Apple Computer often takes a special place in these histories of personal computing, its business success being legendary, if not mythical. The story of the company's rise from a garage to a multi-billion dollar corporation is well known among technological writers and students of business. In the history of computing, however, this shift in method is apparent largely in the amalgamation of economic detail into discussions of technological progress. Very few studies in the history of personal computing have been made by professional historians of technology, but the topic has been the focus instead of technophiles, a disparate group of technology journalists and amateur historians. The microcomputer is rarely regarded as a valuable historical artifact in itself, and generally its design is dismissed as largely determined by utility.
T here is, then, a strange lacuna in the study of computer history.
Personal computers are regarded by economic historians only as sets of features in a package that is ultimately evaluated by how well it sells, and by those more directly interested in technology as the reified state of the art, objects judged entirely on the basis of function. This is at least in part because historiographic models for the study of material culture do not easily apply to mass-produced instruments with few moving parts and very limited physical interaction for the user. Nonetheless, a direct evaluation of these artifacts and the ways in which they have been presented reveals that their function as well as their appearance has been shaped by very specific human interests which Lubar rightly describes as political.