Whatever Happened to Computer Hobbyists?

by Louis E. Frenzel, Jr.

The microcomputer industry, a field pioneered primarily by hobbyists, is now a major U.S. enterprise. Thanks to a never-ending supply of high technology components, good software and major shifts in the marketplace, the microcomputer field is no longer the curiosity it once was.

Those responsible for building the first microcomputers, applying them to a wide variety of tasks and making us all aware of them, were computer hobbyists. But today, the big emphasis is on business, professional and industrial applications. Has the hobbyist disappeared completely? Let’s explore the changing role of the hobbyist in the dynamic micro marketplace.

Picture fuddling by computer

Can you identify this face? It’s a well-known President who freed the slaves and was shot in Ford’s theatre. Still stumped? Try viewing it at arm’s length, or squinting, or jiggling the page rapidly. This picture represents a Bell Labs experiment to learn the least amount of visual information a picture can contain and still be recognizable—of some concern to designers of Picture- phones. Here a computer has riven a portrait into 200 squares, each rendered in an even tone of gray along an intensity scale from one to sixteen.