Schools and Hobbyists
First generation computers were largely out of reach of schools and hobbyists who wished to build their own, largely because of the cost of the large number of vacuum tubes required (though relay-based computer projects were undertaken). The fourth generation (VLSI) was also largely out of reach, too, due to most of the design work being inside the integrated circuit package (though this barrier, too, was later removed). So, second and third generation computer design (transistors and SSI) were perhaps the best suited to being undertaken by schools and hobbyists.
Read more about this topic: Transistor Computer
Famous quotes containing the words schools and and/or schools:
“Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“If the women of the United States, with their free schools and all their enlarged liberties, are not superior to women brought up under monarchical forms of government, then there is no good in liberty.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)