Bicycle for the Mind

In the early 1970s the computer was a room-sized machine tended by specialists in white coats, something you fed punch cards and waited on. A handful of hobbyists, dreamers, and misfits refused to accept that. Within a decade they had put a computer on a desk, then in a home, and in doing so they rewired the modern world. Steve Jobs called the personal computer "a bicycle for the mind" — a tool that multiplied human capability the way a bicycle multiplies human motion.

This is the sweeping story of how that happened — from the Altair and the Homebrew Computer Club to the two Steves in a Los Altos garage; from VisiCalc and the spreadsheet that sold the machine to business, through the IBM PC and the rise of Microsoft, to the Macintosh, the graphical interface, and the connected world that followed. It is a story of garages and boardrooms, of soldering irons and stock options, of the engineers, entrepreneurs, and rivals — Jobs and Gates, Wozniak and many more — who turned an obscure hobby into the defining industry of our age.

Clear, vivid, and honest about both the liberation the personal computer promised and the concentrations of power it produced, this is the definitive popular history of the machine that reshaped work, play, and thought — and of how a countercultural dream of computing for everyone became the foundation of the world we now live inside.