Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 1.9
In the 1960s, IBM dominated the mainframe computer market in the United
States.
(IBM/AP Photo)
digital cameras, wristwatches, ATM machines, automobiles, microwave ovens, ther-
mostats, traffic lights, and much more. The highest-profile use of microprocessors, how-
ever, is in personal computers.
During the Vietnam conflict in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the area around San Fran-
cisco was home to a significant counterculture, including a large number of antiwar
and antiestablishment activists. The do-it-yourself idealism of the power-to-the-people
movement intersected with advances in computer technology in a variety of ways, in-
cluding the
Whole Earth Catalog
, the People's Computer Company, and the Homebrew
Computer Club [22].
The
Whole Earth Catalog
, first published in 1968, was, in the words of Steve Jobs,
“sort of like Google in paperback form” [23]—an effort to pull together in a single
