History of the Digital Age ? The Personal Computer ? A Product of ...

I think the intellectual leap from thinking of computers as huge monstrosity to private, personal property is vaguely misleading language. To me at least it conjures imagery of a single person with a prophetic view of a time and place when the computer would be in every home. To be fair, such ?prophets? did exist, but the leap from massive machines that were only viable in the commercial setting to smaller, privately owned devices was hardly the single vision of one person, or even of a single group. Instead, the ?leap? was created by a perfectly aligned series of groups, individuals and corporations to bring about the age of the personal computer.
In a sense, as Campbell-Kelly and Aspray seem inclined to believe, the leap from commercial to private was predictable for the computer; a foreseeable mix of mankind?s inherent curiosity, sociopolitical motivation and corporations willing to invest in possibility, plus a healthy dose of scientific genius of course. Such is the history of radio technology and, if I may make a leap of my own, will probably show it to be the history of internet technology. Each part, the enthusiastic hobbyist that built early minicomputers in his basement, the young entrepreneurial genius, the politically minded shouters who demand that such technology be shared and the well-established corporations that we still know today, all were significant and necessary for the leap to have successfully occurred. Think of it this way: had the Altair 8800 been designed and released without the tech hungry hobbyists and liberators already leaping to buy it, it would probably have been a failure or at least only a modest success, not the groundbreaking piece of history it is today. The intellectual leap was the product of its time, not of individuals.

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Source: http://history.msu.edu/hst250/2011/06/01/the-personal-computer-a-product-of-its-time/

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