Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture

4: The Many Creators of the Personal Computer

The Many Creators of the Personal Computer The 1970s saw the emergence of a radically different kind of machine from the mainframes depicted in Desk Set and 2001. The “personal computer” was small, self-contained, designed for individual use, and priced for consumer purchase. It broadly expanded the public availability of computing power, and transformed American notions about computing. So how did we get from the mainframe to the PC? Rather than a smooth, linear development, the history of the PC is marked by false starts, dead ends, and unpredicted moments of convergence. Sociologists of technology have developed a helpful model for understanding the emergence of new technologies, labeled Social Construction of Technological Systems (“SCOT”). Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker write, In SCOT the developmental process of a technological artifact is described as an alternation of variation and selection. This results in a “multidirectional” model, in contrast with the linear models used explicitly in many innovation studies and implicitly in much history of technology . Such a multidirectional view is essential to any social constructivist account of technology. Of course, with historical hindsight, it is possible to collapse the multidirectional model on to a simpler linear model; but this misses the thrust of our argument that the “successful” stages in the development are not the only possible ones.1 In tracing the multidirectional path of PC development in the 1970s, this chapter will examine a series of technological projects, including the development of the ECHO home computer system, the emergence of minicomputers and time-sharing, the formulation of Moore’s Law, the 4 81 marketing of the microprocessor, and finally, the invention of the Altair, hailed by most observers as the “first personal computer.” As we shall see, each project reflected an intersection of multiple, often conflicting visions of computing. What we think of today as the PC is not the result of any single dominating vision. Rather, we live in the legacy of numerous struggles , alliances, and negotiations, out of which emerged contemporary notions of the personal computer. ECHO: Making Room for a “Home Computer” The first computer designed specifically for home use was the ECHO IV, the project of a Westinghouse engineer named Jim Sutherland.2 Borrowing surplus controller hardware and memory from his job, Sutherland pieced together a complete computer system in his house in 1965. The guts of the computer resided in his basement, in four large wooden cabinets weighing a total of 800 pounds. Wires connecting input stations and output terminals ran throughout the house—there was a keyboard in the living room, a teletype in the kitchen, and several binary displays that hung over doorways and on ceilings. In 1966 Westinghouse began publicizing its employee’s futuristic project , and the Sutherland family appeared in a series of newspaper and magazine articles. As a story in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing recounts, The accompanying photo from an early article on the machine shows Jim Sutherland at the console with his wife [Ruth] putting a raincoat on daughter Sally while [son] Jay and daughter Ann look on. The food [on the table in front of them] is supposed to symbolize how ECHO had the potential to track the groceries, and the raincoat was in case ECHO learned to predict changes in the weather, which it never did.3 Jim and Ruth Sutherland also made a series of presentations to meetings of home economists, discussing the computer’s impact on their family’s lives. The ECHO raised for the first time the question of what it might mean to computerize a home. Where would you put a computer? What would it do?4 We can see in the uses to which ECHO was put some early attempts to answer the question. 82 | The Many Creators of the Personal Computer One answer was the kitchen. While installing 800 pounds of computing equipment in the basement and running wires up to a terminal in the kitchen just to make out shopping lists and file recipes in binary form may seem like comical overkill, ECHO wasn’t the only kitchen computerization project of 1966. That year also saw the introduction (and quick failure ) of the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, a powerful 16-bit machine that came with a built-in cutting board.5 The cumbersome attempts to computerize the kitchen of the 1960s may seem silly in retrospect; after all, the kitchen of today...