Geek Spot by Jeff Timm

Hi! I’m Jeff Timm, personal computer user since 1983. My wife Holly insisted I share my knowledge and answer your basic computer hardware questions.

What’s a personal computer?

Back in the 1940’s and 50’s and 60’s and 70’s computers were huge expensive machines that were incredibly fun to play with. Unfortunately, only college students and a few dreamers at major computer companies had that luxury. Imagine playing Asteroids ™ on a system that cost $10,000,000 in the middle of the night and calling it a "test."

Suddenly in the 1980’s microchip manufacturers shrank computers down until a CPU (Central Processing Unit) fit on a single chip and could be purchased by anyone. All those computer people who couldn’t get computer time for all their personal projects suddenly started building their own. (It’s MINE and I can do WHAT I WANT with it!)

From computer kits we went to prebuilt computers, which still would have been the domain of hobbyists and those strange people who were in projection clubs in high school, but then a couple of disgruntled accountants invented VisiCalc ™.

Accountants used to be poverty stricken fellows who worked 18 hours a day in tiny little offices with very sharp pencils, writing tiny little figures on huge lined sheets of yellow paper and massive ledger books, developing a massive left or right arm, depending on which side of the "calculator " the lever was on.

Then they would take their work to a vice president who would say, "I’m sorry. This figure on page 16 was revised by 13 dollars. I need the figures redone by tomorrow at eleven for the board meeting." This vice presidents office was located on the first floor, because the accountant would immediately jump out the window.

Then came VisiCalc! It ran on an Apple Computer with a tiny little screen, but the spreadsheet could be HUGH! Best of all, ANY figure in a square could be changed at any time AND ALL THE CALCULATIONS WERE DONE FOR YOU BY THE MACHINE!! You didn’t even have to pull a lever.

The computer revolution followed as nearly every accountant and bookkeeper, small business owner and many people who had to fill out evil tax forms, drove, ran, bicycled and/or crawled to the nearest place selling computers and screamed, "GET ME A VISICALC! I DON’T CARE WHAT IT COSTS!"

The rest is history.