From the Editor´s Desk

This issue features several articles that give different perspectives on the emergence of affordable computers for use by ordinary people. Specifically, Kevin Gotkin\´s "When Computers Were Amateur" and Petri Saarikoski and Markku Reunanen\´s "Great Northern Machine Wars: Rivalry Between User Groups in Finland" look at the history of amateur computing from the perspective of the users, rather than that of the manufacturers or by focusing on technological artifacts. The issue also includes a discussion of the 1940s effort to convert ENIAC to the new style of programming first described in John von Neumann\´s "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" and an article by David Walden and his team of contributors that documents the emergence of the Arpanet Interface Message Processor (IMP) program and how it evolved to run on a variety of hardware platforms.