Personal computers, what are they even for?

To market their new products to people who had not already spent years pining for a computer of their own, the creators of the second wave of microcomputers had to face head on the question of what the microcomputer was actually good for. What was its value, if not as a hobby plaything for self-motivated computer nerds? To answer that question, they sketched inventive fantasies about how the computer might somehow be an aid to everyday domestic life. They also harnessed the computer’s symbolic power. By 1977, nuclear power and rocketry had begun to lose the sheen of their glory days in the 1950s and 1960s—the computer had taken over as the icon of progress, the drive wheel of the still-unfolding next stage of modernity.