CONCLUSIONS - Inventing the PC - page 178

a newspaper...
about having fun with computers
and

learning how to use computers

and how to buy a minicomputer for yourself or your school

and books … and films … and tools of the future. 28

PCC helped to establish BASIC as the “people's” programming
language. In its premier issue, PCC wrote, “If you want to talk
to computers, you got to learn a language. There are lots of
languages talking to computers. Most of them are O.K. for
computer freaks but lousy for people. We will use the computer
language called BASIC - great for people, not so good for com-
puter freaks.” 29
Until the early 1970s, very few computer amateurs attempted
the construction of a computer for their own individual use.
However, with the advent of the first commercially available
8-bit microprocessors, the computer hobby movement exploded.
Since mid-1974, the hobbyists had been buying, building, and
experimenting with rudimentary low-cost microcomputers
which were frequently offered to them in do-it-yourself kit form.
The capabilities of these early hobby computers were quite lim-
ited in comparison with the commercial microcomputers from
General Automation, Intel, MCM , or R 2 E . They could only exe-
cute simple programs written in assembly language and, later,
in BASIC , while, for instance, the MCM computers could be
programmed in APL and Intel's Intellec microcomputers in the
PL / M language. But in spite of the evident shortcomings of the
hobby computers, it was the hobbyists, and not the commercial
microcomputer industry, who in the second half of the 1970s
almost exclusively disseminated microcomputer knowledge in
society. Organized in clubs and groups, they put together com-
puter conventions, shows, and fests, ran educational programs,
and published newsletters. Soon these early microcomputer ac-
tivities turned into professional software, hardware, publish-