in a daring and controversial commercial which attracted the attention of news media all over the world jobs created an image of desperate computer users being brainwashed by Big Brother a veiled reference to IBM but they were about to be awakened from their slumber by the winds of free personal interactive computing for the brilliant ideas of the Xerox PARC scientists their time had come On January 24 Apple computer will introduce Macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984 the Macintosh marked the beginning of a new era of computing gone are the arcane symbols instead
using a mouse a person pushes and pulls pictures using the intuitive skills learned in childhood the computer screen with its pictures and icons depicts a familiar world that even a child can understand in reality this friendly graphical illusion is conjured up by thousands of lines of complex code written by computer programmers this code in turn is converted into hundreds of even more basic orders which this computer knows how to follow the computer circuits millions of simple switches blindly obey opening and closing millions of times a second if software can transform the look and feel for
one computer and it could in principle do it for all computers even the unfriendly ones like this one so if I want to copy a file for instance I have to know what the meaning of a colon backslash this that the other thing is and if I this type a single character then it will give me some sort of obscure error message here I got one that says not ready error reading drive-a abort retry fail it's kind of cryptic and it's certainly not very friendly it's a typical old-style interface the interesting thing is that simply
by changing the software not the hardware exact same hardware an environment can be built that is much simpler much friendlier much more graphical and I'm going to bring that up right now take a look at it I have a pointer that I can move around on the screen I've got a mouse here I can click on that to make things happen the same exact machine but given different software it creates an entirely different style of interacting with it now all computers could be friendly they could begin to realize their destiny as universal machines powerful computers
which once filled a room and cost a small fortune now fitted on a desk once the exclusive tool of skilled programmers computers were increasingly simple to use now it was up to individuals to decide what to use them for Computers could be used for arithmetic but different software could turn the same computer hardware into a drawing machine simple commands could scale rotate or color a drawing producing in seconds what would have taken a skilled draftsman hours of work different software in the same machine turned it into a musician studio still other software could turn the
computer into a flight simulator the uses of a universal machine are bound only by the imagination of the user and it now stretched from scientists creating the future to classical scholars seeking a better way of searching and analyzing the literature of the past the machine invented to compute numbers would now less and less be seen as having anything to do with arithmetic the computer was a lever of the mind which empowered individuals in whatever field to do new things we call them computers because historically we just happened to use them first for numbers they could
have been used first for controlling moving signs like like baseball scoreboards in which case we wouldn't have thought of them as numerical we would have thought of them as textual and graphical machines first and then recognize their numerical functions afterward so it's a historical accident that they're called two computers and this is misled a lot of people what they really are is all-purpose machines that can be turned to any purpose by instructing them which doesn't mean saying now computer you to this it means thinking of a series of operations in a way of specifying those
operations that will make the events occur that you want to occur and that sounds so simple Laura a child of a new computer era is blissfully unaware of how a computer works and how its programmed born the year of the Mac she found the objects in her world included not only pets people and toys at friendly computers her father took this extraordinary film when she was only 18 hours old although she can't talk properly and cannot begin to read she is essentially computer literate like a ball where's the ball Wow let's make a ball there's
the ball uh uh we're made very nice gonna make a way to computer once the specialized tool of scientists and businessmen has established itself in the culture of the young what is a computer if someone knows nothing about it what would you tell them a computer is what would you say Kim well a computer is something that you write on and and press buttons on ice not something that you can write with what else can we do with computers make designs how do we make designs on the computer well you press some buttons and then
you can make a design it's something that like a TV and you should make pictures with it and it helps you to read for a new generation of children the computer was a familiar object in their world and not knowing anything of its history as a room-sized number cruncher they had their own image of what it was for how it worked was of no interest to them what mattered was what it could empower them to do since the computer mediated things like drawing writing reading they saw it as a medium of expression more like a
pencil and paper than a machine for these children the computer isn't just a new means of expression it's the only one for it offers them a lifeline to a universe of thought and learning previously denied them these children who are physically and learning-disabled have one thing in common the traditional medium for representing ideas the book is largely unavailable to them print materials are like stairs print materials are inaccessible to a lot of kids kids who can't turn pages can't hold a book kids with dyslexia who can't read words kids who can't hold a pencil or
who can't spell or whose handwriting is very poor if print materials are like stairs then the computer can be thought of as a mental ramp which gives children access to a world of ideas from which they have been excluded Matthew Huggins is a very intelligent seven-year-old because he was born with cerebral palsy he is unable to control most of his muscles unable to open a book or turn its pages unable to speak his thoughts and ideas his keen intelligence is trapped inside an unresponsive body Pan Am yes I know I know what you're doing you're
finding out if you went if they went on TWA right am i right yes a few years ago Matthews only hope would have been to be sent to a special school but by taking advantage of the computers remarkable versatility he's able to attend an ordinary school with other children his age the same books that other children can open and turn can be scanned into a computer where he can control the page turns with his chin the computer has unlocked the world of ideas and made it available to Matthew in a forum he can use
