I posted this remarkable 1978 footage on the site a couple of years ago when it was briefly available. It shows the mysterious new world that was booting up inside the Palo Alto Byte Shop, one of the outlets in Paul Terrell’s early personal computer retail chain.

It makes me a little sad, though, that just for a brief, shining moment, the machinery and not merely the content, was in the hands of the users. Now it’s a top-down affair again, with consumers eagerly awaiting the next product announcement from Apple.

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. Perhaps our use of these tools would be more productive and less narcissistic if more of it had been the product of our own hands. Maybe the Maker culture will proliferate and change all of that.