Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation (Mit Press)

by Alex Wiltshire

John Short (Photographer)

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Book cover for Home Computers

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Home Computers showcases the quirky and characterful beginnings of a commercial product that would come to unite the globe: the personal computer.

As so much technology is forgotten once it is superseded, this is a celebration of machines, industrial design and techno-utopianism of an era in the not-so-distant past. Conceived as a visual sourcebook of the most popular, most powerful and most idiosyncratic computers to grace our workspaces, this timely publication offers a reflection on how far we’ve come and a nostalgic look at a time when digital worlds could be contained in a box and turned off, rather than ever-present in our lives.

Home Computers opens with a scene-setting retrospective by computer and gaming writer Alex Wiltshire. The book’s heart is a series of specially commissioned photographs that capture details of switches and early user-interface design, letterforms and logos, and the quirks that set one computer off from another. Images are complemented by a potted history of each device, the inventors or personalities behind it, and its innovations and influences.
  • ISBN13 9780500022160
  • Publish Date 16 April 2020
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country GB
  • Imprint Thames & Hudson Ltd
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 256
  • Language English