Exercises: From the mainframe to the pocket

Order these stages in the history of digital technology and explain what changed in who controls the programs and the data at each one: the personal computer; the large shared mainframe computers; the smartphone; the commercial internet; cloud services.

In the computer clubs of the nineteen-eighties, sharing programs was the norm; later, proprietary licenses came to forbid copying, studying or modifying programs. Explain how that change motivated the birth of the free software movement and which freedoms it sought to recover.