Time magazine ‘Person of the Year’, 1981

IDEA N^o 9

THE PERSONAL COMPUTER

When Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web in 1990, he was simply bringing together a number of existing technologies – electronic documents, hypertext and the internet. The machine that made all these possible was the personal computer.

An IBM Personal Computer running MS-DOS.

In 1971, a two-year-old electronics company called Intel was commissioned to produce an integrated circuit for a groundbreaking new product, the electronic calculator. The challenge was to create an inexpensive microchip, small enough to fit inside a pocketsized device. Intel employee number 12, Ted Hoff, led the project. Instead of hardwiring the logic into the circuit, he designed a programmable chip. He had created the microprocessor, a chip that could be programmed to perform the operations of a calculator, or anything else for that matter. The world would never be the same again.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ed Roberts was running a company called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) that sold kits for these new-fangled pocket calculators. By 1975, pre-built devices were hitting the market at ever-lower prices and the company was struggling. Roberts decided to try to do what few had attempted – to create a home-assembly kit for a computer. Popular Electronics magazine heard about his idea and were keen to feature it on the cover. Roberts had not made the computer yet – it did not even have a name – but he did have an impressive blue case with lots of lights and switches. Popular Electronics published a picture of the empty case on its front cover. An ad in the magazine marketed the Altair, named after a planet on Star Trek, for $397. MITS received thousands of orders. Roberts needed a working machine fast. He hired two Harvard students to write an operating system. Those students were Paul Allen and Bill Gates. Six weeks later they had created Disk Operating System (DOS). Roberts had created the computer that would spark the digital revolution.

The next year, in 1976, a group of computer hobbyists in the San Francisco Bay area organized the Homebrew Computer Club. One of the members was Steve Wozniak, then aged 24. He had designed a much more sophisticated machine than the Altair, with a monitor and a keyboard. He shared his designs at the club and asked for advice. Steve Jobs gave him some: ‘Don’t give your ideas away for free.’ The pair formed Apple, marketing Wozniak’s computer as the Apple I.

Companies like Atari, Commodore, Sinclair and Texas Instruments joined the market, and by 1980 over a million people owned a microcomputer. IBM took note. They built their own model assembled from off-the-shelf parts. They called it the IBM Personal Computer. All they needed was an operating system. They tracked down a couple of former Harvard students in New Mexico that were rumoured to have one. By now Allen and Gates had formed Microsoft; they licensed DOS – now called MS-DOS – to IBM for a per-unit fee. Less than four months after the launch, Time magazine named the IBM PC ‘Person of the Year’.

It did not take long for competitors to see that the IBM PC was made from components they could buy at their local electronics store. Copycats began to build identical machines in their basements, also licensing MS-DOS from Microsoft. Two of these copycats were Compaq and Dell. The battle between Apple machines and IBM clones commenced. Soon every home and office would have one or the other. It was not long before someone had the smart idea of connecting them all up.■

‘By 1980, over a million people owned a home computer.’

The Xerox Alto (1973) was the first true personal computer, incorporating a keyboard, monitor, GUI and mouse, but it was never sold commercially.