The Microcomputer Revolution for Historians
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3554919 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard Jensen (0000-0002-1016-1524, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1983 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 91 |
| Publication date | 1983-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/203518 |
| OpenAlex | W2322322833 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
The Microcomputer Revolution for Historians In 1971 Intel Corporation introduced the 4004 microprocessor chip and launched the microcomputer revolution. Today anyone can buy a sophisticated computer on a chip-like the widely used Zilog z-80A-for the price of cabfare from an airport, and a stripped-down system like the Timex-Sinclair Iooo ready to plug in for the price of two nights at a motel. The little Timex, for a total cost of about $S5o, has the processing speed and internal memory capacity of the smaller versions of the IBM 360 mainframe machine that revolutionized computing in the I960s. The press has given extensive coverage to the microcomputer revolution, and historians in generations to come will be called upon to decide whether the microcomputer had as much impact upon society, economy, and culture as the locomotive or the automobile. What are the implications for historians in the I980s? For perspective, consider how historians have used giant mainframe machines. Perhaps 500 historians in the United States, and a few score in Europe, have used them chiefly to process large, static data sets. Typically we conduct statistical analysis on census data, collective biographies, reconstituted families, election returns, or economic and demographic time series. The major effort goes into locating suitable sources, drawing a sample, devising a coding scheme, and coding the data. Keypunching the data is an outside expense of some magnitude. With the help of a consultant, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (spss), the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), or a similar package of canned programs is used to create a machine readable data file. The package is used to manipulate the variables and to run all the statistical analyses that the user can think of, and the work is done. Very few historians write their own programs, because they know too little about FORTRAN, operating systems, or the potential of the computer. Practically all the reports on original programming that appear in our literature deal with complex data
Microcomputer · Telecommunications · Big Data Technologies and Applications · Computer Science · History
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1984 - 2024 (41) |
| Highly cited | No |