While I had conceived and written Microcomputer Primer for techies, the average Joe was struggling with what–in 1977–seemed a bizarre question: "Why would I want a personal computer in my home?"
We tried to answer this perplexing query with Your Own Computer, a title I coauthored with Michael Pardee. The answer? Never underestimate the virtue of simplicity. Concise (80 pages) and inexpensive ($2.95), Your Own Computer ascended to the top of the bestseller charts. To glance at the narrative of this title today is an act that illuminates the astonishing trajectory of change in computer technology.
Your Own Computer details, among other wonders, the fact that a computer memory board holds 65,000 bytes (65 KB). By contrast, the PC of the millennium arrives ‘out-of-the-box’ with 8 GB or 8,000,000,000 bytes of memory–a 128,000 times increase in capacity!
