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If all goes according to plan, "columbia," this nation's first space shuttle, will fly like a skylark next march. >> if the shuttle program works the way it's designed to, it will be a technological feat marveling that of the trip to the moon. >> the space shuttle had new systems, new technology. the primary thing is the fly by wire system. you don't have pulleys and cables, it's all done by electronics. all the commands go through a computer. >> built as the world's first reusable spaceship, one that would commute to space carrying scientists and satellites. >> the most important thing was th...

Fear of these bloodless little wizards. the manufacturers are trying to overcome it by making them what they call user-friendly. >> isn't that pretty? now what do i do? >> making computers easy enough to use for a beginner, it wasn't always true. people had never encountered this stuff. >> hold down shift and press -- >> so there was 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 you buy a computer system and you want to solve one of your problems, we immediately throw a big probl...

Wristwatches to microwave ovens. >> the mushrooming industry gives birth to a new high-tech cult and a place called silicon valley. >> the magic part of silicon valley is that there was this boiling pot of people who were involved in technology, involved in science. >> silicon valley was hp, sri, xerox park, and stanford university. that was a hell of a powerful combination. >> there was these two cultures, engineers with ph.d.s and hobbyists. >> it was a time when there was a lot of social ferment in and around the bay area. there was a lot of counterculture people. so you had cheap semicondu...

You into learning this stuff. it's not going to happen at once and it's certainly not a 1984-ish vision at all. it's going to 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 rough, big, ugly, difficult to use inventions when they first came out. >> it would crash and you would have 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. >> small steps, don't take big steps. ...

Basically an observation computer engineers are getting to the point where they can essentially double the computing power of a computer chip every 18 months or so. >> and this is what really made the power of computers explode in the 1980s. because every 18 months, these things were getting twice as good. >> you could get the 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 of consumer products, things get more expensive over time. milk, gasoline, houses, but not technology. >> one of the st...