Stacks, ‘Pacs’, and User Hacks: A Handheld History of Personal Computing

Abstract

In 1988, a churlish columnist for The Daily Telegraph by the name of Boris Johnson remarked upon the Whipple Museum’s recent acquisition of Cambridge architect Francis Hookham’s extensive handheld calculator collection. Ironically applauding the museum’s curatorial foresight, the author encouraged it to ‘branch out from mere science and become a major tourist attraction for its peerless collection of obsolete gadgets of every kind’. This equation of calculators with worn socks and kitchen appliances pithily suggests how rapidly perceptions of earlier computing technology changed as ‘personal’ desktop computers became commonplace. Conventional wisdom locates the origins of the personal computer (PC) in the Jobs family garage circa 1976 – the more erudite in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics announcing the Altair 8800 – but the first device actually marketed as such was a different ‘PC’ altogether: the HP-65, a programmable calculator launched in 1974. In this