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PublishedMit Press, May 2020 |
ISBN9780262044011 |
FormatHardcover, 256 pages |
Dimensions25.4cm × 21.7cm × 2.7cm |
A celebration of the early years of the digital revolution, when computing power was deployed in a beige box on your desk.Today, people carry powerful computers in our pockets and call them "phones." A generation ago, people were amazed that the processing power of a mainframe computer could be contained in a beige box on a desk.
This book is a celebration of those early home computers, with specially commissioned new photographs of 100 vintage computers and a generous selection of print advertising, product packaging, and instruction manuals. Readers can recapture the glory days of fondly remembered (or happily forgotten) machines including the Commodore 64, TRS-80, Apple Lisa, and Mattel Aquarius-traces of the techno-utopianism of the not-so-distant past.
Home Computers showcases mass-market success stories, rarities, prototypes, one-offs, and never-before-seen specimens. The heart of the book is a series of artful photographs that capture idiosyncratic details of switches and plugs, early user-interface designs, logos, and labels. After a general scene-setting retrospective, the book proceeds computer by computer, with images of each device accompanied by a short history of the machine, its inventors, its innovations, and its influence. Readers who inhabit today's always-on, networked, inescapably connected world will be charmed by this visit to an era when the digital revolution could be powered down every evening.
