When Chuck Stevens entered the technology industry as a programmer in the late 1960s, his computer was so large he could walk around inside it.

Now, Stevens is executive vice president of Rosemont-based technology company Comdisco. And instead of walking around inside them, Stevens uses computers so small he can surf the 'Net while walking down the street.

Arguably, the evolution of the computer can be traced to the abacus counters that emerged about 5,000 years ago. Its modern origins began around World War II, when "we really start to see the collision of computing and the development of electronics," said Steve Jones, head of the communications department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Those early main frame computers were developed in the '40s and '50s at colleges like the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and used in academia and the military for complex mathematical calculations. They were enormous, taking up several rooms, expensive and positively slothful by today's standards, though, as a 1952 University of Illinois press release touted, one could do the work in five hours that it would have taken the calculators of the day 50 years to complete. Those first computers saved data on tape drives, recorded results on punch cards and used typewriters as interfaces - no monitors, yet.

Bolstered by the invention of the transistor in the late 1940s, the integrated circuit in the late 1950s, the semiconductor and other breakthroughs, computers got smaller, faster and more reliable through the ensuing decades.

As microprocessors came on the scene in the 1970s, computers were becoming portable, or at least about the size of a large suitcase. The era of the personal computer was nearing.

Limited in the early days to hobbyists and their do-it-yourself computer kits, personal computers were introduced to the public by IBM in 1981. Within one year, the number of PCs in use had doubled to 5.5 million. By 1995, that number rose to 65 million.

The PC also brought major changes in offices. Clunky old main frames were replaced by series of PCs linked together to form local-area networks and the client/server wave.

A similar idea - linking computers together for the sake of information-sharing - also forged the Internet, the World Wide Web and e-mail. Fledging networks were being developed on university campuses and by the government as early as the 1960s and '70s. But the growth of the number of linked networks and the advent of graphic technology and Web browsers in the early 1990s unleashed the Internet-based commercial revolution now under way.

The pace of change in computers today is even faster. While today's microchips have 64 million transistors in them, that number could increase to 64 billion in 10 to 15 years, Stevens said, as new synthetic materials that work on the subatomic level are developed.

Likewise, while a few hundred megahertz of processing power is, well, mega, by today's standards, within 10 years there will be systems in the gigahertz range, Stevens said.

The latest ability to surf the Internet with wireless technology - bringing a portability unheard of even with the "wired" laptop - may be the next wave, said Jones, who has written several books on computer history and usage.

"The main thing I find interesting is the unpredictability of the uses," Jones said. "We just don't know what's going to happen next."

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