The Home Computer Revolution I have been into computers even before there were personal computers. When I look back I realize the really useful ones came out in the middle 1980s or their abouts. I have talked about those old computers a couple of times, but not from the aspect of how they were trailblazers. When the first home computers came out they were nothing more than toys. I have to say they did one job very well and that was wetting a person’s appetite for more. Some had keyboards which were only good for experimenting with. It really didn’t matter because the memory was so limited you couldn’t do much with just a couple of thousand bytes. I was in college in the early 1970s using mainframe computers and wanted to try a new Sinclair computer. I ordered one and my heart dropped when I opened the box. There was this tiny device which was so limited you really couldn’t do anything useful with it. From that point on, desktop computers started to improve. The Texas Instrument’s TI-99/4A was a well made machine which even had built in sprites you could make into any shape when creating a game. It had some pretty good competition at the time. They were up against the Apple 2, TRS-80, and even the Atari 400/600. The Commodore VIC-20 was a very popular machine. The TI-99/4A was also the first 16 bit home computer. We were still not at the point however when the average person could do useful things with a computer. In 1982 a computer hit the market that excited me. This machine became the most sold computer in the world. It was the Commodore 64. It bragged it had 64 KB of memory, which is 64,000 bytes. At the time this was considered incredible. To give you an idea, General Motors was running a computer with the same amount of memory. I saw this as the first computer I might be able to get some use out of. One point to mention is its price was considered very low at the time. I was actually able to use this computer for keeping track of inventory. The computer did have to use some of the memory for the operating system, so the amount left for the user was about 39,500 bytes. It was capable of using a floppy disk for storage so this helped with the memory limit. It still was not ready for serious home use, but it could play games and accepted a game cartridge. If I had to guess, this was the turning point for the computer industry because people were so interested in the machine it primed the industry to create more capable computers for home use which could actually be beneficial to those who wanted a computer to use for serious things. Moving on to desktop computers which allow for this, and allowed for games, resulted in people wanted to get one. There were no laptops yet and the computers called portable were nothing more than the desktop put into a big bulky case with a handle. In 1985 Windows was released. It allowed for the use of word processors, spread sheets and all sorts of personal programs. In 1983 Apple had come out with the Lisa. It had a mouse, one of the very first. The mouse was based on a mouse device from the 1970s used on the Alto Xerox PARC computer. The Lisa had used folders, icons and a sort of Windows system. Commodore which had the best selling computer at the time, the Commodore 64 knew in order to maintain its lead it had to come out with a more advanced computer than everyone else, and so it did in 1985. It came out with the Commodore Amiga. The machine was far ahead of the competition. The first Amiga was the Amiga 500 and blew away the competition. It had an operating system called AmigaOS. It had a very advanced processor at the time which was the Motorola 6800 and 256 KB of memory which was expandable. The beautiful desktop screen had 64,000 colors available. It could open many screens on the desktop and each one could be a different resolution. Try doing this on your home computer, you won’t succeed. It was so good, Hollywood effects artists traded in there hundreds of thousand dollars special effects computers for a version of the Video Toaster a special version of the Amiga and proceeded to use it for movie and television special effects. One of the shows made with a video toaster was Babylon 5. Yes, the Amiga also had some great games. Finally, software which needed a lot of memory at the time could use an Amiga to do incredible things like create 3D programs. It had a custom graphics chip no one else had and for a while was the hottest selling computer. While computers had shrunk down from those huge room filling devices, some people wanted smaller devices, but didn’t want to give up the abilities they now had. Amiga had come out with a portable computer but it was a joke, it wasn’t very portable. Then it happened, laptops started to appear. Actually, one was introduced in 1981, it was the Osborne 1. It weighed 24.5 pounds and had to be plugged in. A couple of others had come out but the price was far too high for ordinary people. IBM released a laptop in 1986 which was the first to weigh under 15 pounds, but it was a company named Compaq which released the first battery powered laptop. It was the Compaq SLT/286. It had VGA graphics, an internal hard drive and had the notebook style. Companies began to realize there was a market for a small capable computer and they began to throw their hats into the ring. In 1989 Apple introduced a Mac Portable. It was not a good seller. In 1991 they tried to correct this and came out with the Mac PowerBook. This time they had a success on their hands. One thing led to another and smaller devices were wanted and we eventually got the tablet. It was introduced in 1989 by GRiD systems and was the GRiDPad 1900. It weighed 4.5 pounds and required the use of a tethered pen. They were the company which eventually made the famous PalmPilot. As time went by, things got even smaller and smart phones began taking over for computers. Suddenly they started to become all purpose devices and many of us found we didn’t even need a computer anymore because we could do anything we wanted on our phones.
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