1970

While bombs rain down on Vietnam, three engineers at Intel complete the design of the first commercial microprocessor. Their invention, almost unnoticed in a world obsessed with the Cold War, will change everything.

The opening decade unfolds in a peculiar climate. America bleeds in Vietnam. Young people take to the streets. The USSR and the United States eye each other warily. Oil becomes a weapon. And amidst this global chaos, a handful of men and women invent the digital future.

American campuses are boiling over. Social protest rejects established authority, including that of large centralized computers symbolizing institutional power. At Berkeley as at MIT, students dream of a different kind of computing—more personal, more accessible. In university laboratories, people work on machines that bear no resemblance to the air-conditioned colossi of corporations. There, away from the paths marked out by IBM, another vision of the computer is born.

In 1973, the oil shock strikes. Lines grow at gas stations. Inflation soars. Faced with this crisis, companies seek to reduce their costs. Computerization appears as a solution. Banks are the first to embrace it, as they must manage an increasing number of transactions in an unstable economic context. Their needs propel the development of ever more sophisticated databases. Oracle emerges in this context, based on an idea by Larry Ellison inspired by a theoretical IBM article.

In the East, behind the Iron Curtain, the USSR attempts to keep pace. It launches its own computing plan, sometimes copying Western architectures. The SALT agreements change nothing—technology remains a power issue. Soviet computers equip factories and administrations but suffer from a growing lag. Computing visibly marks the difference between the two blocs.

Japan plays its own tune. Without the military constraints weighing on American industry, Japanese companies focus on consumer electronics. They excel in miniaturization. Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp establish themselves worldwide. Their components soon equip the first personal computers. The country, defeated in 1945, takes its technological revenge.

Europe advances in scattered order. France relies on its Calcul Plan and the International Company for Computing to create a national champion. Germany depends on Siemens. The United Kingdom develops ICL. But these national initiatives struggle against American giants. European universities, however, shine in theoretical research. The Pascal language, created by Niklaus Wirth at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, marks an advance in programming language design.

Television then reigns supreme over Western households. Images of the first step on the Moon, viewed by hundreds of millions of spectators, demonstrated the power of communication networks. Telecommunications engineers reflect on digital data transmission, particularly with the first videotex experiments. In France, the PTT launches studies that will lead to Minitel, the first mass-market network before the Internet era.

In schools and universities, computer science takes its first steps as a teaching discipline. The BASIC and Logo languages are designed with an educational objective. Seymour Papert, at MIT, theorizes learning through programming. These reflections open a new field: computing is not only a calculation tool but also a means of learning differently.

The working world transforms—cathode ray tube screens gradually replace cardboard files. In offices, secretaries discover word processing. The first daisy wheel printers reproduce typewriter quality but with electronic flexibility, changing administrative professions. Unions worry and negotiate agreements on screen working conditions, but the march toward all-digital is launched.

Science fiction seizes upon the computer theme. “2001: A Space Odyssey” popularized the image of HAL 9000, an artificial intelligence gone mad. In 1973, the film “Westworld” imagines uncontrollable robots. These works express the hopes and fears aroused by computerization. Simultaneously, the first commercial video games like Pong attract a new audience to these machines once reserved for scientists.

Healthcare doesn’t escape this wave. Hospitals equip themselves with computer systems for patient management. The first medical scanners, appearing at the beginning of the decade, produce digital images that only computers can process. Pharmaceutical research increasingly relies on molecular modeling. Medical computing emerges as a new discipline.

Large cities become laboratories where urban computing applications are tested. Traffic light management, optimization of water or electricity networks benefit from real-time control systems. These applications require computers capable of reacting instantly to their environment, stimulating the development of embedded systems.

International trade metamorphoses with the adoption of electronic exchange standards. Barcodes appear in American supermarkets. Banking transactions are automated with the SWIFT network. Supply chain computerization begins. These developments accelerate the globalization of subsequent decades, where information flows will circulate as quickly as goods.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak found Apple in 1976. Their Apple I symbolizes the spirit of this new computing: artisanal, personal, almost rebellious. At the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen create Microsoft. These young entrepreneurs bear no resemblance to the leaders of traditional large computing companies. They inaugurate a new era where the computer is both a consumer product and an object of passion.

Fundamental research advances rapidly. Alan Kay’s work at Xerox PARC on graphical interfaces enables more intuitive computing. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson’s creations at Bell Labs—the C language and the UNIX system—launch modern computing. These innovations, initially confidential, will transform the industry’s face over subsequent decades.

At the end of the 1970s, the first amateur computer clubs gather enthusiasts around rudimentary machines like the MITS Altair 8800. These communities develop a culture of sharing that contrasts with the closed world of professional computing. Specialized magazines publish programs that readers copy line by line. No one yet imagines that these obscure practices represent 21st-century computing.

The computer, once a tool reserved for large organizations, begins its transformation into a daily companion during the 1970s. The ideas emerging during this period will shape our digital world for the following 50 years, designing a society where information processing is as essential as the production of material goods.