Songfacts®:

• Four years after the first mass market personal computer, the Apple II, went on sale, Kraftwerk released Computer World, a concept album about the rise of computers within society. Its title track foresees the marriage between the corporate world and technology.
• Business, numbers
  Money, people
  Computer world
  Computer world
  
  Kraftwerk released "Computer World" in both German and English-language editions. The German version replaces the repeated "computer world" with the line "denn zeit ist geld," which translates into English as:
  
  Computer world
  Because time is money
• The song hints at an international conspiracy using computers to spy on people.
  
  FBI and Scotland Yard
  Interpol and Deutsche Bank
  
  Kraftwerk's Ralph Hutter told NME in 1981: "Well, now that it has been penetrated by microelectronics our whole society is computerized, and each one of us is stored into some point of information by some company or organization, all stored by numbers. When you get into Germany at a border, they place your passport into a machine connected to the Bundeskriminalamt in Wiesbaden so they can check whether you can enter or leave, for various reasons other than whether your passport is correct. It goes much further than that, there's a whole philosophy of, etc. - it's our 1981."
• Kraftwerk recorded Computer World at their private Kling Klang studio, hidden away in Düsseldorf, Germany, between 1978 and 1981. Ironically, the German electronic pioneers did not own a computer at the time.
• Performed only by electronic instruments, Computer World contains eerily prophetic lyrics about the way technology would come to dominate society. However, Hutter rejected the suggestion that Kraftwerk are futuristic, insisting, "We were maybe just in time."
• Fun Fact: Time magazine chose the personal computer as its Person of the Year on December 26, 1982, the first non-human ever. Ironically, the writer of the story wrote it on a typewriter, since Time's newsroom would not get computers for another year.