Computers are large, expensive machines for governments, universities, and major corporations. Personal computing is not practical.
The Apple II launched in 1977, the same year this cohort graduated. The Commodore PET and TRS-80 also launched that year. Personal computing was already arriving. Within a decade, computers were in millions of homes and schools.
What changed?
For the first three decades of computing, the machines were the size of rooms. ENIAC, completed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, weighed 30 tons, stretched across 1,800 square feet of floor space, and required its own dedicated power supply. Through the 1960s, IBM's mainframes filled climate-controlled data centers and were operated by trained technicians who managed time on the machine for institutional users. If you graduated in 1977, this architecture seemed almost a feature of reality. Computation required infrastructure. Infrastructure required institutions. Personal computing was not a realistic vision for ordinary people.
Then three machines launched in the same summer. Apple Computer unveiled the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in June 1977, fully assembled, color graphics, keyboard included, priced at $1,298. Commodore released the PET 2001 the same month. Tandy's TRS-80 arrived in August. Three affordable computers aimed at ordinary consumers appeared in the summer the 1977 graduating class was beginning their adult lives.
None of this was sudden. The Altair 8800, a kit computer for electronics hobbyists, had appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975. It had no keyboard, no monitor, and required assembly from components, but it demonstrated that a sub-$500 computer was possible. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for it. Jobs and Wozniak used it as an existence proof. Gordon Moore had described the underlying economic engine in 1965: the number of transistors on a chip was doubling roughly every two years, and cost per transistor was falling proportionally. The classroom could see the current state of computing. It had no framework for Moore's trajectory.
Within a decade of 1977, personal computers were in millions of American homes and schools. Programming had become a professional skill sought across industries that had never imagined needing it. The machines were always going to get smaller and cheaper; the physics and economics of silicon had made that outcome almost certain years before anyone was teaching it. The classroom taught computing accurately for its moment. It taught the moment as if it were a destination.