In 1997, during my second year of university, I bought my first personal computer, or PC. A sleek, black Compaq Presario with a handy internal 14.4 modem. While I enjoying playing many hours of Civ II between writing the odd term paper, little did I know the PC had actually died years earlier. And now, 16 years later, the PC is still dying. Or dead. According to some, anyway. So pretend the PC you’re probably reading this on is a mirage as we share decades of so-called experts predicting its demise.

1. The long, slow, fictional death of
the PC
In 1997, during my second year of
university, I bought my first personal
computer, or PC. A sleek black Compaq
Presario with a speedy internal 14.4
modem. While I enjoyed playing many
hours of Civ II between writing the odd
term paper, little did I know the PC had
actually died years earlier.
And now, 16 years later, the PC is still
dying. Or is dead. According to some,
anyway. So pretend the PC you’re probably
reading this on is a mirage as we share
decades of so-called experts predicting its
demise.
By Jeff Jedras
Image courtesy of bandrat at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

2. “The personal computer died this
month. The personal computer may turn
out to be like the horseless carriage,
whose effect on our expectations was
greater than its impact on our lives. PC
users day-dreamed of electronic
cottages and global villages but settled
for word processors and spreadsheets
instead.”
- NY Times column by futurist Paul
Saffo
October 13, 1991

3. “A PC is a ridiculous device; the idea is
so complicated and expensive. What
the world really wants is to plug into a
wall to get electronic power and plug
in to get data.“
- Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to the IDC
European IT Forum
September 4, 1995

4. “The PC era is over. This is not to say
that PCs are going to die off, any more
than mainframes vanished when the
IBM PC debuted in 1981. But the PC's
reign as the driver of customer buying
decisions and the primary platform for
application development is over.”
- IBM CEO Lou Gerstner in the
vendors 1998 annual report
1999

5. “We’ve been in the post-PC era for four
years now.”
- Sun Microsystems president Jonathan
Schwartz to the New York Times
December 4, 2004

6. “The PC is dead. Rising numbers of
mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric
devices don’t merely represent a
change in form factor. Rather, we’re
seeing an unprecedented shift of
power from end users and software
developers on the one hand, to
operating system vendors on the
other—and even those who keep their
PCs are being swept along.
- Jonathan Zittrain, in the MIT
Technology Review
November 30, 2011