Bicycle for the Mind

About This Book

In 1975 the computer was a room-sized machine tended by a priesthood of specialists, the property of governments and giant corporations. No ordinary person owned one, and almost no one imagined they ever would. Within a single human lifetime, that machine shrank until it fit on a desk, then in a bag, and finally in a pocket — and there were more of them than there were people on Earth.

This is the whole sweep of that astonishing story: the transistor and the microprocessor that made a small machine possible; the hobbyists who built the Altair from a kit and the two Steves who founded Apple in a California garage; the killer app that turned a toy into a business tool; the day IBM legitimized the personal computer and then lost control of the industry it created; the graphical interface born at Xerox and perfected on the Macintosh; the home-computer boom, the GUI wars, and the rise of Microsoft; the laptops, the laser printers, and the modems that set the machine free; and the collision with the internet that made the PC the on-ramp to a connected world.

Clear, vivid, and honest about both the triumphs and the costs — the creativity and commerce it unleashed, and the surveillance, distraction, and concentrated power it also brought — this is narrative history at its most gripping: the unforgettable account of how a handful of dreamers, hackers, and salesmen put a computer on every desk, in every home, and in every hand, and quietly remade the modern world.