ABSTRACT
The personal computer we know today might never have happened were it not for computer amateurs in the 1970s. In many ways, the development of the personal computer was an echo of the way that radio was a new technology fostered by enthusiasts until it was adopted by corporate interests and became mainstream in the 1920s. In the case of the personal computer, the new technology was the microprocessor – the computer on a chip. In the early 1970s technically savvy computer amateurs began to build their own “microcomputers.” Their technical fixation, however, was moderated by the computer-liberation movement, which sought to wrest computer technology from corporations and put it into people’s hands. By the mid-1970s hundreds of small firms were supplying computer kits and software for microcomputers. The two great survivors of this period were Apple Computer and Microsoft. It was not until the end of the 1970s that the industry giant IBM woke up to microcomputers. In 1981 it launched its “personal computer” and gave a lasting name to the desktop computer that would become an industry standard up to the present day.
