08-31-2016, 08:11 AM
(08-31-2016, 12:05 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-30-2016, 11:04 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Computers have been around a long time. At what point did computers move from being primarily owned and used by big government and big business to being made available and being made affordable to everyone else. I say Reagan's election and the further implementation of supply side economics made owning a computer for ones business or personal use possible. You're a 3rd gen tech dude. I'm a dude who has been in business for close to 25 years.
Your timing was about right. The Apple II came out in 1977. The personal computer came before Reagan by a bit, but really took of during his time in office.
But it was the microprocessor chip that made cheap PCs possible that caused the explosion more than economic policy. I graduated from college in 1977 and watched the mini and micro computer age take off from Route 128 near Boston. Nothing was going to stop the technology or speed it up much. The microprocessor was an idea whose time had come.
Well, it was Reagan's time as well. Tax and spend had been overdone. A spectacular series of national failures resulted in Carter's national malaise. The notion that the US could attack a whole bunch of problems all at once and inevitably triumph at all of them had grown exhausting, and the failures just kept on coming during the 1970s. The disillusionment led to a call for smaller government and less taxes. In the field of government it was a time of pulling back and doing less.
But that wasn't the mood on Route 128. The tech industry was booming. Government and the tech industry were going in different directions just then.
The first Tech revolution gave America the gigantic mainframe computers that allowed cumbersome calculations to be done in bulk. Those computers devoured huge amounts of energy, cost fortunes to build and maintain, and broke down often. The second tech revolution created the computer chips that allowed computers that cost about as much as a good stereo system or a six-year-old used car at the time and did not require so much energy to run and cool. Then came more subtle refinements of the chips that now allow the creation of all sorts of fantasies -- maybe a live 99-year-old John F. Kennedy having a chat with a live Pope John Paul II (also deceased in reality) at the World Trade Center in New York City on some screen that has the word "LIVE" on it. (Yes, next year will be the JFK centennial. Time flies, does it not?). To top it off, the Pope has arrived on the Titanic. Let us not be suckers.
Now we have tablets and cell phones that we can buy for about the same price as a pair of shoes. I have one that I use exclusively for an input to the stereo system; it cost about $50 and a router that I had gotten for the chance to read some long novel on Project Gutenberg. The real revolution is finding new, humanizing ways to use computer power.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.