Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation (Mit Press)

About this book

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 Aquariustraces 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 todays 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.