August 12 marks the 30th anniversary of the personal computer. So it’s either fitting or ironic that Mark Dean, an IBM engineer who worked on the company’s first PC now says of personal computers: “They’re going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.”

Dean shared his thoughts ^[1] on an IBM-sponsored blog. Many questioned IBM’s decision to sell its PC business to Lenovo in 2005, he writes, but, “it’s now clear that our company was in the vanguard of the post-PC era.”

Speaking of the post-PC era, Dean says he himself has moved beyond the PC and now uses a tablet as his “primary computer.” He doesn’t tell us who made that tablet, but it’s interesting to consider that IBM made the first tablet computer, the ThinkPad 700T, all the way back in 1990.

Perhaps Apple’s lawyers should consider this before insisting to German and other courts that anything that looks like a tablet ^[2]violates the company’s patents and trademarks.

Read more at CNET ^[3].