📸

Apple was joined in the PC market by hundreds of other companies, including 'Big Blue' itself - IBM. When the giant computer manufacturer launched its own PC in 1981, it expected to sell 250,000 units over five years. Again, the popular hunger for computing power was underestimated. In a short while IBM was selling 250,000 units a month. Penetration of personal computers has now reached between 15 and 35 per cent of all homes in the major industrialized countries. There are said to be over 130 million PCs in use in the world in homes and offices, and the number is still rising.

And though the PC revolution would probably have happened without Wozniak and Jobs, it may not have happened as quickly. It's worth remembering that the catalyst for all this was a magazine article about phreaking.

Computers are more than just boxes that sit on desks. Within the machines and the programs that run them is a sort of mathematical precision that is breathtaking in the simplicity of its basic premise. Computers work, essentially, by routeing commands, represented by electrical impulses, through a series of gates that can only be open or closed - nothing else. Open or closed; on or off. The two functions are represented symbolically as 1 (open/on) or 0 (closed/off). The route the pulse takes through the gates determines the function. It is technology at its purest: utter simplicity generating infinite complexity.

The revolution that occurred had to do with the control of access to the power represented by that mathematical precision. And the argument is still going on, although it is now concerned not with the control of computers but the control of information. Computers need not be isolated: with a modem - a box-like machine that converts computer commands to tones that can be carried on the phone lines - they can be hooked up to vast networks of mainframe computers run by industry, government, universities and research centres. These networks, all linked by telephone lines, form a part of a cohesive international web that has been nicknamed Worldnet. Worldnet is not a real organization: it is the name given to the international agglomeration of computers, workstations and networks, a mix sometimes called information technology. Access to Worldnet is limited

📸