Authors

Discussion

The ‘Great Transformation’ (Philipp Ther) – the social, economic and political change in Eastern and Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s – was accompanied by another transformation process: individual computerization and the introduction of affordable microcomputers into private households and small businesses. Home computerization is increasingly well researched thanks to new cultural and technological studies targeting single countries – but it is rarely considered in the context of wider social change. This paper raises the question of the extent to which the home computer boom was intertwined with the ‘Great Transformation’, was shaped by it and at the same time helped to shape it. This will be done by analyzing the discourses and practices surrounding the home computer as a medium and vehicle of small-scale and individual entrepreneurship – a mode of economic activity which, on the one hand, had a privileged position in Western European neoliberalism and, on the other hand, represented a form of proto-capitalist economic activity born out of precarious circumstances in the Eastern European system transformation. In both constellations, the home computer played a prominent role: as a crystallization point of various cottage industries around hardware production and distribution, repair, hardware and software imports and smuggling, programming, and software distribution, often in the form of ‘piracy’. Using selected examples from West Germany, Poland, and the late- and post-Soviet space, the paper will point out areas of entrepreneurial activity around microcomputing that are to be analysed in depth in order to incorporate this important yet unstudied sector of ‘bottom-up capitalism’ and to embed it into the history of the transformation period beyond the East-West divide.