1 ene 1984 año - Mac computers

Descripción:

While Trump and other swashbuckling tycoons grabbed headlines and made splashy investments, a handful of quieter, less flashy entrepreneurs was busy reshaping the American economy. Programmers such as Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak pioneered a computer revolution in the late 1970s and 1980s (see “Thinking Like a Historian”). They took a technology previously used only in large-scale enterprises — the military and multinational corporations — and made it accessible to individual consumers. Scientists had devised the first computers for military purposes during World War II. Cold War military research subsequently funded the construction of large mainframe machines. But these early institutional computers were bulky, cumbersome machines that filled entire climate-controlled rooms.

EXAM TIP
Analyze the impact of computers on the American economy and society.

Ironically, in an age that celebrated free-market capitalism, government research and funding had played an enormous role in the development of a technology that would reshape society and culture. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, concluding with the development of the microprocessor in 1971, computers grew faster and smaller. By the mid-1970s, a few microchips the size of the letter O on this page held as much processing power as the massive early machines, and the day of the personal computer had arrived. Working in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computers in 1976 and within a year were producing small, individual computers that could be easily used by a single person. As Apple found success, other companies scrambled to get into the market. International Business Machines (IBM) offered its first personal computer in 1981, but Apple’s 1984 Macintosh computer (later shortened to “Mac”) became personal computing’s first runaway commercial success.

Meanwhile, former high school classmates, Gates, age nineteen, and Allen, age twenty-one, aimed to put “a personal computer on every desk and in every home.” They recognized that software, rather than hardware, was the key. In 1975, they founded the Microsoft Corporation, whose MS-DOS and Windows operating systems soon dominated the software industry. By 2000, the company’s products ran nine out of every ten personal computers in the United States and a majority of those around the world. Gates and Allen became billionaires, and Microsoft exploded into a huge company with more than 50,000 employees and annual revenues in the tens of billions of dollars. In three decades, the computer had spread from a few military research centers to thousands of corporate offices and then to millions of people’s homes.

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