When he talks about "little computers," he's talking about the microcomputers of the '70s and '80s, like the IBM PC, Apple II and Macintosh, Commodore 64 and Am

When he talks about "little computers," he's talking about the microcomputers of the '70s and '80s, like the IBM PC, Apple II and Macintosh, Commodore 64 and Amiga, etc. And he wasn't wrong. Those machines were completely different than the "big iron" of the day -- they were single-user, single-tasking systems with no meaningful memory protection or other features to protect the system against poorly written or malicious applications. Microcomputers were supposed to be personal computers, with "personal" in this context meaning that the operator had complete control over 100% of the system's resources, up to and including the ability to shoot themselves in the foot. The big iron world was all about multi-user paradigms like time-sharing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing), so the micro mindset was definitely a radical departure. The irony, of course, is that the micros ended up eating the world, and then the Internet came along and completely demolished their entire philosophy. It turned out that there's no way to connect a single-user, single-tasking computer to a global public network without it running into fundamental performance and security problems. The two microcomputer OS vendors left standing by the 1990s, Microsoft and Apple, both ended up having to throw out their old systems and spend enormous amounts of time and money building new ones (Windows NT and OS X) that could actually be used practically in the new internetworked world. And, not coincidentally, those new systems looked a lot more like the systems that ran on the old big iron than they looked like the systems that had made the microcomputer revolution. The only way for the "little computers" to survive was to become the "big computers" they had so loudly put up against the wall.