Home Computers - 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation (Hardcover)

A celebration of the early years of the digital revolution, when computing power was deployed in a beige box on your desk.Today, people carry powerful computers in our pockets and call them "phones." A generation ago, people were amazed that the processing power of a mainframe computer could be contained in a beige box on a desk. This book is a celebration of those early home computers, with specially commissioned new photographs of 100 vintage computers and a generous selection of print advertising, product packaging, and instruction manuals. Readers can recapture the glory days of fondly remembered (or happily forgotten) machines including the Commodore 64, TRS-80, Apple Lisa, and Mattel Aquarius--traces of the techno-utopianism of the not-so-distant past. Home Computers showcases mass-market success stories, rarities, prototypes, one-offs, and never-before-seen specimens. The heart of the book is a series of artful photographs that capture idiosyncratic details of switches and plugs, early user-interface designs, logos, and labels. After a general scene-setting retrospective, the book proceeds computer by computer, with images of each device accompanied by a short history of the machine, its inventors, its innovations, and its influence. Readers who inhabit today's always-on, networked, inescapably connected world will be charmed by this visit to an era when the digital revolution could be powered down every evening.

General

Imprint:	MIT Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	May 2020
Authors:	Alex Wiltshire
Photographers:	John Short
Dimensions:	254 x 217 x 27mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth over boards
Pages:	256
ISBN-13:	978-0-262-04401-1
Categories:	Books > Computing & IT > Computer hardware & operating systems > Personal computers > General Promotions
LSN:	0-262-04401-3
Barcode:	9780262044011

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