Osborn Computer News Today

♪ ♪ the average family home, cory practices her violin, christian plays with his cars and mike and carol worry over the bills. >> we went in with pretty much the same technology thats been in place for a couple of decades. typewriter. calculators. tv. oven. a car. you listen to music on a big old stereo system with a turntable. maybe you had a digital watch and that was the only thing that was going to be digital that you actually owned. >> hello? im not here now but my faithful ...

>> how many calculators do you own? >> two, maybe. >> right. you use the automatic bank telling machines? >> sure. >> so life is already seducing you into learning this stuff. its not going to happen at once and its certainly not a 1984-ish vision at all. it will just be very gradual and very human and will seduce you into learning how to use it. >> random access memory is internal memory built inside of this computer. >> these new computers were big, ugly, difficult to use inventions when they ...

If all goes according to plan, "columbia" will soar like a skylark next month. >> if the shuttle program works the way its designed to work it will be a technological feat rivaling americas visit to the moon. a major moment in the history of flight. >> the space shuttle had new systems, new technology, primary things. fly by wire system. you dont have pulleys and cables, its all done by electronics. all the commands go through a computer. >> it was built as the worlds first reusable spaceship. o...

Moores law, named for gordon moore, one of the engineers who worked at intel. basically it was an observation computer engineers are getting to the point where they can essentially double the computer power of computer chips every 18 months or so. and this was what really made the power of computers explode in the 1980s, because every 18 months, these things were getting twice as good. >> you could basically put a whole computer on a chip, it was less expensive to manufacture. so you had smaller...

Called technophobia. fear of these bloodless little wizards. the manufacturers are trying to overcome it by making them what they call user-friendly. >> isnt that pretty. now what do i do? >> making computers easy enough to use for a beginner, it wasnt always true. people have never encountered this stuff. >> dont shift. >> so there is a great disconnect between the ambitions of the apples and microsofts and the realities of people trying to use these things for the first time. >> right now, if ...

>> one of the things that was really hard about making a computer was now on a chip. so all of a sudden, people who had a thirst for this stuff could go out and buy a computer, you could make them yourself. >> there was a lot of this revolutionary theme with a lot of the technical people in it, changes in technology and how we were part of it even though in our companies we were the fringe element. we are not the managers and leaders but boy, just a clever design on its own had value. >> you hav...

>> it is lower prices that helped the tremendous boom in home computer sales but one home in ten will have a computer by the end of this year. by 1990, the number could be two out of three. >> we knew the personal computer was getting serious when the competition started, because when you have competition, innovation gets stimulated. >> compaq. >> atari. >> this is the one. >> high resolution, more storage and greater expandability than ibms pc. >> ibms entry heated up an already volatile market...

>> almost nobody can say, were going to take technology to this point. its much more chaotic. things rise, ball, bubble and fall back. great ideas pop out but nobody can find a use for it, so it goes away. it is a confluence of developments that are all happening at the same time. >> small and portable are the watchwords for the 90s according to manufacturers showing their wares in chicago this week. sony has camcorder that fits into your hand and a combination tv/vcr that goes into your purse o...

That these things the hobbyists were doing could lead to this whole new kind of product called the personal computer. >> it was at a home brewed computer club where steve wozniak and steve jobs first displayed the computer they had been working on and it caused a sensation. >> we had absolutely no idea what people were going to do with these things when we started out. matter of fact, the two people it was designed for was woz and myself, because we couldnt afford to buy a computer kit on the ma...

Over it. the mindset was the computer as the brain and it was a threatening concept. >> the 1980s is a period of time when the big impersonal giant machine that lives in a huge air conditioned room some place suddenly becomes something that sits on your desk. >> something is happening out there. something thats expanding your world. small computers are happening. >> as soon as we have intelligent machines creeping into our daily lives, into our factories, into our hospitals, into our businesses,...