Date: 04/03/2021 Shift: 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM Q. No: 159

Look at a photograph of a typical office of the mid-fifties and in 2010, and the difference is instantly obvious. Every desk in the office now has a computer on it. Today half of the workers use computers on a daily basis in their jobs; in 1954 perhaps one-tenth of one percent did. Moreover, not just office workers use computers. Garage mechanics, dentists, lumberjacks, and a thousand other job categories as well now utilize computers in the daily course of business for purposes unique to each occupation.

To be sure, in 1954 computers were already making inroads into American business, especially in areas where data processing was very intense, such as banking and insurance. But they were huge and hugely expensive, kept in special air-conditioned rooms and tended by men in white coats. Very few Americans had ever actually seen one. Today about the only way for an American not to see one every day would be to stay in bed with lights off.

The difference is the development, beginning in 1969, of the microprocessor, essentially a dirt-cheap computer on a silicon chip. A little more than a decade later, the calculator had sent the slide rule into oblivion, word processing had made the typewriter a relic, and Apple Computer had introduced the personal computer.