You may be asking yourself: “why did I just watch a video of an empty light industrial building”. This is a totally valid question, and it is worthy of a baffling response,

(Especially baffling in the digital age). ---Historical Context, or historical perspective.

How does footage of a factory being shut down offer this context? Only with feeling, it’s a gentile guide leading you to a time in computing long forgotten and often mocked, the beginning…

Even the beginning, can be contested. Apostles of Steve Jobs might say that logic began with the Apple 1 in 1976, however the idea seems to go back a littler earlier, about two thousand years earlier. Clearly, some consensus is required on the idea of “computer”. For the sake of narrowing the ideological scope, I will reify the “computer” and define it as a personal programmable electronic logic general purpose machine. The Apple 1 meets this criterion, the Antikythera mechanism does not. The definition can be clarified further, about two hundred Apple one’s were sold, and sold as a circut board that hobbyists could fuddle with. It didn’t actually do anything useful, no taxes, no games… no fun. It was about as useful to Joanne Shmo as a two thousand year old eclipse predictor. No, the first “computer” needed to do something useful or interesting, and this would need to be evidenced by people actually purchasing and owning it.

So then what was it? The Apple 2 in 1977, the popular and affordable Tandy Trs-80 in 1977, the IBM Personal Computer in 1981? All those machines may have brought the idea of computer into a common understanding or misunderstanding, but they were beloved only by hobbyists and tinkers, and were owned by few. What about this little guy? It was useful, less threatening than its competitors, nice to look at, colour!!, half the price of anything else, had lots of cool games, downright fun to use, and… was wildly popular. It was a “computer” that warranted owning, any it outsold its competitors by many magnitudes. The Commodore 64, was our first “computer”. If you are a compu-historian you might have even remembered laughing at it as you tinkered with your “real” computer, an apple 2 or IBM. There is a good chance you haven’t heard of it, just like that factory, it is ancient pointless history.

            This brings me to the point I have been trying to make, in the digital era history is irrelevant. The only matters of importance are the matters immediate. The written word brought things into permanance, the computer made those things temporary, and the internet made every slice of data and idea purely transitory, a thing that exists for a while until something new exists in its place. How long lived are internet memes? Not very… The complicated element in this is; we begin to think of what is current, as what is first, or primary. Occasionally a friend tells me “Steve Jobs invented the smartphone” or “The iPhone was the first handheld computer”. For those individuals, those statements are completely true, as for that person, the smartphone didn’t exist until they purchased one. But… It may be beneficial to think of technology as a scale of development, even if we conclude that the C64 was the first personal computer, we must first ignore all the development that preceded it.

And

            Thinking historically is a slow, romantic, infinitely interesting canoe trip though the human experience. It may seem trite to discuss the C64, or the Atari, or the Amiga, but is it any less ridiculous then thinking the iPhone 5 or Android 4.2 phone will change your life?