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| Wildebeast or Gnu (Photo credit: jomilo75) |
Personal computers and the software that runs them has evolved greatly over the years. In the process, motherboards (the guts of the computer) have become smaller and more functional as the number of transistors in a chip has risen from thousand to hundreds of millions and clock speeds have increased thousands of times. In the process, software has changed from simple monitors controlled by serial links to complex operating systems with hundreds of processes running and GUIs (Graphical User-Interfaces). For many years the GUI has followed the "desktop" paradigm, a virtual space where "documents" and images and multi-media "files" lay about or were placed in "folders" and a user pointed and clicked to start processes, usually starting a new application or a new process (usually seen by the user in a window). There are many personal computers these days leaving the "desktop" paradigm for a new style or out of necessity, being on tiny screens like smartphones. There just isn't enough space on the tiny screen for much of anything to point and click and fingers are fumbly pointing devices anyway.
