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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 of consumer products, things get more expensive over time. milk, gasoline, houses. but not technolog...

>> 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 spreadsheet and suddenly, he understood the value of a personal computer. >> there is a drastic mindset...

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 people. you had cheap semiconductors, you had people who would look at things differently than what the c...

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 ibm's pc. >> ibm's entry heated up an already volatile market. one industry innovator, osborn computer, was forced into bankruptcy court last month. and apple, the industry's number one in small computers, had to con...

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 one in corporate america and no one in most of the homes of america thought that the personal comput...