PC turns 40 years old today
Posted on December 9th, 2008 by fizzle in Current Events
Thats right! 40 years ago today, the first personal computer ever to be seen was unveiled to the eyes of a crowd more shocked than when Noah parted the red sea, or whatever it was he did. An astronomical 1,000 people showed up on December 8th, 1968 in San Fransisco, and rumor has it, at least 3 of them were not virgins. This wacky new device boasted an interactive screen, and it even had a manual movement device, which they eerily called a “Mouse”, presumably because it was connected via a wire..and…it looked like a tail?
Who knows. We do know that after Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, the inventor of the Personal Computer, gave his demonstration, the crowd of 997 jumped and cheered and gave Engelbart a standing ovation, while the 3 non versions shrugged it off and said “Meh, women are way more awesome than this thing”. Those three non-virgins live with their parents at the ripe age of 63, have never made more than $6.50 per hour, and overall, they hate their lives, and seek to make the live of everybody else miserable. Oh if only…
The demonstration showed how the computer users, who probably had to have 300 hours of on the box training before even touching one of these mammoths by themselves, could edit text and graphics on the screen, click on (as far as i know the first ever implementation of) hyperlinks to go from one document or screen to another, and all the amenities we would expect today in a modern computer. Oh, and that whole internet thing? Yeah, they got a sneak peak at it, back when it was called ARPANET, and it was still in it’s infancy.
So, where would our lives be without the invention of computers? More importantly, what would I be doing right now if there were no PERSONAL computers? Or laptops? Or an interstellar network of computers? I’d be fucked. My life would resemble that of one of the non-virgins from 1968. But alas…Engelbert hooked a brother up, and here I am.
Oh, you want to see the demo from 1968 in full? Well here ya go! (clickity)
Tags: computers, pc invented, tech, today in history
December 11th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
So this Douglas Engelbart dude later changed his name to Michael Douglas and became an actor?cool.