5 Things You Didn't Know About The Cold War
It ended in part because of Apple
in part because of Apple
The hobbyist culture and the economic flexibility in the U.S., both largely absent in the Soviet Union and Soviet-bloc countries, encouraged guys like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to take on industry giants like IBM. As a result, the information age erupted, spreading information that wasn’t spun by news outlets or crafted by governments into propaganda, but expressed by everyday citizens. The most remarkable testament to this comes from Professor Karen Dawisha, director of Miami University’s Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies. Dawisha quotes a Czech microcomputer maker in the mid-1980s moaning about the impact of PCs: “With these computers comes not only technology, but also ideology… Children might soon begin to believe that Western technology represents the peak and our technology is obsolete and bad… in 10 years’ time it will be too late to change our children. By then they will want to change us.” Finally, before a conflict as massive and globally important as the Cold War can be evaluated with any accurate historical perspective, a certain amount of time must pass, key people need to die or start talking, and a number of classified documents need to be declassified.
