestanding machines began to link together. During the 1980s more office machines were connected by cable into local-area networks all communicating with a common computer that acted as a file server. With the rise of networks, a single connected PC still only served one user, but the network itself began to resemble the old mainframe computer in that individual users were getting from and storing to the common disk space provided by the server. These networks made it possible to deploy database software with sufficient storage to duplicate the capabilities once only possessed by mainframes and minicomputers.
In 1984 when the Macintosh appeared, approximately 1,000 computers were connected to the system that would later emerge as the Internet. According to Hobbes' Timeline of the Internet, the number of hosts, or connected computers, increased to 313,000 by 1990, 36.7 million by 1998, and 439.3 million by 2006. The emergence of this new technology in the last third of the twentieth century altogether redefined the personal computer. Without losing the functions that it had acquired along the way—entertainment, office tool, database and graphics engine—it became principally and primarily a communication tool.
The basic machine also proliferated into small devices, initially into portable and then laptop computers, and then into handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs). Finally—merging its functions with that of the telephone and TV and thanks to the vast expansion of wireless communications—the machine became a tiny handheld device capable of acting as a computer, a telephone, a radio, a television set, a music server, and a camera. To be sure, these latest tiny descendants of the venerable ENIAC are no longer, properly speaking, personal computers. That designation still pertains to desktop computers, portables, and laptops. Functionally, however, all of these devices are identical and could not exist without transistors engineered into tiny CPUs with enormous power and speed using information storage media of incredible density.
MARKET
Computer Hardware
In 1987, ten years after the introduction of PCs, U.S. production of all computers was valued at $23.2 billion. The U.S. Bureau of the Census did not report on PCs as a distinct category in that year. The first time that PCs appeared statistically well defined in national accounts was in 1992. In that year PC shipments were valued at $18.7 billion and represented 65 percent of all computers shipped. The total market was $29.6 billion. Other major subdivisions of the computer market were multi-user host computers, or mainframes and minicomputers ($8.6 billion), and special-purpose computers, including analog and hybrid machines ($1.3 billion).
Domestic production of computers, including PCs, peaked in 1999. In that year total shipments of computers stood at $64.7 billion, with PCs representing 66.1 percent of shipments and a $42.8 billion market. Domestic shipments declined after 1999. Shipments were being buoyed throughout the 1990s by the explosive growth of the Internet, usually referred to as the dot-com boom. The dot-com bust occurred in early 2000 when the tech-stock-heavy NASDAQ Composite Index reached an all-time high of 5048.62 (March 10). As of the spring of 2007, the NASDAQ had not reached that level again. The recession from 2000 to 2001 dried up capital expenditures. Data on domestic shipments at time of writing were available to the year 2005. Since 1999 domestic shipments have declined at a rate of 8.3 percent per year. Domestic shipments of multi-user computers declined most (9.3%), and special-purpose machines declined least (2.5%). Demand for computers declined as well in the 1999 to 2005 period but at the lesser rate of 2 percent per year. Demand dropped from a 1999 high value of $68.3 billion to a low of $48.9 billion in 2002. It began to grow again in 2003 and reached $60.6 billion in 2005. The gap between domestic supply and demand was filled by imports. The market picture is presented graphically in Figure 170.
Domestic demand is shown in bars in the graphic. The value of demand is calculated by taking domestic shipments, deducting exports, and adding imports. It is worth noting that in 1997 total domestic shipments and demand were approximately at the same level but that, as time advances, U.S. production totals are at increasingly lower levels than total demand. Indirectly, the chart reveals that more of the U.S. demand is being satisfied by imports.
Figure 171 makes these relationships explicitly visible. In the 1997 to 2005 period, a major change had taken place in the computer industry. Furthermore, in that personal computers represent more than two-thirds of the industry, these changes directly affected the product. U.S. exports were valued at $5.9 billion in 1997, peaked at $7.4 billion in 2002, and declined somewhat by 2005. Domestic hardware production was on a downward slide, having reached a level, at $38.4 billion, slightly above the level achieved in 1994 ($38.1 billion but not shown on the chart). The category exhibiting unambiguous andsustained growth throughout this period was imports, increasing from $6.4 billion in 1997 to $29.1 billion in 2005. Representing 12.6 percent of total domestic demand in 1997, imports satisfied 48 percent of demand in 2005. Other countries were making a product category entirely invented, pioneered, and perfected in the United States.
Peripherals
Users of the PC define it as consisting of the computer itself, its monitor, and a mouse and keyboard. In the realm of industrial statistics the computers are divided into the computer itself and then into different categories of peripherals. These categories are: (1) storage devices including floppy, hard, and tape drives; (2) terminals; (3) other peripherals, including keyboards, printers, modems, cash registers, and other equipment; and (4) magnetic and optical media, including floppy disks, CDs, and magnetic tape. In all of these categories, trends in domestic production are pointing downward, as shown in Figure 172.
Domestic demand for these categories did not decline in this period. Instead, as in computer hardware, imports have replaced domestic production. For example, demand in 2005 for storage devices was valued at approximately $16.2 billion and for terminals approximately $10.3 billion, indicating that more than two-thirds of disk drives were imported and virtually all terminals originated overseas. The U.S. Census Bureau does not specifically report on which portions of the peripherals market relate to personal computers but two categories—other peripherals, and magnetic and optical media—include large segments related to devices used in commerce, such as cash registers, and to mainframes and minicomputers.
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Software
Although the software market is intrinsically dependent on the hardware platforms which it animates, software sales represent a much larger market and also display another trend. Data available from the Services Annual Survey indicate that in 2005, software sales at the producer level amounted to $119.6 billion, more than three times the size of computer hardware produced domestically and nearly twice the value of the demand for machines. Moreover, software sales have been growing. They increased from $84.0 billion in 1999, increasing at the rate of four percent per year.
The software market is traditionally reported in three major segments. Systems software is the largest (39.3%), applications software is next (35.7%), and other services bring up the rear (25.1%). Operating systems represent approximately 39 percent and network software 27 percent of the systems category. Business productivity and home-use applications (including games) account for 45 percent of applications. Other services include preparation of custom software and providing consulting, training, and similar services. It is difficult to separate software used in strictly personal contexts from that which is used for commercial or institutional purposes. The Census Bureau estimates that nearly half of total software sales are associated with personal computers, accounting for $59 billion of the total. The remainder is used for mainframes, minicomputers, and special-purpose computers.
KEY PRODUCERS/MANUFACTURERS
The PC market is global. The top companies sell worldwide and/or procure their products from many countries. The division of manufacturing chores between specialists also explains why imports have come to play such an important role in this industry.
Two companies dominate the manufacturing of CPUs, the core of a computer. They are Intel Corporationand Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). All other producers buy their chips and then build computers around them. The top five companies, as reported in Market Share Reporter, with 2004 market shares shown in parentheses, are Dell Inc. (30.3%), Hewlett-Packard Company (18.4%), Gateway, Inc. (5.8%), IBM (4.7%—but IBM sold the product line to Lenovo late that year), and Apple, Inc. (3.2%). These five companies commanded 62.4 percent of the total U.S. market in 2004. The overwhelming majority of all PCs run on operating systems produced by Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft is the top-ranked software producer in the world. The company also dominates the PC applications market. Apple offers its own operating system but is producing machines able to run on Microsoft's Windows platform, showing that even Apple needs to accommodate itself to the de facto standard set by Microsoft.
Equipment Type | Industry 1997 | Shipments 2005 | Annual Rate of Decline |
(billions of dollars) | |||
Storage devices | 8.6 | 7.5 | −1.7 |
Terminals | 0.8 | 0.2 | −13.6 |
Other peripherals | 13.7 | 7.7 | −6.9 |
Magnetic and optical media | 5.2 | 1.3 | −15.9 |
Total | 28.3 | 16.7 | −6.3 |
Intel Corporation is a $35.4 billion company (2006) and holds the commanding market share in semiconductor chips. The company has 94,100 employees, more than 50 percent of whom are located in the United States. The company produced 68 percent of its products at U.S. plants and 32 percent in plants located in Ireland and Israel. Second-ranking AMD had 2006 sales of $5.6 billion. The company's chip manufacturing facilities are in Germany. Its chip assembly is performed in Malaysia. Testing is conducted in Singapore and in China.
Like the chipmakers themselves, computer producers are also global companies. Dell Inc., for instance, the leading PC producer, with $55.9 billion in sales in 2006 (fiscal year ending February 3), maintained 3.6 million square feet of manufacturing space in the United States and had 2.3 and 3.9 million square feet in Europe and in Asia, respectively. Hewlett-Packard, ranked second in PC sales, had revenues of $91.7 billion of which personal computers accounted for $29.2 billion. The company had worldwide operations, including facilities in the United States, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Israel, the United Kingdom, China, Japan, and Singapore.
In Gateway, Inc.'s 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company discusses its manufacturing by saying: 'Gateway's product needs are fulfilled through original design manufacturing and distribution relationships in Asia, Europe, Mexico and the United States to meet the needs of key market segments.' The phrase, 'original design manufacturing,' became the acronym ODM in the early 2000s and stood for a widespread practice under which manufacturers design products but others do the manufacturing to their specified design. Intel, in its own 10-K report, refers to those reliant on ODM as 'fabless' producers, perhaps coining a phrase to indicate a lack of fabrication facilities. Gateway itself, however, launched a facility in 2006 for final assembly of what it describes as configure-to-order desktops, laptops, and servers. Gateway had sales in 2006 of $3.98 billion.
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Lenovo Group Ltd. is a Chinese corporation but has its headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company is the inheritor, by acquisition, of IBM's personal computer business. IBM left the business in 2004. PCs had moved from the status of a hi-tech product with healthy margins to a commodity category, and IBM sought to deploy its assets into more profitable branches of the computer business. Lenovo's sales in 2006 were $13.3 billion. Notebook computers represented 49 percent and desktops 45 percent of sales; the remainder accounted for by handheld and other devices. The company ranks third-largest in the world (behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard) but ranks fourth in U.S. sales.
Apple Inc. changed its name in 2007 from Apple Computer, Inc., perhaps signaling, in its own way, that the age of the PC is passé and that the iPod and iTunes represent the modern world. Indeed, only slightly more than 50 percent of the company's total sales of $19.3 billion in 2006 were represented by computers, peripherals, and software. The remainder amount was accounted for by iPods and music. Apple's first PCs were made in a garage in California by hand by one of its co-founders. In 2006 assembly of computers took place in Apple's own plant in Cork, Ireland, or under contract by others in California, Taiwan, North Korea, and in the Czech Republic. All portable products made by Apple were assembled in China. Substantially all componentry used by Apple was manufactured in Taiwan, China, Korea, and Singapore. Apple retains, from its origins, a comprehensive profile in that the company continues to sell hardware, its own operating systems, and its own monitors and other peripherals. Apple has the largest and most loyal customer base. From its beginnings the company had acceptance in the educational community, promoted by its own generosity. The Macintosh became the choice of all those specializing in high-end graphics applications.
The giant among software companies, and overwhelmingly so in the PC market, is Microsoft Corporation. The company had sales of $44.3 billion in 2006. Of that total approximately 73 percent was directly related to personal computers or smaller devices. The company's five largest segments were operating systems ($13.2 billion), office software ($11.8 billion), server software for networks ($11.5 billion), and home and entertainment software ($4.3 billion). Office software includes Microsoft Office used by many people both in the workplace and in home applications. Microsoft contracts out most of its manufacturing activities to others.
Microsoft identifies its major competitors by segment. The company's rivals in the operating system segment are Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. Apple competes with Microsoft directly in the PC market. Hewlett-Packard and IBM have always sold operating systems for their own brands of large computers, those that predate the PC. Sun Microsystems is also principally a competitor for Microsoft in the commercial rather than the personal segment of computing. Sun offers Solaris, a version of the Unix operating system developed at Bell Laboratories (1969–1971) for mainframes. Sun, like Apple, also supports Windows on the Sun brand of desktop computers.
Microsoft's competitors in the office software category include Apple, Corel Corporation, Google, IBM, Novell, Inc., and Oracle, among others. The company points out that it faces competition in Europe and Asia. Apple has always offered its own applications software or software produced by others for its operating system. Corel is well-known for its graphics and drawing programs; Corel also acquired the once-dominant WordPerfect word processing system still used in many offices. The leading word processor in the early 2000s was Microsoft Word. Microsoft lists Google as a rival because the company has Web-based word processing and spreadsheet products. IBM competes with Microsoft with a product array very similar to Microsoft Office. IBM acquired Lotus Development Corporation in 1995 and, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, offers SmartSuite which includes spreadsheet, word processing, presentation, and other office tools. IBM is still active in this segment of the PC market although it severed its connection to hardware. Novell, a systems company best known perhaps as a pioneer in networking PCs, is oriented toward Unix and offers product suites comparable to Microsoft Office. Oracle and Microsoft compete primarily for entry-level database applications.
The software market is extensive. It has many niche markets still profitably served by Microsoft's competitors. Unix users as a group represent the largest segment. Unix itself comes in several variants. Solaris is one. Linux is supported by Red Hat, Inc. and is popular because it is free-ware; Red Hat, however, sells products running on Linux. The field is also large and diverse enough so that a detailed discussion of it goes beyond the scope of this essay. Microsoft is featured prominently by reason of its dominant share of the PC software market.
MATERIALS & SUPPLY CHAIN LOGISTICS
The PC industry is characterized by a wide distribution of its production functions. Some companies specialize in major components or subcomponents; some provide design and specification functions; others fabricate, and then specialize in marketing and distribution; and yet others concentrate on fabrication, assembly, and testing. The industrial structure is economically and logistically justified because the basic components are physically light, usually small, and the items have high value. Most are produced by automated processes with relatively low inputs of labor but high inputs of capital. Assembly and testing require the most labor. Components and subassemblies are therefore shipped extensively from point to point before being put into the final product at the ultimate assembly location.
DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL
Personal computers nominally have a three-tier distribution system. Product moves from producers to wholesalers, from wholesalers to retailers, and then to the consumer. The word nominally is appropriate because, over time, fewer and fewer computers or software products are passing through the formal retail channel. The retail sector in this industry is very small, approximately $11.6 billion in 2006 according to Manufacturing & Distribution USA, and has declined from a level of $24 billion in 1997—which was quite small. Distribution in this industry is, in effect, something of a hybrid.
Most computers move from the producer directly to the customer triggered by mail, online, or telephone orders, the producer acting as the retailer—or the product passes through an integrator/wholesaler who supplies companies and also, usually through the company's intermediation, to individuals. The wholesale sector had sales in 2006 (including computers, peripherals, and software) of $266 billion, up from a level of $221 billion in 1997. The wholesaler is very often an integrator, providing services to corporate clients. Equipment sales are a natural part of installing networks for a company, adding nodes as these are required, and maintaining such systems over time.
KEY USERS
Personal computers may best be classified by the context of use. Computers in the home are used for Internet access, e-mail, games, homework (both of the school and the office variety), for storing, printing, and sharing photographs taken by digital cameras, and for a wide range of hobbies and administrative chores. The same people who use home computers will also use essentially identical machines at the office.
Use of the computer may be classified as heavy, casual, or intermittent. In heavy use the computer is central to daily life, e-mail is checked by the hour, and several computers may well be running, augmented by hand-held devices.
An important subset of users include those who work at home and for whom one or several computers will be the chief means of earning a living.
ADJACENT MARKETS
In the sense of substitutes for the personal computer no products come to mind, but one is reminded of the days when people used telephone lines to reach mainframes and thus time-shared massive but slow computer resources with many others. The telephone was once used for many rapid coordination activities now accomplished by e-mail. Before word processors and spreadsheets took over, typewriters and calculators performed the same basic functions software and PCs now do rapidly and with little effort. The PC, especially in its most modern incarnation as a communication and general office tool, has no substitute. Heavy users often feel as if the world had suddenly stopped when the computer dies or the network crashes.
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Four markets adjacent to the PC are: (1) computer furniture, (2) extensive publishing activity ranging from books to magazines, (3) computer integration and support markets, especially PC networking by cable or wireless means, and (4) custom software production, consulting, and training services.
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Smaller, faster, without wire: the phrase describes the R&D thrust in the computer industry. In 1965 Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double every other year. His prediction turned out to be correct. In 1970, 4,000 transistors were crowded on a chip—in 2006 more than a billion transistors fill a chip. Moore's prediction has come to be known as Moore's Law.
Semiconductor fabrication processes are referred to by the size of the transistor. In 2007, 65-nanometer technology prevailed, meaning that transistors were 65nm in size. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. In 2007, 45nm chips were under development by Intel, AMD and IBM in partnership, and Toshiba and NEC Corporation. In 2008 or 2009, 32nm and 22nm transistors will be available. According to Intel, the 45nm chip, based on replacing silicon dioxide with a hafnium-based material for transistor gates (insulators), will double the number of transistors per chip but will cut energy consumption by 30 percent. Switching speeds will increase 20 percent. More speed is also promised by designing CPUs for processing of two activity threads simultaneously, a technology under development that Intel calls hyper-threading and AMD dubs multi-threading. Such capabilities permit parts of the same program to be carried out at the same time—or two programs running side by side—saving seconds in both cases.
Substantial R&D is also being dedicated to expanding signal transfer without the encumbrance of wires. Developments are guided by two standards issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 802.11 relates to WiFi and 802.16 to WiMax systems. WiFi refers to wireless local-area networks. The term is a play on the old Hi-Fi designation used by home stereo enthusiasts. WiMax stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. Systems under these standards promise very fast, 10-billion bits per second, broadband transmissions of signal between mobile and fixed installations, or multiple fixed installations, several miles distant from each other.
All of these developments point toward both miniaturization of machine intelligence and making it mobile. Developments in support of embedded products—chips on all kinds of mobile or stationary equipment capable of acquiring or generating signal without wire—are receiving substantial R&D funding but, in effect, are aimed at products no longer even remotely like personal computers.
CURRENT TRENDS
The electronics sector, built on the base of the technology that PCs introduced, continued to grow as the first decade of the twenty-first century advanced. At the same time, the PC category showed signs of having reached maturity. The very interest in hand-held devices that acted as telephones and cameras but could still be used for texting with one's friends, indicated that attention had shifted from PCs. Similarly, the PC category itself was entirely taken for granted while commercial and entrepreneurial focus were turned on the Internet. IBM's sell-off of its PC business and Apple's name change were straws in the wind. PCs had their glorious spring in the 1970s, their youth in the 1980s, their peak in the 1990s, and had turned into very productive and rather sober adults by the beginning of the twenty-first century. The future promised growing maturity: ever better machines able to carry out virtually any task that could be framed in symbolic notation. The excitement had abated and had moved on, leaving behind a gigantic industry pervading every nook and cranny of domestic and institutional life. In that industry change would be relatively slow but steady and add-ons incremental rather than dramatic.
TARGET MARKETS & SEGMENTATION
Producers in this industry divide the market into entry-level, middle-of-the-line, commercial, and high-end machines by selecting processors with different speeds, providing less or more memory, and leaving out or making 'standard' high-end functionalities, for sound or graphics, for example. Standard offerings at all levels are common, using low price at the entry level and features at the high end to target customers. Targeting relies on the user's technical sophistication. High-end users—or the managers who buy for them—understand and value technical features. Entry-level buyers are looking for functionalities, such as the machine's ability to display their favorite games or to hold their large stores of photographs. The highest end of the market is the network server, almost always selected after analysis of the system it will anchor. An important special segment is the user of a laptop computer who is interested in weight, in the performance of the battery-pack that powers the computer, and the machine's ability to be connected to the main computer in the office or the home to upload or download files for a customer visit or a trip.
RELATED ASSOCIATIONS & ORGANIZATIONS
Association for Computing Machinery, http://www.acm.org
Association of Women in Computing, http://www.awc-hq.org
Computer & Communications Industry Association, http://www.ccianet.org
Consumer Electronics Association, http://www.ce.org
Electronic Industries Alliance, http://www.eia.org
IEEE Computer Society, http://www.computer.org/portal/site/ieeecs/index.jsp
Portable Computer and Communications Association, http://www.pcca.org
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Computer History.' Computer Hope.com. Available from 〈http://www.computerhope.com/history/index.htm〉.
'Computers and Peripheral Equipment: 2005.' Current Industrial Reports. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. January 2007.
Darnay, Arsen J. and Joyce P. Simkin. Manufacturing & Distribution USA, 4th ed. Thomson Gale, 2006, Volume 2, 1239-1243.
Lazich, Robert S. Market Share Reporter 2006. Thomson Gale, 2006, Volume 1, 405-408.
'Meet the World's First 45nm Processor.' Intel Corporation. Available from 〈http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/45nm_technology.htm〉.
'Moore's Law.' Intel Corporation. Available from 〈http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/index.htm〉.
'Product Summary: 2002.' 2002 Economic Census. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. March 2006.
Seibold, Chris. 'April 7, 1976: Steve Jobs Gets Crucial $5,000 Loan.' Apple Matters. Available from 〈http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/history/april-7-1976/〉.
'What's In A Name Change. Look At Apple.' Forbes. 25 January 2007.
Zakon, Robert Hobbes. 'Hobbes' Internet Timeline v8.2.' Available from 〈http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/#Growth〉.
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Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB) Testing
In that case, DOD uses the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (or DLAB) to measure one's aptitude to learn a foreign language. Studying for the DLAB Many people ask if one can study for the DLAB, or if there are any study guides available.
DLI's language guidelines | AUSA
The Defense Language Institute categorizes languages into four levels of difficulty. Category I languages are easier to pick up, while moving on up through Category IV, language comprehension is more difficult, and the length of courses reflect that. Category I languages, 26-week courses, include Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.
FY-17 Defense Language P(DLAB) INFORMATION SHEET
16. The DLAB replaced the Army Language Aptitude Test (ALAT), and the Defense Language Aptitude test (DLAT) I and II, which are no longer acceptable qualifying criteria for entry into the Defense Foreign Language Program. The minimum qualifying DLAB score is determined by language difficulty category (LDC).
FY-17 Defense Language Proficiency Test Dates MCAS CHERRY ..
The DLAB replaced the Army - Language Aptitude Test (ALAT), and the Defense Language Aptitude test (DLAT) I and II, which are no longer acceptable qualifying criteria for entry into the Defense Foreign Language Program. The minimum qualifying DLAB score is determined by language difficulty category (LDC). Within their respective
What is a Good DLAB Score - DLAB Prep
What is a Good DLAB Score. Home DLAB FAQ What is a Good DLAB Score .. Category IV Languages – Those with a 120 or above have a significantly higher probability of graduation than those below a 120. So as you can see, there are multiple measures and statistics to use in developing your personal ideal DLAB score. .. Contact; Fresh From The Blog.
An Army Linguist
In the unfortunate event that you fail you DLPT, there is some ok news in store for you. Per AR 11-6, para 5-6 (b): Commanders will initiate action to withdraw the SQI “L” for enlisted Soldiers if the minimum proficiency standard in not met within 1 year from date of initial DLPT failure for a language difficulty category (LDC) I or II language and within 2 years for an LDC III or IV language.
An Army Linguist: Foreign language codes, payment schedules
Here is the payment schedule based on your language. Remember that getting paid requires you to either be in a language-dependent MOS (such as 35P), or a language-capable MOS (such as 35M) in a language coded billet (or any billet if you are DLI trained).
Map: Language Difficulty Ranking For English Speakers
Language Difficulty Ranking For English Speakers. .. Category I languages are the easiest for English speakers, who can reach reading and speaking proficiency within about half a year of intense study. There is a mix Romance and Germanic languages in this classification, including Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish, and Italian. .. Email address ..
How do I become a linguist? (Part 3 - Picking the right job)
For more information on the recruiting process use your CAC card to log into https://ikn.army.mil (Intelligence Knowledge Online portal) and look about halfway down the first page on the left column. If you contact me via your AKO email I can also put you in contact with a local recruiter at your current Army installation.
Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center ..
Dialog on Language Instruction is an occasional internal publication of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) and part of its professional development program. Its primary function is to promote the exchange of professional knowledge and information among DLIFLC faculty and staff and to encourage professional ..
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