ПЕРЕВОД НА РУСС Although the work at Xerox PARC was crucial, it was not the spark that took PCs out of the hands of experts and into the popular imagination. That happened in January 1975, when the magazine Popular Electronics put a new kit for hobbyists, called the Altair, on its cover, for the first time, anybody with $400 and a soldering iron could buy and assemble his own computer. The Altair inspired Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobs to build the first Apple computer, and a young college dropout named Bill Gates to write software for it. Meanwhile, the person who deserves the credit for inventing the Altair, an engineer named Ed Roberts, left the industry he had spawned to go to medical school. Now he is a doctor in a small town in central Georgia. To this day, researchers at Xerox and elsewhere pooh- pooh the Altair as too primitive to have made use of the technology they felt was needed to bring PCs to the masses. In a sense, they are right. The Altair incorporated one of the first single-chip microprocessor — a semiconductor chip, that contained all the basic circuits needed to do calculations — called the Intel 8080. Although the 8080 was advanced for its time, it was far too slow to support the mouse, windows, and elaborate software Xerox had developed. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1984, when Apple Computer’s Macintosh burst onto the scene, that PCs were powerful enough to fulfill the original vision of researchers. Researchers today are proceeding in the same spirit that motivated Kay and his Xerox PARC colleagues in the 1970s: to make information more accessible to ordinary people. But a look into today’s research labs reveals very little that resembles what we think of now as a PC. For one thing, researchers seem eager to abandon the keyboard and the monitor that are the PC’s trademarks. Instead they are trying to devise PCs with interpretive powers that are more humanlike — PCs that can hear you and see you, can tell when you’re in a bad mood and know to ask questions when they don’t understand anything.
