You, Peter D. Junger, wrote:

>Tresy Kilbourne writes:
>
>
>: You know, the market is not always evil. Think about how that computer on
>: your desk came to exist. As recently as the 70s, only big bad
>: corporations could afford computers, because the technology was too
>: expensive to bring them within the range of the average person's budget.
>
>In the 70s I had a computer on my desk---a Northstar Horizon in a
>wooden case---that was not made by a big bad corporation, but rather
>a small harmless one that originally wanted to call itself Kentucky
>Fried Computers.
>It ran CP/M and when I came into a windfall I fixed
>it up with a 20meg hard disk (I already had a one-meg 12 inch floppy
>drive).  And that machine was supplemented by an Apple //, which was
>luggable and not made by a big, bad corporation, whatever Apple may
>have become, and then that was replaced by an Osborne, which also was
>not made by a big, bad corporation.

I didn't say the computer manufacturers were "bad"--I was referring to
the early customers for computers. I was also using the term "big, bad
corporation" sarcastically, to reflect the prevailing knee-jerk attitude
towards corporations that infects this list. My own view is that
corporations are amoral, not per se immoral; whether they act for good or
evil is largely a matter of social forces. Also, when I say "the 70s" I
am being informal, much as when we say "the 60s", meaning everything up
and including the resignation of Nixon in 1974. I know Apple was getting
off the ground in the late 70s.
>
>Moore's so-called law applied to those micro-computers---the term
>Personal Computer hadn't been invented yet.  So computers were getting
>cheaper and cheaper then.
But they were still way expensive. As an owner of an Apple II you should
know that. Profit margins for Apples then were around 40%, if I am not
mistaken.
>
>: NOONE was even thinking that computers would soon be appliances that most
>: people could afford.
>
>I don't think that most people would call a typewriter an appliance,
>but in the seventies I was already certain that the computer would
>replace the typewriter for other people, just as it had for me.

And I suppose Bill Gates and a few other smarties did as well. Maybe I
shouldn't have said "no one." But are you seriously saying that it was
widely perceived that PCs on every desktop were just around the corner? I
recall when I was writing my undergrad thesis in 1979, that a lucky few
had access to something called a "word processor," which allowed them to
easily *footnote* their theses, and change individual words without
retyping an entire page! This modern miracle required trips to the
university computer lab, however, and lugging boxes full of cards back
and forth to one's dorm.

BTW, you know something's become an appliance when Sears sells it.
>
>: What happened, then, in essence, was that the big
>: bad corporations who could afford computers subsidized the R&D that drove
>: down the price of computers to the point where we could afford them.
>
>It was the people who could afford digital watches and calculaters
>that supported the R&D that went into chips like the 8080 and its
>clone (with improvements) the Z80.  The Z80 was the CPU in my
>Northstar.  IBM, at that time, was trying to sell me some sort of
>weird word-processor that only had a three line screen and had no
>computing capabilities.  I had a 25 line screen, an 8080 assembler,
>Pascal Z, C-Basic, and Microsoft Basic (which I didn't like), WordStar
>and a simple database program called, I believe, DataStar.  None of
>those programs came from big, bad corporations. (Microsoft may have
>been bad back then, but they weren't big.)

I must not have been clear about who "big, bad corporation" referred to,
for which I apologize. I guess irony doesn't survive data compression <g>.

But when you allude to digital watches and so forth, I do agree. But if
you harken back farther (assuming you are old enough to), you may recall
that some early pocket calculators cost as much as an entry-level PC. So
the same rationing-by-price had the effect of making the well-off
subsidize the R&D and upfront chip costs that led to the $1.98
programmable H-P calculator (note: more irony). Digital watches and
pocket calculators, to me, are part of the hi-tech evolutionary process
that got us to this point.
>
>And now I have two desktop computers and a laptop, all from Dell,
>which is getting to be a big, bad corporation, but certainly never did
>any serious R&D.  And my operating system was written by a kid in
>Norway named Linus and is free.  And most of my software comes from the
>Free Software Foundation, which is not now, and never was, and never will
>be, a big bad corporation.  And I use LaTex for producing texts, and
>that is a free bunch of macros for TeX which is also free and was written
>by a computer scientist and mathematician so that he could typeset his
>own books.  And so on.

I have been careful to always refer to hardware mfrs in this argument.
Software is an entirely different market, as Bill Gates was smart enough
to recognize, and Apple wasn't.

>The government did not kickstart the computers on my desks.  (It did
>fund much of the initial research that led to the Internet, but that
>R&D was done by academic researchers in universities: corporations,
>bad or not, had nothing to do with it.)

I think you came in late on this thread. I concur that the current
computer industry operates relatively free of direct taxpayer subsidy
(Ex-Im Bank and other govt-related lending support I can't comment on.) I
originally brought it up because Chomsky cites Pentagon-subsidized
computer R&D in the 40s and 50s as an example of more socialism for the
rich. While I admire Noam greatly I have always found this example
somewhat glib, for the reasons I have been defending. If you dispute that
government funding had anything to do with kickstarting the process, I
disagree, but I am not going to argue the point further, as it moots the
entire thread. Thanks for the factual, reasoned comments though.


Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think
little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and
Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
                -- Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859)