People had seen computers running corporate departments and calculating orbits for NASA. Suddenly they were told they could have one too. At home.
The fact that it didn't do much was part of the fun, because it meant you had to master the technology to make it usable.
So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.
Modern computing doesn't offer that. It's all about playing in someone else's sand pit. Whether it's FB/Twitter, the app store, or an Amazon drop shipping business, or an ad-funded entertainment site, or a side project on GitHub - you're working inside an environment imposed on you by others, which you can't change and don't own.
You could say "How is that different to BASIC?" The difference is that using BASIC never felt like being part of someone else's machine. It was your tool, you could what you liked with it. There was no sense of being a cog in a factory which printed money for other people.
> So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.
Maybe that is how you experienced it as a computer nerd like myself, but that was not the pitch.
For business it was computers for all just like the big boys. For families it was prepare your kids for this new computer oriented world. For us kids it was play computer games at home without having to stick coins into a machine at the mall. But us kids had to play the education angle on our parents who had credit cards. :-)
People had seen computers running corporate departments and calculating orbits for NASA. Suddenly they were told they could have one too. At home.
The fact that it didn't do much was part of the fun, because it meant you had to master the technology to make it usable.
So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.
Modern computing doesn't offer that. It's all about playing in someone else's sand pit. Whether it's FB/Twitter, the app store, or an Amazon drop shipping business, or an ad-funded entertainment site, or a side project on GitHub - you're working inside an environment imposed on you by others, which you can't change and don't own.
You could say "How is that different to BASIC?" The difference is that using BASIC never felt like being part of someone else's machine. It was your tool, you could what you liked with it. There was no sense of being a cog in a factory which printed money for other people.