Notice, however, that while Ken Olsen was using his orthodoxies to make decisions, others in the
industry were already questioning this set of assumptions and thinking about computers in a completely different way. In that same year, 1977, Apple launched the Apple II, arguably the first personal
computer designed for the home. It was designed by Steve Wozniak. I was 11 years old when this came out and by the age of 13, I was playing on an Apple IIc with my friends. It was slow, had no hard disc anddid very little. But it was cool. And it allowed us to do things we never could. We played computer
games in our home (in that era, we could only play games in video arcades) and we programmed our
own music. It sounded awful, but it was fun and it allowed curious kids like me to do things we never
could before---and it was changing the way we thought about what computers could do.