Page 5 - Osborn Computer News Today

An advanced fiber-network infrustructure. new, more reliable equipment for your home. and a new culture built around customer service. it all adds up to our most reliable network ever. one that keeps you connected to what matters most. in the early part of the 80s, the general image of the computer was always this giant machine with little things all over it. the mindset was the computer as the brain and it was a threatening concept.

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 first came out. >> it would crash and you had to figure out what to do. it would not always create the right results. so it really did take a mindset of someone willing to cut it some slack. >> take little st...

Wozniak and steve jobs first displayed the computer they had been networking 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 market. immediately, everyone wanted one. >> woz was the technical genius and jobs was the marketing genius. >> you needed both of those kinds of mindsets to actually mak...

Just to see if they could do it. steve jobs hears about some of the work going on at this lab and he wants a look. >> xerox park was an invention place. apple was an innovation place. steve was very visual and could see right away the visual graphic interface was different and more communicative than anything he had seen before. he knew it was effective because it was affecting him. >> jobs realizes this is the future of computing. this is a whole diffenkind of computer to be built. famously, a ...

Are going to take technology to this point. its much more chaotic. things rise and bubble and fall back. it is a confluence of developments that are all happening at the right time. >> small and portable are the watch words for the 90s for manufacturers showing their wares in chicago this week. sony has camcorder that fits into your hand and a combination tv/vcr that fits into your purse or briefcase. >> if you have one of these and one of these but you dont have one of these you are missing hal...

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 which led to faster which led to cheaper. >> under any other field ...

>> the idea was that ordinary people might have a use for computers. now, it took awhile to figure out what those uses might be. >> the main thing was spreadsheets and word processing. the computer was the best typewriter you could ever have. it gave you a new way to write. you could change things around and check your spelling and it would always look perfect. >> bottom line numbers. >> my dad had the large ledger sheets, done them all by hand and i remember taking a computer to show them a spr...

Gives birth to a high tech cult and a place called silicon valley. >> the magic part of silicon valley is that there is this boiling pot of people who were involved in technology, involved in science. silicon valley was hp, sri, xerox and stanford university. that was a hell of a powerful combination. >> there were these two cultures, engineers with ph.d.s and hobbyists. >> it was a time when there was a lot of social [ inaudible ] in and around the area. there was a lot of counter culture peopl...

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. one industry innovator, osborn computer, was forced int...

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 have these guys like steve jobs and steve wozniak and bill gates and paul allen who had been messing around on the edges of what would become the personal computer industry but no ...