Dr David Skinner - "Computers could have been different." - 1980s Home Computing Boom

so here we are with dr. David Skinner welcome he is a reader in sociology of angry and Ruskin University and David has researched and published widely in the field of social studies of science and technology so welcome and today we're going to talk about your PhD research in home computing could you tell me when you started your PhD when you finish your PhD and why you chose that topic okay well I began my PhD in 1984 and I'm slightly embarrassed to say I finished it in 1992 but that's another story but the the bulk of the work on the PhD the empirical work that lived on the PhD was done in 1986 and 1987 and I was interested at that time particularly the time when I was coming up with the idea for the PhD Britain was going through what came to be known as the home computer boom and I was really intrigued having having worked a little in the computer industry myself I was really intrigued as to what was going on I couldn't quite understand why so many people have decided that they really needed a home computer ok so you were right there at the start so did you have a lot to research at that time because that was at the start of the I wouldn't say I was actually in at the start because I think I began thinking and studying this in the middle of the 80s and a lot had happened by then so I suppose the first thing to say is that there's a prehistory to the home computer which is a hobbyist to small groups of hobbyists used to build their own computers from kids and then in the very early 1980s you get the development and of the the promotion of the sinclair computer the early sinclair computer zx80 zx81 and then the BBC computer so all those things had happened before I started studying it though and they'd been a great I suppose in my the way I characterize this in my PhD is to talk about that home computer boom was a public event obviously there all these individuals who decide that they're going to go out and buy computers but from my perspective they were participating this wider public event there was a lot of excitement CERN about information technology there were things going on like the computers in schools program the government were encouraging what they termed computer literacy in a variety of different ways I think 1982 was IT was deemed IT year a whole year of promoting computers and computer literacy and I felt when I started to talk to a lot of the early users of home computers the thing that interested me most was the way that they were responding to that excitement and participating that wider event we had a look at the first Sinclair computer and and you said that that was a very good example because people normally have one computer in the house and what was so special about that particular Sinclair computer well I think the the sinclair computer is interesting for lots of reasons but one thing that I do think is interesting about and he's worth remarking on is that it was it was it was a British computer but a lot of these computers they were produced for a British market by British makers rather than I suppose now we're used to these kind of ideas of these global computer corporations selling global global products the very sort of British story the development and the sinclair computer and indeed the BBC be a con computer and the BBC be the other thing about the this the the sinclair is extreme example may be something this there with all these computers is that it's actually got very little functionality I think he's got sort of you know he's got a tiny tiny amount of capacity within the computer so why what were people doing with these computers I think they were experimenting with what a computer could do you shouldn't underestimate the excitement that people have to the idea that they actually owned a computer not that long ago for most people computers were these great big machines you know and mysterious machines you know in an air-conditioned room somewhere the idea that they could actually have something called a computer in their home something that was very exciting but they're also actually quite unclear as to once they've got this computer exactly what what should they be doing with it and one of the things I really like about your display here is the way that it's set up because you've got the the the computer which of course didn't have its own screen you had to plug it into the family computer and a family television rather and of course at this time was actually quite unusual for families to have more than one television in their house it would be plugged into the family television and then what would you do with a computer you would try and put code into it people would buy you know there will be manuals or there magazines or whatever and people would try to put put code in and get these computers to to run often lots of frustrating evenings trying to get them to get them getting to run so this and a lot of the people I spoke to talk back to this time you know period of where the computer kind of rather took over the life of their home you know the family home you know so that you know battles over the television and and lots of arguments about people spending too much time on a computer and staying up too late and left you know memories of people swearing because they couldn't get the programs to go and all this kind of element to it but but another social scientists Lizzie have now this great phrase for describing these early computers called them self referential computers they don't really have any much functionality to them but their primary purpose was to be a computer and the prime what were people doing with these things they were they were exploring what the computer was then you also mentioned that Sinclair yes very good at utilizing the media yes and it was well sink yeah so Sinclair is also an interesting figure because of the way that he exploited a wider governmental and media interest in computing and what that time was called the information technology revolution or the computer revolution or the micro revolution all these different ideas but the idea that somehow the micro computer was part was going to bring about a fundamental transformation in society and the economy and it was up to everybody to respond to both the promise and the threat of this computer revolution and Sinclair was very good at riding that wave so he portrayed himself as an example the new kind of British entrepreneur that was going to you know rescue the British economy but he was also good at saying to people in the you know these very sort of memorable adversity placing somebody supplements in newspapers and someone is saying look here's your chance here's a chance for you and often it was your family to own a computer and be part of the computer revolution in the time you had Sinclair yeah and you mentioned that different types of people and different computers yeah I thought yeah that was one thing that was yes so by the time I was actually talking I did a lot of work with users early users of the computers so I that was partly going along to things like computer clubs because there were lots of these again people forget this they would didn't just you know that again part of the excitement was that people would go along to clubs in order to use computers and do this these clubs might be in libraries or computer shops or different kinds of places but also I went along and I spoke to lots of different types of household who'd had these computers and one thing that was interesting was the way in which people came to identify different different computers with different sorts of activities almost different kinds of moral values and you could see a lot of people's hopes and anxieties of the computer played out in the way in which they talked about the different brands so a computer like the Commodore 64 which was a which wasn't a specifically British computer which was one of the early computers to be marketed more in a more kind of fun games orientated way I think a lot of the parents were quite concerned about this you know they didn't really like the idea of this sort of computer and a lot of them were much more comfortable with say the BBC computer the Acorn what became the BBC be because this was very closely associated with the computers in schools initiative and was seen as a you know this is a sort of worthy educational machine and I mean it's quite a large financial investment at that time to buy one of these computers and but lots of families would say well we got this rather than a Commodore or the Sinclairs or whatever because this was a proper educational computer that would really help their children yeah so I think I think there wasn't well I don't we don't want to overplay it I think their snobbery is the wrong word but I think I do think that the it was the sort of there was a kind of the respectable middle that a call and the BBC with a kind of respectable middle-class version of of the home computer because of their associations with education rather than the more kind of ambiguous use of the kind of Sinclair's what were they for people getting up to them so when you started your research yes what was your question what was the main question you wanted to answer I suppose when I started I was interested in the boom itself the public event of the boom that it did seem an event that people participating in and try to understand the excitement that people felt about these computers and there was a author I think to be honest when I started kind of degree of cynicism I'm sort of thinking well why why did people want these computed what were they gonna do with their computers oh I always had a kind of curiosity really about what use people were going to put the computers to and I think the interesting thing was when I the more I spoke to people about computers particularly the later adopters the people that not then perhaps the early hobbies but later the kind of more a better term the kind of ordinary families who bought the computers my curiosity as to what the computer was for was really much by their so I sort of felt like I'd be going on saying well what are you using the computer for and then quite often my experience was they were almost saying well I don't know what should we be using it for and I suppose my take on a lot of the people that I spoke to was that over time they did become clearer about what the computer was but initially I think they have very little idea especially there's about they had you know I kind of they were inspired excited in a broad terms with the idea that you would have a computer in your home but they had they didn't have a very clear or very well-defined an idea as to what his purpose was how they were going to use it and so on but I think by the time I finished doing my empirical work in about 1988 you could see already that things were settling down a lot and this is partly about what was going on in terms of the market in terms of the products that are available but I think it's also that I admired would be that the users themselves were helping to kind of clarify what the purpose the computer was so towards the end of the time I was studying so you could see that computers had a much clearer identity you know you got the the early amstrad's being taken up that were very clearly a word processing computer you had the development of new generations of what are in effect games consoles or glorified games consoles there are unequivocally about playing games and some extent the idea of a general-purpose home computer begins to disappear as does the idea that the computer is for the whole family which early on is a big inspirational idea promoted by the government and also promoted by marketers like Sinclair the idea that this is a computer for the home that all the family are going to use and I think by the end of the eighties that as well starts going by the board so what was the home computer used for sort of like mainly well I think early on you have to remember that there's very little commercial software available so what people are doing largely is coding and then running programs that they coded but but particularly the early machines it's the coding itself that's the primary activity rather than the functionality produced by these by these programs I mean I think some of the early uses did enter code too right no they would play computer games that they coded in themselves they might they're not necessarily making up the programs from scratch I mean what they're normally doing is that they're they get hold of code out of a computer magazine or out of the manual or whatever and they code it in they play the game but I think often it's the actual coding is the primary activity rather than the resulting functionality at the time how many comping clubs I don't know the answer how many computer clubs were there I don't know I was maybe someone else can tell you the answer to that I would say that well for example I was I focused on one particular area of outer London and I was studying that and in that area there had been a regular computer Club at the local library there was a computer shop that sold home computer products and software and so on that running that ran a computer Club as well and also a lot of the people under people that I spoke to there would be after school at lunchtime there would be something called computer club in a secondary school so I think there are all these different sorts of clubs going on at that time and was it government driven or consumed I think it's a mixture of both I mean but I think there was a real there's a real push to get computers into schools and there would be you know one or two teachers who would be the champions of computing you know go on courses go on trade and their job would be to champion the computer to their colleagues and to other members of staff and I think they probably typically be the ones that be running the the computer clubs but a lot of it is consumer driven so I talked to a lot of older teenagers who previously been in a computer club when they be younger and it was really them who'd been driving it you know the club was held at held at computer shop but it'd been it with them that had been asking for this they wanted a place where they could do compute do computing together there's this sort of interesting tension between the idea that computing something should take place within the family and say with these these teenagers what they wanted you know is the beginning of something we're very familiar with now the idea that this is something that teenagers share amongst themselves you know and actually they were nearly all boys that I spoke to and again I don't that that pattern has persisted to some extent now I think so if you look at your research now what do you think the main sociological changes have been by the rise of the home computer yeah well by looking back on my research I mean it's very tempting I could I could be very critical about my methods and my approach and there are lots of things I would do differently and all these good things but I think there are some things that do that the remain interesting in standards standard the test of time and I think one of them is it is important to remember how things that we think of as being fixed and obvious about what is a computer how it should be used who should use it all those things they were earlier on they were all up for grabs computers could have been different and they're really interesting questions as to how these types of computing emerged is a combination of obviously what's happening amongst the producers but the early users play a really important part in a sort of discussion about about what's the computer for how it should only they helped to develop the the usability of the computer are you aware whether there were formal feedback forms to communicate with businesses or Research Center or how do you think they well I mean very early on almost pre that the you know pre Sinclair the is almost hard to distinguish between the producers and the hobbyists so they're almost one of the same people but yes I think they but I think they did have formally and informally lots of really good connections back to the to the users and the fact that they're all these sort of public fora in which the producers and users can meet either face-to-face or by written written form things like computer magazines lots of computer you know conferences and exhibitions and so on where the producers that are there with the users I think is really really important and of course a lot of them really early consumers then go on to be producers so who are we and you'll probably know this better than me but I mean I suspect that when you when you talk to a lot of the people who are involved in computing from the 90s onwards they start off as the you know on the Sinclairs and the BBC B's when they're teenagers you're now based in Cambridge yeah and was in your research you came across Cambridge names yes so who do you think in the Cambridge area had the most profound effect computing Cambridge and the Cambridge area doesn't play an important part in the history of the British home computer boom so both Sinclair and Acorn are based in this in this area I Anglia Ruskin University on a Cambridge campus and actually the the building which is now part of RIT Center was the head office of Sinclair computing and they have been sort of what the time is very swish sort of very sort of space-age offices that now look like a bit of a sort of 80's period piece and in fact featured in newspaper ad at the time called where the headline was Silicon Alley because it's just at the end of a residential street so there was this sort of portrayal of oh this is this is the British response to Silicon Valley in California you know the end of this residential street in in Cambridge you know here's the beginning of the British computer industry okay where did your interest for computers come from because you said this you worked in computers yeah I did I didn't yeah it was a family one so it sounds like yeah so I think like like people would go oh you know my grandfather was a miner and my you know the same guy could do the same so I have this family history that relates to computing so that my dad's dad worked for national cash registers from the 1920s selling accounting machines and during that during the recession of the late twenties and thirties he got lots of his brothers jobs also at national cash registers so they all worked at NCR selling selling accounting machines and then actually my then my dad and his brothers then also work for NCR in the 1950s and they all then went on to work in the computer industry in different shapes or forms so my dad worked for NCR and then he worked for a company called freedom and then he went and started his own company selling and marketing computers and then eventually word Pro electronic calculators and were the processors my uncle worked for the national computing Center my other uncle had a software company and so on so so had this sort of family background in competing and partly and so and I did work sort of briefly in the family business in that set of work for my dad mainly into the sales support with a lot of sort of early word processing machine with early versions of word processors and doing things like you know word processing and database management and these kind of things so in the area just at the beginning of the PC era in 1881 82 that kind of that kind of period what elements do you feel as a museum we need to capture about the uniqueness of this period I think there are lots of really good things about the way the museum is done it actually so I'd really like the the set up here with the the recreation of a computer room in a school the only thing I'd say about this is this isn't bit later on when there are a lot of computers where as early on you'd have one computer in the corner of a classroom because of the government rhetoric was yeah a computer in every classroom you know like the five-year plan kind of thing I think the only thing I would like to see more of is to make strange the fact that actually most of the time the early computers people didn't have a screen they didn't have it they didn't come with their own screen so I think it'll be great to have some sort of display which was like a family you know the family television with a computer plugged into into it and the other thing which you do have a bit but I think he's really important is is the all they kind of associated publishing around the home computer beam computing you know the multitude of computer magazines and the beautiful books and so on and I think it would be also great to have these initiative the government initiatives like the computer in schools initiative IT year and all these kind of thoughts things represented as well but I think the museum's great I think it's there's lots of fantastic things here if you could ask because you concentrated more on the only effect on society going to but if you could ask people who created the machine yes questions about sociological effect of what effect is that what questions would you ask what questions would I ask the the makers I don't know I mean I suppose particularly with Sinclair I would I'd love to know why he was convinced that there would be a market for the very early computers for the zx81 zx81 why he believed it because there is this leap of faith the idea that you could build really to price so you could get down to the so you could say here have a computer for less than a hundred pounds doesn't really matter what it can do but hearing is you know why why he believed that that would would would work the up but the other thing that I would do actually if I go back is well I don't know whether apologize is quite the right word but I think it height up I was very cynical about something which to at least some extent did come true so I what was going on during the 80s was that obviously there at the British economy and British societies in turmoil there's deindustrialization and there's lots of talk about Britain in decline and so on and I think that's one of the reasons why all this sort of focus on home can heating in the home computer boom was so intention this is though this is our response you know this is gonna get us out all this trouble you know if only we can train everybody and get everyone familiar with these competes and I think at the time I think I was very cynical about it but it half came true I mean is true that just they sort of leap of faith that if you train up you know you expose hundreds of millions of people to coding and to computing you are going to create a generation of people who are familiar with happy with computers and I think if those people did the next generation did contribute to a lot of successful things in the British computer industry in a way that I was entire I have to admit entirely skeptical about when I I said I spent a lot a lot of time talking to different kinds of households that had hope home computers in them and one of the things that was really striking particularly when you spoke to parents was the way in which the computer competed in general and the home computer excite that you know prompt it promoted very sore strong prompting very strong feelings so you know both hopes and fears so in terms of computing in general there's a belief in the promise of the IT revolution but there's also an anxiety about what's going to happen will there be any jobs for people you know but so there's both the kind of excitement and an anxiety about computers in general will they take away all our jobs but in relation to home computer you can also see those those hopes and fears are also very strong you have to imagine me going around do my my research so I talk to different kinds of computer user and I did go to computer collapse and do various things but ventually Riley or Romney I decided I needed to go and find so-called real users of these home computers so I actually sort of tramped the streets of rice lip and Uxbridge putting on a put notes through hundreds and hundreds of doors saying have you got a home computer when you talk to me and the idea behind that was that I would get to talk to a cross-section of different sorts of adopters of these own computers and there were lots of interesting things about about those interviews but quite often what I ended up doing was talking to parents about their hopes and fears for their children so when when you spoke to them about why did you buy the computer what use did you want to put the computer to you could see those hopes and fears were really everything so the hopes and fears were firstly about computing in general so I often felt that when people buy this computer they were responding to the sort of idea that computers were going to be important to everybody in the future and they needed to respond to the IT revolution but the part of this is a fear of being left behind you know fear that computers are going to take your job and these kind of things and then similarly there are enormous sort of hopes and fears for what the computers going to do for the family so there's this idea that the fam the computer is going to be something that the family together are going to participate in the computer is going to be educational the computer is going to prepare children for the future it's going to give them a head start but there are also anxieties that somehow this is going to go wrong when the computers going to be used for the wrong reasons you know so it frays that they would continue to do parents go well I don't want their computer to be just used for complain games on you know there must be some other uses that we can put putting the computer to it's got to mean it's got to be educational it's got to be practical but there is this sort of idea that the computer is important one way or the other you know this can either go all right or go all wrong but there's this idea that somehow you have to respond to this wider rhetoric about computers in the future by trying to get to grips with a Minecraft it's that's why you call it a public event because it was driven by the government what do you think you think it was I think it was a public event it was driven by a lot of things but I think part of it was the government things very concrete things like IT year and computers in schools initiatives to do computers in libraries but also the rhetoric of government government ministers there was an IT minister Kenneth Baker whose job seemed to be primarily because remember this conservative government who doesn't want to intervene in directly in the economy so all their interventions relation to IT a lot of them are kind of cultural ones there's this or belief that they just need to promote computing promote the right sort of attitudes towards completing and things will somehow come right because of that but yeah the the event is also a kind of bottom-up event as well you know so people are starting computer clubs starting computer magazines and starting computer fanzines you know their own xeroxed newsletters and all kinds of different weird computer organizations I mean at one point I went along and actually with Heinz I really wish I'd spent a lot of more time than I did with them but I mean I I went long few times to a club that was sort of like really a sort of New Age Computer Club which at the time seemed to be completely wacky who all inspired by the idea that well with computing we'll all be linked together and so on and now you think well actually they were talking about the internet to me at the time it just seemed like a lot of really barmy sort of hippie New Age stuff about the computers are going to connect us all together and so on so all kinds of little sort of initiatives that are from the bottom as well as from the top I thing and and and also the computer industry itself trying to promote this and all the kind of spin-offs it's the publishing computer the publishing print publishing has a great boom around computers as well computer magazines computer books what would have yeah it's an interesting question to ask what would have happened if the Internet come out at the same time as the eater I don't know what the answer to that is what is interesting is the way in which early on there's not much interest in connectivity that people are prepared to play around with the standalone computers whereas there are other sorts of experiments going on other places aren't there like the so the mini tail experiment in France which is much more a kind of government attempt to connect people there are people who are kind of talking about playing around with connectivity but it is a lot of the function pendant it's interesting how a lot of the functionality isn't there because they aren't connected so you would you know and you would find people who'd spend days you know night night after night trying to write write a program to manage their home accounts but of course not much pointless you can really connect up to your bank or whatever to do this yeah I don't I don't know the answer to that question to be honest but it is interesting how people are playing you know it's the missing link to a lot of the things that people are doing it's not really my idea but I think there's a very interesting way of thinking about the development not just of the the technologies but also the kind of philosophy behind computing which is that actually you can go way back to soar thirties and forties and people are really inspired by these ideas or cybernetic ideas about a connected society we're all connected up together and the idea you could a a lot of it's very top-down kind of command and control but the idea that we could all be connected together but then that that ideas been around for ages and then then it's almost like maybe you need you to the next phase which was about let's get out the computer out of a out of its air-conditioned room and into everybody's work placing into everybody's home and that was happening in the 80s and then the next phase the internet phase brings those two things together and then that kind of takes everything up to a a new level but the interesting thing in a way look at take the long view is with the internet what it allows is the the bringing together of those two things that sort of 80's interviews 80s sort of bottom-up enthusiasm for the microcomputer and that earlier mid twentieth century kind of cybernetic vision of a connected world when you did your interviews was there a gender issue yes so when I did my interviews there was a big gender issue around computing one thing was interesting was that my PhD supervisor was called Roger silverstein who was a real pioneer of what he called an ethnography of media use within the home and he was developing his ideas about a wide wider ideas about trying to understand how media used took place within the home alongside my project which is about home computing so he was very concerned he was very concerned and I should talk to families as a whole about the home computer I think you know inspired by this sort of idea that he wanted everybody's perspective within the household on it but in practical terms what I found was when I was trying to do my search it was really hard to set up interviews with everybody in the household to talk to them about this so you would there would be one or two people that would respond to my appeal for help and say oh yes I'm really interesting computer yet please come along told me and I would say I want to talk to everyone in the household and then surprise surprise you'd arrive at the household and either you would you would have everybody together and try to talk to them all which case you'd have this very stilted kind of conversation we're actually quite often mum or the daughter would have comparatively little to say or else more typically was you'd arrive er right at home thinking that you're going to talk to everybody and then actually it would be the dad or the teenage son he'd go oh I did tell everybody but they're not here you know and so even at that basic level in terms of talking to people I actually had to work really hard and I did towards the end of project purposefully sample households where there were younger women or you know either teenage women teenage girls or older women who were the primary computer users but had to look a lot harder for them and the clubs the clubs varied a lot in terms of the kind of characters of the club so the early hobbyist computer clubs do tend to be male orientated came coming out of sort of hobbyist electronics the more the kind of worthy library based ones yeah they were male again but perhaps more more women going along to them but again the sort of the say like the computer club that I went along to it was teenage boys who dominated that that club and you know there wasn't really space for the teenage girls to come along the social class dimension to this is interesting I think because I think like everywhere else the take their walk the the take up was skewed in terms of social class but it was different to other countries so I didn't I didn't do sort of quantitative research on this but there was some quite reasonable market research looking at the not the very early adopters but that sort of mid-1980s and the thing that was different about Britain I remember in comparison to other countries was that I mean using that to the marketing split you know the a B C 1 C 2 DS things actually the take-up amongst the C's was very strong so these sort of so obviously the A's and B's are the professional and managerial kind of middle-class occupations to take up his high but it's it's nearly as high amongst sort of routine white-collar workers and skilled manual work more affluent sections of the working class there they were adopting in they may not be no docked in saying computers but they were buying computers in in the same numbers as the middle classes which was very different from other countries so the that just if you think about it it's a consumer electronic Britain's different from certainly other European countries in terms of the take-up surly err more computers are sold but actually that class makeup is quite different maybe maybe also the price barrier so that one of the things that that sinclair did was sell was produced computers to a price so that made the computers more affordable to people I think that's that's an element yeah yeah well they're all there earning more yes oh I think there is that they're affordable but I think for all the people that I talked about I mean the risk of getting into that sort of like well you know you could a hundred pounds with a lot of money and then days kind of conversation but I mean you do have to remember that actually they are still quite a significant financial investment so I mean I think something like this would be four hundred quid four hundred pounds to buy BB CB in the 1980s I don't quite know what the equivalent of that but it's quite a considerable amount of money plus well are you going to buy another television televisions were a lot more expensive relatively in those days so that it's not an insignificant amount of money to spend for a lot of the families that I spoke to you next week the BBC micro almost like second face campaign make it digital right of course with the first BBC sort of micro project they utilized the media but the whole media scene was different you didn't have social media people were watching TV from their living room with that family that was a center point of your living room now the BBC are relaunching the BBC micro project yes to educate the next generation of coders and digital makers sociologically what is different different setting well it it would be interesting to see what this sort of the second coming of the BBC micro project what impact it will have whether it'll have anything like the impact that the first one had I find it quite hard to believe that they will really but I do still think it's very interesting and one of the things I think is interesting is this return to coding and return to the ideal is important for people to learn how to code and see if you'd like to get get within the black box at the computer - in order to understand how it works which is very much the spirit of the early phase of the home computer booth but of course what happened to was the end of the 80s was this sort of move away from this you know oh well now we know what a computer is and it's all about the functionality doesn't matter you don't have to learn how to code he's a word processor you don't have to know how to code he's a his a floppy disk with the computer game already written on it and it's it's interesting this revival of it revival revival of coding and return to the idea that people should you know get under the bonnet of a computer and really understand how how it was I find that very intriguing and that will it will be very interesting to see how that plays out but part and I think the other thing that I think's interesting which is you know the computer museums part of this is the way in which you've got people who are now very well established and successful as part of the British computer industry who have this sort of nostalgia for that earlier phase and this belief you know this probably quite well family belief that this was a really important thing which happened and so they're their own commitment to that again I find really intriguing we should we should put something back by teaching teaching people to to to code but maybe there are other things that we can anticipate that might come up other sorts of other sorts of interest I think the other thing that's interesting is what's happened to put this long side what's happened to the internet where for for a while again you know the internet was up for grabs wasn't it they're all these it felt like something very exciting it wasn't clear what you were gonna use it for and all this kind of stuff and then it's kind of almost gone through the same process again it's become you know oh it's all about the functionality you don't have favorites anymore because you don't have your own fate you know you don't write your own blog anymore you don't have your right you don't even have your own favorites you just have your own few platforms that you revisit every half an hour on your smartphone you know and I always wonder whether what would be almost as interesting would be whether they'll be a similar kind of revolt in relation to the Internet that people who want to get back underneath the bonnet of the Internet as well the last thing I would like is to write to introduced his Leslie hadn't because in 1999 you wrote an article with Leslie Haddon the Enigma of the micro social science computer review so who is this person why did you choose to write an article together okay I wrote an article in I think actually was in 1991 with Leslie with Leslie Haddon about the British micro between called the Enigma of the micro and it was Leslie and I had done our PhDs in parallel really he was a lot more efficient about doing his than I was I have to say but we did it in parallel he was interested in the British home computer being he started off by looking at from the perspective of the producers where whereas mine was very much focused on the early users but we had over the years we'd had lots of discussions and Leslie was immensely helpful to me during my PhD and so the article was really us saying look we've had all these discussions what can we learn by putting the two accounts together the the produced the account of the producers and the accounts of the users and our argument in that paper was that you could see these weren't two parallel stories there were two related stories that you got through from the late 70s through to the end of the 80s a kind of firming up of what computing what home computing micro computing might be for a non-business user and that process had been a kind of dialogue amongst in between the producers and he uses between them they kind of come up with this these set of uses and an answer to the question well what's a home computer for

Channel: The Centre for Computing History

Views: 5,245

Keywords: 1980s Computers

Id: dAySDE5G8aw

Length: 48min 27sec (2907 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2016