In the late 1970s and early 1980s, from about 1977 to 1983, it was broadly predicted that computers would soon transform many aspects of home and family life as they had business practices in the previous decades. Mothers would keep their recipe catalog in computer databases and turn to a medical database for help with child care, fathers would use the family’s computer to supervise family finances and track automobile maintenance. Children would use disk-based encyclopedias for school work and would be avid video gamers. Home automation would bring about the bright home of the ’80s. Using some sort of computer technology, television would be interactive. Morning coffee would be brewed robotically under computer control. The same computer would control the house lighting and temperature. Robots would take the garbage out, and be programmable to perform new tasks by the home computer. Electronics were luxurious, so it was usually thought that each home would have one computer for the entire family to use, with interfaces to the various devices it was expected to control.
All this was predicted to be routine sometime before the end of the decade, but virtually every aspect of the predicted revolution would prove not to be or be delayed. Put simply, the computers obtainable to consumers of the time period just weren’t powerful sufficient to perform any task necessary to realize this vision, much less do them all at the same time. The home computers of the early 1980s could not multitask. Memory capacities were too small to hold entire databases or financial records, floppy disk-based storage was woefully inadequate in both capacity and speed for true multimedia work, and the graphics of the systems could only display blocky, unrealistic images and blurry, jagged text. Before long, a backlash set in computer users were “geeks”, “nerds” or worse, “hackers”. The North American video game crash of 1983 soured many on technology in general. The computers that were purchased for use in the family room were either beyond in closets or relegated to basements and children’s’ bedrooms to be used completely for games.
It took another 10 years for technology to mature, for the graphical user interface to make the computer approachable for non-technical users, and for the internet to provide a compelling reason for most people to want a computer in their homes. Predicted aspects of the revolution were left by the wayside or modified in the face of an emerging reality. The cost of electronics dropped precipitously and today many families have a computer for each family member, or a laptop for mom’s active lifestyle, a desktop for dad with the kids sharing a computer. Encyclopedias, recipe catalogs and medical databases are kept online and accessed over the World Wide Web not stored locally on floppy disks or CD-ROM. Our coffee may be brewed automatically, but the computer is contained in the coffee maker, not under external control. This delay wasn’t out of keeping with supplementary technologies newly introduced to an unprepared public. Early motorists were extensively derided with the cry of “Get a horse!” until the automobile was accepted. Television languished in research labs for decades before regular public broadcasts began. Before the invention of radio, the telephone was used to distribute opera and news reports, whose subscribers were denounced as “illiterate, blind, bedridden and incurably lazy people”. Likewise, the acceptance of computers into daily life today is a product of continuing refinement of both technology and awareness.
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