The second half of Computers picks up a bit quicker than the first. By this point in time, we’re into the days of the IBM giant and microprocessors, and desktop PCs are a new invention. Many different companies are picking up IBM’s technologies and copying them, birthing multi-billion dollar companies like Compaq, Dell and others. This point in technological history is a bit of a scattered rush, as so many different things are happening at once. Primarily, though, the Apple II and the relationship between Microsoft and IBM are some of the most influential parts of this time period.


The Xerox PARC team, and later the Apple team invent the modern graphical user interface, abandoning the cryptic command-line interface of BASIC and MS-DOS. It was also around this time that software became its own business, with “killer apps” like VisiCalc and Microsoft Word becoming valued pieces of business technology. As Ferro states: “In 1970, total sales of software by U.S. software firms was less than half a billion dollars. By 1980, U.S. software sales reached $2 billion.” (pg. 102)
Video games spawned another huge industry within the technological fields, Microsoft birthed many millionaires, the Internet and World Wide Web were created. Over around 20 years, the shape of the world and the world’s communications were completely altered forever.


There is truly no way to easily summarize the way that the introductions of all these technologies changed our world. Computers went from being building sized to pocketable, and while becoming exponentially more powerful. Much of the world’s information is never less than a second and a Google away. And, as Ferro puts it, “a reader fifty years from now will look back on the computers and software available at the turn of the millennium and be astonished at how primitive it all is.” (pg. 149)