jan 1, 1970 - Personal Computers

Description:

Personal computers became available to the public in the 1970s, and became increasingly common in homes in the following decades. Computers allowed for not only the rapid dissemination of textual information over the internet, but also the production of texts in new ways (Galbraith, 2020).

About the image: I took this image of my personal computer, which is displaying an Arabic medical text from 1094 CE, courtesy of the National Library of Medicine’s digital repository. Thanks to personal computers, I was able to sift through dozens upon dozens of old medical texts for this timeline.

SOURCES
Galbraith, S. K. (2020). A Brief History of the Book: From Tablet to Tablet. Libraries Unlimited.

IMAGES
Image taken by the author, A.E. Shuff, in 2025.
The image shows a page of the following document:
Rāzī, A. B. M. ibn Z., & رازي, أ. ب. م. ب. ز. (1094). Al-juzʼ al-thālith min kitāb al-Ḥāwī fī al-ṭibb. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections. https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-9404682-bk

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