ericpete is the editor of the Experts Exchange newsletter. He considers the main benefit to doing that job to be the opportunity to write -- something he has done professionally since he was a young boy.

Headline: Dell reflects on 25 years of PCs
Headline: Scratching the 25-year PC itch
Headline: The Great PC 'what-if'
Headline: Twenty five years of the IBM PC

60 years ago, give or take a few months, the ENIAC was unveiled. It wasn't the first computer, but it was the first that sparked the imaginations of countless scientists. 35 years later, in 1981, IBM started selling its Personal Computer.

That's 25 years ago. A quarter of a century.

We remember it well: the boss decided to head to Sears, where he spent about $3,000 (in 1981 dollars) on this whitish box from IBM, complete with the same kind of green monitor we had seen in the computer labs during our college days. It wasn't much to begin with, so he spent yet another small fortune to first add a second floppy drive and some RAM to it, and then later spent a huge amount of money for a 10 mb hard drive. Its serial number was something like 1012.

It was revolutionary. We used phototypesetting equipment that stored data on floppy drives -- nothing really new there -- but what was different was that we could enter data (classified advertising, using a program called DataStar -- from the same people who brought us WordStar) into this computer thing, and it could save the data to a floppy we could put into the typesetter, saving us countless man-hours. It paid for itself in less than a year.

When we got the hard drive, we figured that we could store tons of information about our client base on it -- so much so that we might not have to keep the bulky notebooks of business profiles. That never happened, but we calculated that we could keep pretty much everything we needed about everyone we did business with on that hard drive -- with plenty of room left over.

IBM went in a terrible state shortly afterward, for a number of reasons. It was THE standard for computers -- their mainframes were all over, and a story on a guy who only had to sell one or two a year to make a great living was a front page feature in the Wall Street Journal. But these small machines -- a computer designed for small businesses that would fit on a desktop -- didn't exactly fit the IBM corporate model; hence the partnership with the world's largest retail firm. IBM supplied the technical expertise; Sears provided the outlets and salespeople.

Then came mistake number one, which we still think is singularly the biggest mistake by a big company since Ford built the Edsel: IBM decided that the provider of its operating system could sell the OS to anyone who wanted to buy it. We're not convinced anyone ever actually paid for it; everyone just copied the floppies and handed them around. Talk about a sound marketing strategy: give it away so people become dependent, then start making them pay for upgrades.

A year or two later, we found ourselves "in the business". We worked on networked point-of-sale machines, and along came this guy who wanted us to sell a portable computer that ran both DOS -- any version -- and CP/M, which was the dominant operating system at the time. We sold our first computer to a newspaper company to use for bookkeeping; within a couple of years, they were setting type on one. We worked on Kaypro 16s (someone in the office said that the name came from "all Kays and no pros") -- these suitcase-sized boxes that weighed about thirty pounds and looked like they would survive being shot with 50 caliber bullets. There were plenty of others.

Like our friend, Sid Fishes, whose invention of iTunes preceded by nearly a decade its actual unveiling, we saw ideas all over the place, from "profiles" to ad hoc networks between offices to Not-Quite-Hotswapped drives to virtual communities on the Internet. And like him, life had a way of intervening.

But it's been a heckuva ride; Mom sends us email from half a mile away because it's more convenient than picking up the phone, and probably hasn't been to a department store in years. We never talk to travel agents any more, and virtually all of the people we work with are at least an hour's drive away -- and for many, we don't calculate how long it takes to get where they are, but rather what time it is where they live. And having gone through our college days with a Royal typewriter that outweighed a pallet of cinderblock, we wonder how we made it through without one.

Finally! I've been using Outlook Express for as long as I can remember, but there are still a few people who send me mail to my Yahoo account -- I just don't remember to look at it, in part because I really didn't like the interface that much. Well, Yahoo has announced a beta version that has an OE-like interface. No more checkboxes, and it even includes a preview pane, drag-and-drop and RSS feeds to go along with the 1GB of storage. It isn't available to everyone yet, but you can get on the waiting list.

Speaking of people who offer you tons of storage space for email, I've never bothered to get a Gmail account (thanks to all the people who have offered me one). All of the news about the US government wanting to look at what Google and Yahoo have on their servers bothers me a little. But the other day, I came across a little "Google Anonymizer" tool. I'm sure someone can adapt it to work for all of the other search engines.

A couple of years ago, I got a passport for a trip that never happened. Now, the US government has started to issue passports with smart chips embedded in them. Not everyone thinks it's a good idea, though. A good number of researchers have demonstrated all kinds of holes in the system, and jkr, who called my other half for his birthday last week, told us about a conference he attended where someone actually changed the data on a passport. Given that most people seem to believe whatever the computer tells them, it might be time for a reappraisal of the idea, especially since there are people who think having them implanted in their bodies is a good idea too.

And lastly, PCWorld came up with a list of The 10 Biggest Security Risks You Don't Know About. Unless, of course, you read this newsletter.