VCF Pacific Northwest -- Chris Rutkowski -- The Rise of Business PCs

Chris Rutkowski, The birth of the Business PC - How volatile markets evolve, The early 1980s marked the shift from the hobbyist/industrial eras of computers to the emergence of the modern PC. The Epson QX10, the last and arguably greatest of the 8-bit computers, set user expectations of what a PC can and should be. Those expectations persist today in the form of the standard PC keyboard, the various "office" suites, and the "push button" ease of a touch-screen UI. We are going to investigate why the form-factor has been so successful, and how that success can be extrapolated into understanding that age-old question: "What’s next?"

A presentation at Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest, March 23 2019