OBJETIVO ESPECÍFICO 3

Nowadays it would be difficult to find a middle- to upper-class household in the United States that lacks a personal computer. Many homes, in fact, own more than one: iMacs and Dells and Gateways, home-built PCs and brand-X clones sit on our desktops, countertops, and kitchen tables. Outside the home, laptop computers, one to a person, crowd the tables at coffee shops and schools and libraries. These computers run word pro- cessors and web browsers, programs for playing games, editing digital photos, balancing checkbooks, and charting family genealogies. Software tailored for entertainment and productivity rides atop operating systems designed to be accessible to a general public: simple icons, point-and-click interfaces, mice and trackpads (used in laptops) that anyone from a child to a senior citizen can operate. Increasingly, computer processors and storage devices are encroaching on that most hallowed shrine of American domestic life—the living room TV—as well as the smaller end of the scale, the pocket devices of phone, camera, calendar, and address book. In sum, personal computers and computing devices constitute a suite of technologies that work with us in our most intimate, mundane, everyday spaces and actions.

But it was not always this way. Only a few decades have passed since the personal com- puter’s hulking ancestors squatted low to the earth like immobile dinosaurs: computers that were themselves the size of living rooms, of entire houses. And the uses these machines were put to had nothing to do with personal finances or instant-messaging friends; instead, they calculated missile trajectories, chemical interactions, mathematical simulations— concerns specific to the places, and populations, where these early computing machines existed. Since then, however, the behemoths found in military bases and research labs have undergone a radical change. This transformation involved breathtakingly rapid advances in miniaturization, memory storage, graphics displays, and power supplies: a string of break- throughs so regular and seamless they scarcely deserve to be labeled as such. However, equally important was the social dimension of the personal computer’s rise. The personal computer sprang in equal part from the counterculture 1960s and the commodity-mad 1970s, bringing together both a populist impulse that proclaimed Computers should be available to everyone! and a commercial imperative that said Computers are the next big

consumer market! The result was a cultural as much as a technological revolution, respon- sible for new directions in hardware and software design, new audiences for computer use and programming, that characterize the modern computing landscape.

Among all of these changes, perhaps no element was more emblematic than the video game. As the first purely recreational use of computer hardware, video games represented a redefinition of what—and who—computers were really ‘‘for.’’ A generation of pro- grammers honed their software skills writing games; home users built their own computers in order to make and play games; entire companies were started in order to market games to a new audience of personal computer owners; and the needs of gaming (better and faster graphics and sound, input devices like the trackball and joystick, networked computing environments for head-to-head play) drove technological innovation in the computer industry. In a real sense, video games were the ‘‘killer app’’ that transformed the giant machines of the 1940s and 1950s into the sleek plastic boxes that currently can be purchased at Best Buy and brought home in the back seat of an SUV.

The earliest electronic computers, like the 40-ton ENIAC of World War II, used vacuum tubes to switch bits of binary data—the operation at the heart of all digital computers—on and off. But the tubes were large and hot, preventing them from being placed too closely together, which imposed a maximum size and power limit on the first generation of thinking machines. Technical advances over the next several years made it possible for computers to become much smaller, cooler, and faster. The vacuum tube begat the transistor, the transistor begat the integrated circuit (IC), and the integrated circuit begat the microprocessor. Each innovation packed more binary switches and logic gates into a smaller space, increasing computer power by orders of magnitude while reducing their physical ‘‘footprint.’’ By the 1960s, a small cadre of minicomputers had emerged, taking up residence in college research labs and making inroads in the world of business. It was here, using the refrigerator-sized LINCs, PDP-8s, and VAXes, that an early generation of programmers began putting computers to recreational use, creating the first computer games and designing ever more elaborate graphical ‘‘hacks.’’ Access to the minicomputers was generally guarded by a priesthood—an inner circle of authorized users who stood between the burgeoning population of enthusiasts and the machines that so fascinated them. Hackers engaged in a perpetual contest to gain access to the machines and run programs written in their spare time, outside the strictures of class assignments and business projects. In pushing against the priesthood’s authority and the interdiction that computers were only for serious, public use, 60s hackers laid the groundwork for a computing culture that would truly be open to all comers—small, cheap, privatized computers.

In the early 1970s, the development of Intel’s 8008 ‘‘computer on a chip’’—thousands of logic circuits imprinted on a single piece of silicon—made it possible, for the first time, for home users to build computers for their own enjoyment. Yet none of the big companies like IBM and DEC that had dominated the 1960s seemed interested in exploiting the home market. This oversight can be attributed in part to a cultural misperception: a belief, possibly unconscious, that the values and passions of domestic space were incompatible with the institutional definition of computers as tools for large-scale, serious computation. While this was perhaps understandable given where computers had ‘‘evolved,’’ it failed to take into account a generational logic by which those who had been teased with computers in the 1960s came into the 1970s ready to make such a thing happen. The first personal computers would come from hobbyists and fanatics, not from big corporations.

The first machine that can properly be called a personal computer, the MITS Altair 8800 released in 1975, may look primitive to us now, but it was by no means a simple device. Rather than spreading its processor demands across a flotilla of circuit boards, the Altair made use of Intel’s single-chip microprocessor. It arrived not as a finished machine but a kit, a box of pieces that users had to assemble themselves—a laborious process that often took months and encouraged hobbyists to communicate with each other, pooling resources in order to answer questions and solve technical problems. Once assembled, the Altair had to be programmed through a tedious process of flicking individual switches, literally setting on/off registers in the computer’s 256-byte memory. There was no storage capacity, so even the act of loading an operating system had to be performed anew each time the Altair was switched on. And there was no display, so the unit could only communicate through flashing the lights on its front panel. Nevertheless, the Altair was a success beyond anything its creators planned, eventually selling 10,000 units.1

The Altair is significant not just because it represents the first time computers had fallen within reach of the home user, but because the social and commercial trends it kicked off directly fed into the next phase of the personal computer explosion. The technically advanced community of Altair builders came together to form a grass roots organization known as the Homebrew movement. As other kit computers joined the marketplace, these groups found common ground in the Homebrew Computer Club, holding periodic meetings in which announcements were shared and technical problems solved. Homebrew also seeded an interest with many individuals who would go on to play integral roles in the personal computer’s development, including a young Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen, and Bill Gates.

Without a doubt, the most significant year of the decade was 1977, which saw the launch of three separate machines—each different from the other in terms of technical capability, audience, and brand identity, but equally epochal. The Commodore PET was one of the first computers to incorporate a monitor, keyboard, and cassette-tape storage device in the same case as the motherboard (the board with all the computer chips on it). Pyramidal and white, PETs quickly began to appear in schoolrooms across America. The TRS-80 was the first computer to be sold by the ubiquitous, low-end hardware store Radio Shack. Developed by parent company Tandy, the TRS-80 packaged a combination keyboard/motherboard, a cassette storage unit, and a black-and-white display for $599. In its base configuration, it came with 4K of RAM (16 times that of the Altair 8800), which could be expanded to 16K or 48K for an additional cost. The TRS-80 was a best-seller, shipping 250,000 units2before its discontinuation in January 1981. However, Tandy’s vanguard machine never lost its air of essential cheapness, and this, along with its affiliation with the little-respect Radio Shack, led many to dub it the ‘‘Trash-80.’’

1977 was also the year that the Apple II hit the market. Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, two scruffy college kids who were part of the Homebrew culture, assembled the first Apple in a suburban California garage, selling their Volkswagen to finance the project. While the Apple I, in its wooden case, was built primarily to impress other hackers and hobbyists, its followup—the Apple II—was an immediate and unmitigated success, the first true personal computer and the first commercial blockbuster. By 1980, only three years after its introduction, Apple had become a billion-dollar company.

The Apple II’s streamlined beige case contained a motherboard, keyboard, and expan- sion slots. Wozniak’s clever engineering placed 6502 microprocessor at the heart of a complex circuit board that held a maximum of 48K of RAM. More significantly for home

enthusiasts, the Apple II boasted a colorful display (both in blocky ‘‘lo-res’’ graphics and a separate ‘‘hi-res’’ mode). The problem faced by the Altair 8800 only a few years earlier, of limited memory and an almost completely inscrutable input-output scheme, was decisively resolved by the Apple II, whose open architecture and multiple expansions slots encouraged the home users’ creation of software and hardware. The Apple II came with a programming language, Integer BASIC, prestored in ROM. The machine also shipped with reference manuals laying out every detail of the circuit board and ROM architecture. All of this contributed to a robust community of developers whose innovations supplied the Apple II with programs and peripherals to meet many needs.

What kinds of software did these early personal computers run? Overwhelmingly, the answer was video games. Machines like the Apple II were a gamer’s dream, offering color graphics and sound capable of emulating the video games found in public arcades. Conversions of games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man existed alongside embryonic versions of many of today’s popular software genres, including flight simulators and even rudimentary first-person shooters. Even computers like the TRS-80, whose graphics were limited to the ASCII character set, thrived on a diet of text-based adventures. Other text- based games written for teletype terminals—titles like Star Trek, Eliza, Hunt the Wumpus, and Colossal Cave Adventure—found their way into homes through the publication of David H. Ahl’s Basic Computer Games in 1978. Outside the world of gaming, Visicalc, an accounting spreadsheet, became the first ‘‘killer app’’ for the Apple II, serving both as a home tool to manage finances and as a business tool for companies brave enough to break with the minicomputer tradition and use microcomputers in the workplace. But it was video games that introduced the notion of the personal computer as a plaything and more importantly an interactive playmate: a logic that often motivated the computer’s purchase by parents who saw in the machine a tool that would intrigue and entertain their children.

A large factor in the proliferation of video games, both legal and illegal, was the devel- opment of cheap, fast storage media. Ever since the days of punchcard storage, software had been copied and modified by one user after another, spreading virally throughout the technical community. Now a similar practice emerged, first around paper printouts of BASIC listings, then around electronic storage media. And here one of the personal computer’s early limitations came into sharp relief. The first personal computers used audiocassette players and tapes to read and write programs to memory. The tape drives were slow and often unreliable. A faster alternative was the floppy disk drive, which wrote data onto flat floppy disks in plastic sleeves, 51_{⁄4inches across. Though floppies had been} in use for years as a storage medium for minicomputers, the Apple II was one of the first computers to make this mode of storage practical on a home budget, utilizing a controller card plugged into the motherboard. The TRS-80 and PET also featured floppy drives as expensive upgrades. Once a computer made the move to DOS (disk operating system), programs could be loaded and saved much more quickly and conveniently. Floppies also enabled software to be copied more efficiently, leading to a spread of shared software and the flourishing of piracy.

The troika of Apple, Commodore, and Tandy dominated the market throughout the late 1970s. As the decade turned, however, several competitors appeared. Texas Instru- ments, heretofore a maker of calculators, introduced a color computer called the TI-99/4a in 1979. Commodore offered a low-cost followup to the PET, the VIC-20, followed in 1982 by the Commodore 64, which went on to become the best-selling personal

computer of the twentieth century. Also of note were the game-maker Atari’s entries in the field, the Atari 400 and 800. Like the TI-99/4a, the Atari computers featured add-on slots for game cartridges, an alternative to floppies. All of the machines featured color graphics, sophisticated sound, and chip sets specialized for the delivery of dazzling audiovisuals, a sign of the important role played by video gaming in setting performance agenda.

But this crowded field thinned out with the introduction of two machines that quickly came to symbolize divergent trends in personal computer design. In 1981, IBM released its Personal Computer, effectively branding the letters ‘‘PC’’ for any machine working to IBM specifications and running an operating system known as PC-DOS. Initially too expensive to make inroads on the home market, the IBM PC proved successful as a low- end business machine. Significantly, the DOS operating system was sold under the name MS-DOS by its creator, the software company Microsoft, leading to a wave of PC clones—functionally equivalent computers released by different companies. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, PCs and their descendents became a dominant sector of the personal computer market.

The other landmark computer launched at the time was Apple’s Macintosh, released in 1984 amid an advertising campaign that stressed the Mac’s difference from the PC. The Mac marked a major turn in Apple’s philosophy of computer aesthetics and set forth a paradigm for the interface that profoundly shaped computer design from that point onward. Molded into an all-in-one unit of off-white plastic, the Mac comprised a black-and-white monitor and a 3.5-inch floppy drive. A keyboard connected to it, but the real innovation was a second device which attached to the keyboard: a small, square pointing device known as a mouse. The mouse was essentially a trackball, like that on the arcade game Missile Command, but turned on its belly: moving the mouse caused an arrow-shaped cursor to move on-screen. This was the key to the Macintosh’s interface, an all-encompassing graphic environment modeled on the metaphor of a desktop, complete with folders and a trash can for deleting documents. Users could point and click objects on-screen—represented by icons—and drag them to new locations as though they were physical objects. The cartoonish, simple, almost toylike nature of the Mac interface was intended to make using the computer an easy, immediate experience (further demolishing the wall of expertise that so forbiddingly surrounded more complex machine surfaces) while hiding away the complex inner workings of machine language and program listings. The interface was also interesting for its indebtedness to gaming: the icons resembled avatars, and the visual layout of the desktop embodied a spatial metaphor very much like the on-screen worlds of video games.

Many of the Mac’s features, which also included a suite of built-in applications like MacPaint and MacWrite, were later appropriated by other software designers. Despite Apple’s protests and attempts to legally protect its designs, the WIMP interface (for windows-icon-menu-pointer) formed the core of other GUIs (graphical user interfaces). The greatest such ‘‘appropriation’’ was undoubtedly Microsoft’s: In 1985, the company introduced Windows as a module for MS-DOS. It followed up with Windows 3.0 in 1990, Windows 95 and 98 in 1995 and 1998, respectively, Windows XP in 2001 and Windows Vista in 2006—amid a host of other versions targeted at both professional and home users. With each iteration, Windows became a more fully featured GUI and operating system, paralleling but never exactly mimicking the Macintosh OS. To this day, the Mac and PC worlds exist in a curious state of detente, establishing reluctant

dialogue like two global superpowers, aware that they have to share the same planet but resisting, on a core level, each others’ basic ideology.

Throughout the 1990s and into the first decades of the twenty-first century, the personal computer has continued to grow in capability and flexibility. In general, PCs have enjoyed access to a wider field of video game software, with the hardcore gaming community investing much time and money in building ever more powerful and elaborate ‘‘rigs’’—often outfitted in neon-lit ‘‘case mods’’—to showcase the latest games in both solo and multiplayer competition. The advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and its exponential growth in the years that followed was a direct result of a broadly installed base of computers in the home, networked together over first phone lines, then cable—another medium in which gamers have thrived. The contemporary personal computer takes on many forms, from home-built PCs to all-in-one Macs to packages put together by companies such as Dell. In the roughly 30 years that personal computers have been in existence, they have continued to multiply in power—as measured by microprocessor complexity, memory and storage capacity, and graphics capability—and drop proportionately in price. The personal computers of today have long surpassed the monsters of yesteryear, and the trend does not seem destined to let up. As high-end computing machinery reaches casual home users, the cultural meaning of computers will continue to evolve, fitting ever more intimately into our daily existence.