Page 74 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

computer 423

One of the many video-
game arenas in Korea
in 2004. This is a
location of regular
competitions between
Korea’s finest video and
computer gamers. In
Korea, these events are
televised, and the
competitors treated like
movie stars.

financial record-keeping and similar applications. Much personal computer. Alto innovated many of the tech-
of the research work was done at universities, and the nologies that would become standard for home and
availability of a few mainframe computers on campus office computers, including the mouse, windows and
gave scientists the chance to adapt them to many research icons on the screen, desktop printing with many different
purposes. fonts, incorporation of images and animations, and local
area networks that allowed individuals to send files back
The Personal Computer and forth between their machines. Xerox was not able to
The birth of the computer industry involved nothing less exploit the technology at the time, because of the high
than development of an entire computer culture, includ- cost and low performance of microelectronics. In the
ing programming languages and compilers to control the 1960s, Gordon Moore, a founder of the Intel computer
machines, networks and input-output devices to transmit chip corporation, propounded what has become known
information between users and machines, and new as Moore’s Law, the observation that the performance of
courses in universities leading to the emergence of com- computer chips was doubling every eighteen or twenty-
puter science and engineering as a distinct field. For four months. Alto’s technology finally hit the home mar-
years, the dominant model was expensive mainframe ket when the first Apple Macintosh was sold in 1984,
computers with batch processing of data—computer soon followed by Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
runs that were carefully prepared and then placed in a Before any of the big information technology compa-
queue to await time on the mainframe—although there nies offered personal computers to the public, hobbyists
were some experiments with time sharing in which sev- were building their own from kits, notably the Altair first
eral individuals could use a computer simultaneously in announced in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electron-
real-time. Then, in the mid-1970s, both inside informa- ics magazine.A technological social movement, drawing
tion technology companies and outside among electron- on some of the cultural radicalism of the 1960s, quickly
ics hobbyists, the personal computer revolution offered a spread across America and Western Europe, although in
radically new concept of computing. retrospect it is difficult to estimate how much this radi-
In April 1973, Xerox corporation’s Palo Alto Research calism contributed to the rapid advance of the computer
Center ran its first test of the Alto, the prototype desktop revolution. It is true that Apple was founded in a garage