From a technical perspective, the timing made sense—there was a foundation of microprocessor-based systems and a growing community of enthusiasts. But for the general public, it felt like computers went from obscure to omnipresent overnight. They were suddenly on TV, in magazines, featured in books, and even depicted in movies and shows. That cultural shift was massive. For many of us, it marked the beginning of having computers in our homes—something that’s never changed since.
I appreciated the article’s attention to detail too. The bit about the TRS-80 monitor being repurposed from an existing product (with a "Mercedes Silver" color to boot), and the PET’s sheet metal casing being a practical choice rather than a design one—those are the kinds of behind-the-scenes decisions that rarely get spotlighted but say a lot about how fast things were moving back then.
It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped, with basic human ingenuity and capability for expression having been crippled by reliance on increasingly advanced automation with increasingly simple interfaces.
Humanity is not going to fare well in the world of pervasive synthetic intelligence with simple language interfaces. I fear we will see an unprecedented dumbing down of the population, a new “dark age” perhaps.
When instead its always been like this. That certain types of people do certain things and others are highly disinterested in it, and this sort of modern 80s or 90s renaissance never occurred. It was the same tiny community of people doing the highly technical work, just like today.
I agree. I remember 1984, when all of my schoolyard peers had a home computer. It was only myself and one other guy that ever experimented with our systems' integrated BASIC. Everyone else exclusively used their computers for gaming. Unsurprisingly, the other programmer and I are the only two who subsequently made careers in IT.
Those computers were vastly simpler, and many weren't connected to any kind of external network (or the networks were, again, vastly simpler). It's like the difference between a Model T era car (many people possess the technical ability to maintain them, even today) versus a modern car.
It's not that we expect less of people today, we've just produced something much more complex so what it even means to understand or use a computer has changed, because it's not the same thing as 40-50 years ago. If I threw an Apple II level computer at someone today, I'd expect as much from them as throwing the same computer at someone in 1980 (actually more, they'd have more foundational knowledge than a random person in 1980 would have).
Moving to something modern, even a language that's considered easy to learn like python, you very quickly get into more complicated concepts. That seems to have created a situation where the easier and more powerful we make programming for programmers, the more it gets out of reach of anyone else. Though there are still languages specifically for learning (like BASIC), so that doesn't have to be a problem.
One of my sons was interested in learning programming, but the goal he envisioned was to write an AAA game. It was rather discouraging to have to tell him that it would take a minimum of 5 years (realistically more) to get to the level where he could consider getting hired into a team of hundreds to work on such a game.
In contrast, the first computer I had access to had a whopping 7167 bytes of RAM to work with, and a 25x40 character screen. Correspondingly, our ambitions were much more limited.
I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's magazine (the internet archive has issues until about 1990: <https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal?and%5B%5D=creat...>), and many articles seem to fall into the categories of either being fairly simple (mostly games), or visions of overly ambitious projects that likely never came to fruition (a multi user UNIX system implemented on an 8080 system with 32K RAM and a floppy drive, to be written by somebody who encountered his first computer two years earlier…).
To be sure, there were also quite sophisticated programs, such as a 6502 floating point package co-developed by Steve Wozniak.
Many commenters have pointed out that it was always a tiny fraction of people that could do this kind of thing, and I think that’s probably true, in retrospect. My ideas about the subject are probably colored by the fact that it always seemed easy to me, and I assumed (at the time) that others would also find it easy because I hadn’t come to grips with the bell curve yet. But if I think critically, there was basically no one I knew that was doing anything more ambitious than typing in games from magazines at that time…. So perhaps my worries about the dumbing down of society are overblown?
After all, it’s not like no one is graduating high school or something.
We did BASIC (& Logo) programming in my elementary school, on Apple IIs. It's rare anybody got past basic "hunt the wumpus" programs.
There were program listings for simple games in the back of computer magazines of the era. Invariably the better ones were full of DATA statements at the end that were bits of 6502 or Z80 machine code to do the "real" work. Woe befell you if you typed them in slightly wrong.
Later, mostly in the "16-bit" era, we got structured BASIC varieties with better/real editors, and that definitely changed things. I got a lot done in GFA Basic on my Atari ST. But it's debatable if GW-BASIC, GFA Basic, (and later Visual Basic) etc were "really" BASICs... they were more like ... permissive and weird Pascal.
Just because it's a skill you value doesn't mean its a skill others value
I spent a fair amount of time in the early-mid 80's tutoring engineering students in Computer Science (basically a CS101 for non-CS students). A fair number of otherwise very smart people simply couldn't grasp the concepts beyond the very basics.
The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype. Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.
In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.
You can still use these machines - this holy trinity of computers still get regular software made for them - and as platforms, there is a resurgence happening.
The ZX Spectrum Next. The myriad FPGA-based consoles that allow full access to entire "retired architectures". The Apollo A6000 'next-gen Amiga' .. all of these new 'hobbyist systems' fulfil the original need that the 'trinity' systems proposed. There are, literally, hundreds of different ways to get a modern reproduction of the 'second wave' systems.
So I imagine a day, in the not too distant future, that really useful applications are released for the 'next-gen 8-bit hobby microcomputer' systems. Put a well-fitted Apple II environment in a wrist-watch, and watch the devs arrive .. ;)
By way of example, I have in my (admittedly extensive) retro computing collection, an Oric-1/Atmos system that was used consistently, every single week for 40 years, to record motorbike club membership details, statistics, visit logs, and so on. For 40 years that system was doing its job as an on-site membership database and fuel log. That it was offline and only physically accessible was a feature, not a bug.
I think there are plenty of other places that the modern, new-school 'retro-' microcomputers can find their setting - just a little bit above embedded, perhaps, side-wise to the mobile, and very definitely competing alongside desktop in terms of active user experience.
Not to mention, all the 'new retro consoles' are an awesome market for games and entertainment, of course ..
Quite amusingly it tends to be a very narrow and specialized things usually. Quite the opposite of the universability of a modern computers.
They’re “infinite machines” inasmuch as there is an infinity of uses for a computer, and not all of those cases are obvious.
Great learning tool if you dream of building your own CPU architecture:)
Try it!
I cut my programming teeth on an Acorn Electron (a somewhat cut-down BBC Micro) then later a Master128. The fact that the BASIC ROM included a decent multi-pass assembler was great for learning the deeper workings of the machine and such things in general. Being able to easily mix BASIC and assembly provided good lessons wrt choosing where optimisations were worth bothering with and where you should just stick with BASIC to save dev time. Those machines were also based around variants of the 6502.
So the BASIC ROM was not a lost 16KB of address space if you were only using Assembly.
Was always jealous of people who had that available to them, and that it was built into the BASIC of the BBC machines is pretty cool. Even the monitor program built into the Apple II was superior.
All the original manuals/ads/etc (that I can find online) called it the Apple-1 (Arabic, not Roman). I think Woz was already working on the Apple II by the time the Apple I was released.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#/media/File:Apple_1_Ad... [1]: https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/apple.applei.19...
And in the schematics towards the end of the manual
I still have my Atari 800 — it was my first real step into learning 6502 machine language.
I think the same opportunity exists now in the hobby robot market.
Back in the day we had everyone in the club set some goals for their robot, mine were simple; on voice command, have my robot go to a special refrigerator, get out a cold Diet Dr. Pepper, replace it with one from stock, then bring the cold one to me, where ever I was in the house.
Even allowing for a lot of customized environment to support the robot that is a really high bar today (much less in 1998 when I was thinking I'd have it working by the early 2000's)
End effectors, vision, custom fridge that an open electonically on demand with structured storage to hold beverages in pre-specified places, etc etc. I could probably get a lot closer.
Of course my eldest child could do that at 3 years old without any programming at all and no custom engineering of the appliances. So some things seem effortless for people are really challenging for computers.
[1] I was President of the Home Brew Robotics Club (hbrc.org) for 10 years around the turn of the century (after Dick Prather had been President for 10 years and before Wayne Gramlich became President for 10 years :-)
Some CMU graduate students attended one of the demos, and discovered two people discreetly loitering in the background, one doing the "speaking" of the robot, and the other remote controlling it.
Luckily in today's more advanced times, we have Optimus shipping any day now, which definitely has never been teleoperated at any of its demos…
