The term “home computer” was always a bit vague. Even today, I know there is some debate among tech historians over what machines actually fit that description. For example, was the Apple II a home computer despite the fact it cost substantially more than, say, a Commodore 64?

In my own review of this period, I’ve come to look at the Home Computer Era as extending from roughly 1977 to 1985. It was in April 1977 that former Chronicles host Jim Warren’s first West Coast Computer Faire featured the debut of the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the Tandy TRS-80, the so-called “trinity” of early home computers.

In an early third-season episode of Computer Chronicles that I previously covered, Wendy Woods presented one of her remote segments from the Women’s Computer Literacy Project, a San Francisco-based computer school run by Deborah L. Brecher. This report was part of the episode’s larger theme of “women in computing.” Brecher’s school provided vocational training in computers to all-female classes.

Woods also mentioned Brecher’s book, The Women’s Computer Literacy Handbook, which she wrote as a companion text for her classes. Although the title may sound oft-putting at first, having reviewed the book myself, it was actually a wonderfully written introduction to the subject of mid-1980s computing. Brecher took care in her introduction to note that she was not trying to be “condescending to the woman reader.” To the contrary, her objective was to use analogies to explain “many computer concepts that [were] rarely discussed in beginners’ books because they are believed to be too difficult.”

Gary Kildall was not just the co-host of Computer Chronicles. He also co-founded and ran two software companies, Digital Research and KnowledgeSet (originally Activenture). As a software guy, Kildall was naturally interested in the newest means of distributing programs. Back in the first season of Chronicles, Kildall touted the potential of two possible magnetic disk replacements–the Capacitance Electronic Disc and bubble memory–neither of which panned out in the market.

But the third time was a charm, right? At least that was Kildall’s hope when he started Activenture to develop CD-ROM technology. The CD-ROM had also been featured on Chronicles before, when a Sony representative suggested we would see compact discs in computers by the end of 1985. Kildall certainly believed that would happen. Indeed, at the 1985 Summer Consumer Electronics Show, Activenture demonstrated its first CD-ROM product–an electronic version of the Grolier’s Encyclopedia–running off a CD player connected to an Atari 520 ST.

This episode of Computer Chronicles from November 1985 returned to a favorite topic of the show: artificial intelligence and expert systems. Here, the focus was on the practical applications of such technology to the field of medicine. Essentially, how could computers be used to improve the delivery of health care?

From Artificial Hearts to a “Doctor in a Box”?

To kick things off, Stewart Cheifet presented his cold open from Penn State’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He held the Penn State Heart, a mechanical artificial heart that had recently been used to keep a man named Anthony Mendia alive for 10 days. But that was nothing compared to another prototype that Cheifet displayed, a new artificial heart with a microprocessor inside that could control all of the device’s functions. Cheifet said this device would be ready for human use in about five years and was just one example of how computer technology could be used in medical research.

Many Computer Chronicles episodes to this point have discussed, or at least mentioned, the influence of politics on the tech industry. But this next episode from November 1985 looks at how the computers were influencing politics. And our hosts were not necessarily encouraged by what they saw.

Would the “Information Age” Lead to a “1984-ish” Scenario?

Stewart Cheifet did his cold open from the United States Capitol building in Washington, DC. He said the federal government cranked out millions of pieces of paper per day. You couldn’t find a better prospect for the “paperless office” and computers. He added that computers were not only being used in government, but also in campaigning.

IBM was not having the best year in 1985. In October, Big Blue reported its third consecutive drop in quarterly profits. TopView, IBM’s attempt to introduce multi-tasking into DOS, had not taken the business market by storm. And then there was the ever-increasing competition from various PC clone makers.

But we’re still in the period where many industry observers kept their faith in IBM’s ability to brute-force its will upon the market. That leads into our next Computer Chronicles episode from October 1985, which focused on computer networks. As Stewart Cheifet mentioned during the last episode’s “Random Access” segment, IBM had recently launched its new token ring system, which was the company’s challenge to 3Com’s Ethernet standard in local area networking.

A “Random Access” item in the last episode discussed a 1985 bill introduced in the United States Senate, S.1305, which proposed to prohibit anyone from “knowingly entering or transmitting by means of a computer” any content related to child pornography. Although similar legislation is now on the federal statute books, this particular bill never made it out of the Senate despite enthusiastic support from then-President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

There was substantial resistance to S.1305 from civil liberties advocates and the tech industry, who feared the legislation would stifle the nascent computer bulletin board system (BBS) market. In a February 1986 Baltimore Sun column, David H. Rothman cited one BBS operator–who happened to be a lawyer–who said, “Just word of one prosecution would be enough to frighten some board operators” into shutting down completely. The problem, Rothman explained, was that the word “knowingly” in S. 1305 could implicate honest BBS operators who were simply too overwhelmed to monitor their users’ posts 24 hours a day. For example, another operator he spoke to said that he made a diligent effort to prevent users from illegally posting people’s credit card numbers, yet “[n]umbers went up [] before he could zap them, and authorities subjected him to a legal battle.”

Few industries were transformed more by the rise in computer technology than the media. This next Computer Chronicles episode from October 1985 looked at the interaction of computers and the media, with a focus on practical applications in the television, radio, and newspaper industries. The final segment also returned to a favorite topic of the show, computer graphics, where the work of one of the guests would help lead to the creation of a whole new form of media–the computer-animated film.

The Macintosh never lived up to the hype of the infamous “1984” Super Bowl ad. But by the end of 1985, the Mac started to find its niche as a desktop publishing machine. It was actually the launch of Apple’s LaserWriter printer in March 1985 that helped spark this new age of computer-based publishing. Indeed, the $2,500 Macintosh was effectively an accessory for the $7,000 laser printer, not so much the other way around.

There’s a telling comment from the previous Computer Chronicles episode that helps set the stage for this next program. When discussing the state of the computer software industry in late 1985, Electronic Arts founder and CEO Trip Hawkins said the market was driven by men who were primarily interested in entertainment. He explicitly said “men.”

The notion that computer games–and by extension, computers in general–were just for “men” reflects the larger problem of sexism that continues to plague the tech industry even today. Keep in mind, the problem was even worse in 1985 when access to computers was still a luxury for most people. This only exacerbated the difficulties for women looking to enter the male-dominated culture of computer engineering. In June 1985, Stanford University released a study that found only about one-third of computer programmers and analysts were women–and the women who held those jobs earned “far less” than their male counterparts.