Computer World. Матросова Т.А. - 12 стр.

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11
manufacturers will give away hardware in order to sell software». Time alone will
tell whether or not this was his final look ahead into the future.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTERS IN THE USA
In the early 1960s, when computers were hulking mainframes that took up entire
rooms, engineers were already toying with the then – extravagant notion of building a
computer intended for the sole use of one person. By the early 1970s, researches at
Xerox's Polo Alto Research Center (XeroxPARC) had realized that the pace of
improvement in the technology of semiconductors – the chips of silicon that are the
building blocks of present-day electronics – meant that sooner or later the PC would
be extravagant no longer. They foresaw that computing power would someday be so
cheap that engineers would be able to afford to devote a great deal of it simply to
making non-technical people more comfortable with these new information –
handling tools. In their labs, they developed or refined much of what constitutes PCs
today, from «mouse» pointing devices to software «windows». Although the work at
XeroxPARC was crucial, it was not the spark that took PCs out of the hands of
experts and into the popular imagination. That happened inauspicious ly in January
1975, when the magazine Popular Electronics put a new kit for hobbyists, called the
Altair, on its cover, for the first time, anybody with $400 and a soldering iron could
buy and assemble his own computer. The Altair inspired Steve Wosniak and Steve
Jobs to build the first Apple computer, and a young college dropout named Bill Gates
to write software for it. Meanwhile, the person who deserves the credit for inventing
the Altair, an engineer named Ed Roberts, left the industry he had spawned to go to
medical school. Now he is a doctor in small town in central Georgia.
To this day, researchers at Xerox and elsewhere pooh-pooh the Altair as too
primitive to have made use of the technology they felt was needed to bring PCs to the
masses. In a sense, they are right. The Altair incorporated one of the first single-chip
microprocessor – a semiconductor chip, that contained all the basic circuits needed to
do calculations – called the Intel 8080. Although the 8080 was advanced for its time,
it was far too slow to support the mouse, windows, and elaborate software Xerox had
developed. Indeed, it wasn't until 1984, when Apple Computer's Macintosh burst onto
the scene, that PCs were powerful enough to fulfill the original vis ion of researchers.
«The kind of computing that people are trying to do today is just what we made at
PARC in the early 1970s,» says Alan Kay, a former Xerox researcher who jumped to
Apple in the early 1980s.
Researchers today are proceeding in the same spirit that motivated Kay and his
XeroxPARC colleagues in the 1970s: to make information more accessible to
ordinary people. But a look into today's research labs reveals very little that
resembles what we think of now as a PC. For one thing, researchers seem eager to
abandon the keyboard and monitor that are the PC's trademarks. Instead they are
trying to devise PCs with interpretive powers that are more humanlike – PCs that can
hear you and see you, can tell when you're in a bad mood and can ask questions when
they don't understand something.

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