The newsletter is dedicated to support for grassroots efforts and movements like the "computers for the people movement" that gave birth to the personal computer in the 1970's and 1980's. Hard efforts of many people over hundreds of years led to the production of a working computer in the 1940's and then a personal computer that people could afford in the 1970's. This history has been serialized in several issues of the newsletter.
The Amateur Computerist was described by Andrew Ross and Constance Pawley in their book "Technoculture" (Univ of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 125) as follows:
"When worker education classes in computer programming were discontinued by management at the Ford Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, United Auto Workers members began to publish a newsletter called the 'Amateur Computerist' to fill the gap. Among the columnists and correspondents in the magazine have been veterans of the Flint sit-down strikes who see a clear historical continuity between the problem of labor organization in the thirties and the problem of automation and deskilling today. Workers' computer literacy is seen as essential not only to the demystification of the computer and the reskilling of workers, but also to labor's capacity to intervene in decisions about new technologies that might result in shorter hours and thus in `work efficiency' rather than worker efficiency."