How the Digital Age Was Built

The first thing to understand about the Digital Age and the home computing revolution was that it was all one big accident.

Actually, it was more like a series of little accidents. With other inventions, like cars or washing machines or bread, we had a good idea of what we wanted and just needed to find out how to get it. With computers, it was the other way around. We had tons of know-how to build them, but we kept building them and then asking "Now what do we do with it?"

Because before there was a home computer market, nobody could possibly imagine what a home user would want a computer for. Since there was no home computer market, computers were still reels of tape and punched cards and huge iron cubes the size of a refrigerator. The office, military, and factory had plenty of uses for computers, of course. But what would Suzie Soccer-mom do with it? Paint it pink and hang lace on it? Teach it to sing?

You can see the way they fumbled around back in the 1980s trying to find a market for home computers, from looking at the computer ads of the time. A whole family of smiling parents and kids, gathered around a machine that was displaying a pie chart on the screen. Yes, folks, computers could... well... compute! If you needed anything computed, a computer was the thing to compute it on! Whatever computing was. That's the thing, is that for a while, the home computer market was a solution in search of a problem.

Video games are what sold the home computer. First, video game arcades introduced people the world over to the concept of playing a game on an electronic device which could provide sophisticated logic, for the price of a mere coin. Once home users learned that a computer could entertain them, and yet be interactive where a radio or a TV was passive, you had to nail the computers down to keep the home users from carrying them away. Computers doing work in the home was a lost market at the time. Entertainment, they could understand.

This is why all of your important first home computer units - the Ataris, Commodores, Spectrums, Tandys, and early Apples - were game machines first and "computers" second. Besides a game, nobody had any idea why someone would pay for software. So most home consoles came with a language interpreter built in, and a book of instructions on how to code in simple programs. 90% of these notebooks were discarded, while people were happy to just play games. Ah, but that other ten percent led the revolution.

Soon, through hobbyist programming, home users discovered what kinds of jobs a computer was good for. It could do your taxes, save your recipes, manage your business records, and even draw pretty pictures. To do any of these things, software had to be created, and the hobbyists would discover each new application and eventually, commercial software companies at last began understanding how to build useful software that the home user would want.

We're up to the 1990s, now. Apple was doing wonderfully. Linux was born. CP/M and OS/2 seemed about all the desktop on IBM-cloned PCs would amount to. Microsoft meandered out onto the stage, though it was first called "Micro-Soft" and was up until then a programming language and a version of the Disk Operating System (DOS), which was only one among many. Mobile devices had peeked into the market, software companies were starting to make actual money, and movies began to use CGI imagery.

But the market seemed to be saturated, because, while peer-to-peer networking was possible with dial-up modems, the world didn't have a standard for networking. Everybody who wanted a computer for games or business had one. That's when a scientist at CERN - the same CERN who has recently given us the Large Hadron Collider - came up with the World Wide Web, and this touched off the second home computer revolution.

This led us to today. Suddenly, everyone else who didn't have a computer wanted one now, because it was the way to go on the World Wide Web. That's it, that's the end of the story. In case you missed it, the Digital Age was built by (1) games, and (2) Internet. Oh, sure, the computer professionals and enthusiasts had their own separate evolution; you need builders to become interested first before the others will follow. But these two events gave computers their place in the mainstream home, making them a consumer commodity.

Where are we going next? The technology world evolves so fast, it's impossible to get enough of a handle on it to say where it's going. Desktop machines are fading away and mobile devices are the future, but after that, where it goes is anybody's guess.

Filed Under: The Internetz