Net Results: It's the 25th anniversary of the launch of the first personal computer this month, a wondrous machine that, in a quarter of a century, has moved from being a high-end luxury to a commonplace item costing less than a television set.

The IBM 5150 was sprung upon an unsuspecting world on August 12th, 1981 and cost $1,565 - not bad, you might think, given that a decent laptop today would cost much the same. But the 5150 offered you all of 16KB of memory for that amount of cash.

Yes, you read that right - not 16GB (long passed out by today's laptops and PCs) or even 16MB, but 16KB, or about half the total memory space this article will need as a text file stored on my desktop computer.

Still, you could do quite a bit even with that dinky amount, especially as so-called "external media" - in this case, floppy disks that were actually floppy - could be used to hold the products of the machine's computations. These days the little floppy is practically a computing fossil as we have moved to massive and cheap internal and external hard drives.

With thousands of computer applications available and myriad uses for our PCs, it is also strange to ponder that the first killer application was the lowly spreadsheet.

But just as few remember what it was like to work out calculations on a slide rule, not many realise that once upon a time a company had to employ expensive mathematics whizzes to work out what now would be viewed as the most basic and trivial of spreadsheet chores.

If the company had access to a computer - which at the time meant a mainframe, the "Big Iron" market also dominated by IBM - then someone could do the calculations a lot faster, of course, running punchcards through the system. Imagine the transformation when suddenly, anyone could do spreadsheet calculations.

For a nominal amount, any Joe could change variables and run numbers to their hearts' content. Okay, that prospect may not seem wildly exciting, then or now, to most of us - but that tends to be the thing about pivotal breakthroughs, which typically make it easy to do something otherwise dull and essential.

Word processing, another big selling point for the first home and business PCs, also is pretty boring. Even the phrase: word processing.

I hate to think of the consolations and challenges, agonies and ecstasies of getting words arranged in exactly the right way as being a form of "processing", but as a digital task that could be assigned to a computer, I guess word processing remains a reasonable description.

Of course, there was processing and then there was processing, and early programs were pretty darn bad.

I used one that, when you hit the special "save" key, would save everything above the cursor and delete everything below it.

Clearly, the computer guys imagined that writers write by starting at the beginning then going straight through to the end, at which point the sparkling piece of prose can be permanently saved by hitting that save key. Except no writer writes like that. Writers go back and add a few words here, delete something there, add in a quote, remove a paragraph that is too long.

Hence my student newspaper office was punctuated with the pained screams of writers who, having spent three hours on a story, went back to fix the opening paragraph or add their byline and then hit save without remembering to scroll to the end. I still flinch at the memories of hours spent rewriting stories inadvertently sent to "typesetting heaven".

Despite the scars, I couldn't wait to get a computer of my own. That was several years later, and it was a boxy Apple Mac SE and cost almost double the tag on the 5150. It served me well for years and still works, too.

From talking to many people who work with and love computers, I know the memory of that first PC purchase is fondly cherished.

If more than one in a group turns out to have owned a Commodore 64, an Apricot, an early IBM PC, a BBC PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80, an early Mac, you'll hear squeals of excitement as the owners trade memories.

I could turn my old SE into a "Macquarium" full of tropical fish - as one could expect, there's a website dedicated to doing such a thing. But - dare I say it? - I have too much affection for that vintage beige box to tamper with it.

Who'd have thought 25 years ago that the PC would win over hearts as well as minds?