Personal computer

A personal computer (PC), or simply computer, is a computer designed for personal use. It is typically used for tasks such as word processing, web browsing, email, file management, spreadsheets, and video calling. Personal computers are meant to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert, administrator, company or technician. Unlike large, costly minicomputers and mainframes, time-sharing by many people at the same time is not used with personal computers. The term "home computer" has also been used, primarily in the late 1970s and 1980s. The advent of personal computers and the concurrent Digital Revolution have significantly affected the lives of people.

Institutional or corporate computer owners in the 1960s had to write their own programs to do any useful work with computers. While personal computer users may develop their own applications, these systems most frequently run commercial or free-of-charge software ("freeware"), which commonly has closed source (proprietary) codebases; or free and open-source software, where the source code is made freely available. Software for end-users is typically provided in binary (ready-to-run) form. Software for personal computers is typically developed and distributed independently from the hardware or operating system manufacturers. Practically all personal computer users no longer need to create programs themselves to make any use of a personal computer, although end-user programming is still feasible. This contrasts with mobile systems, where software is often available only through a manufacturer-supported channel and end-user program development may be discouraged by lack of support by the manufacturer.

Since the early 1990s, Microsoft operating systems (first with MS-DOS and then with Windows) and CPUs based on Intel's x86 architecture – collectively called Wintel – have dominated the personal computer market, and today the term PC normally refers to the ubiquitous Wintel platform, or to Windows PCs in general (including those running ARM chips), to the point where software for Windows is marketed as "for PC". Alternatives to Windows occupy a minority share of the market; these include the Mac platform from Apple (running the macOS operating system), and free and open-source, Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux (including the Linux-derived ChromeOS). Other notable platforms until the 1990s were the Amiga, Atari ST, and the PC-98 line.