When I originally posted this 1978 video about the famous Byte Shop chain, I didn’t have time to elaborate on why I thought we’d sort of failed the promise of the Home Brew Club and personal computer kits, so I’ll add an addendum.

The people in this video were imagining their future, building it. Media in America had long been a top-down operation and for a brief, shining moment, it wasn’t. I suppose it’s sort of inevitable that this period was transient and that some of the best and brightest (or, perhaps, most ambitious) would take the lead and use this early experience to build brands and drive markets. But despite the free flow of information we have now (a tremendous good), the actual direction is still essentially a top-down situation all over again, though, granted, the people at the top have a very good sense of design. I’m not suggesting everyone could have created brilliant things, but there was something definitely lost in the shift back to passive media consumption that occured by the 1980s.

I don’t mean to disparage the amazing tools we’ve been handed, but I think that’s part of the problem: They’ve been handed to us. Maybe our use of these tools would be more productive and less narcissistic if more of it had been the product of our own hands.•