In August 2001, newspapers, magazines, and television news programs around the country ran stories to celebrate "the" 20th anniversary of the personal computer. The sound bites often failed to mention that it was the 20th anniversary of the IBM-PC that they marked. In contrast, the 20th anniversary of several earlier computers, such as the LINC, Dynabook, MICRAL, Altair, Apple I, and Notetaker, had come and gone without much fanfare. Still, amidst the IBM hoopla, the New York Times did remind its readers that Ed Roberts and Alan Kay had developed earlier personal computers. Clearly, many people and technologies contributed to personal computing, which raises the question: what machine should be historically recognized as the first personal computer?
Originally developed during World War II as calculating machines, computers encouraged new concepts about information and how it could be transformed and distributed over time and space. Historically, we can, in a real sense, trace the roots of personal computing back to human computers who manually calculated mathematical tables. Adding machines, calculators, and office equipment contributed to the replacement of human computers with machines.
When the first stored-program computers went into operation in the 1950s, American corporations began to explore how computers could be sold as office products. At that time, computers operated in air-conditioned rooms isolated from people. IBM was a leader in the effort to make commercial machines available. In 1964, IBM's System 360 revolutionized office computing because it combined miniaturization with large-scale integration to establish the business minicomputer. With the advent of the minicomputer, a new data-processing industry emerged.
In 1968, Alan Kay, a graduate student, began drawing sketches of personal machines called Dynabooks. Because of these early designs, journalists have called Kay the father of the personal computer. Kay, however, believes that the first personal computer was the LINC, a small computer developed by Wesley Clark. Built in 1962, the LINC (short for Lincoln Labs) was a modular machine whose console fit on top of a large desk.
While Xerox was developing personal computing, many smaller computers were invented. For instance, in 1973, Thi T. Truong, a Viet Nam immigrant living in France, invented the first general-purpose computer based on a microprocessor. This MICRAL was based on the Intel 8008 microprocessor. It was a commercial machine, and customers wrote specialized software that would be burned into a ROM (read-only memory) chip to make the system function. By 1974, Intel had all of the components to build personal computers, but they never realized it.
In 1974, Hewlett-Packard advertised their HP-65 calculator as a personal computer which may have been the first time that the term personal computer appeared in the press.
Three other computer-like kits came available in 1974, including the Scelbi-8H mini-computer, the Mark-8 personal computer, and the Altair.
Many historians and journalists consider the Altair to have been the first personal computer because it led to the beginning of software giant Microsoft and the formation of today's personal computer industry. Paul Allen and Bill Gates wrote the first software program for the Altair. Steve Wozniack, a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, built his first computer called the Apple I because he could not afford an Altair. From a social perspective, however, the Altair was the first computer that individuals owned, another reason many consider it the first personal computer. It started a social revolution that brought the use of computers out the control of corporations and into the hands of individuals.
IBM's first successful entry into the microcomputer marketplace was the model 5150, more widely known as the "IBM PC," in August 1981, which would revolutionize the computer market. Although not a spectacular machine by technological standards, the IBM PC brought together all of the most desirable features of a computer into one small machine. It offered 16 kilobytes of user memory (expandable to 256 kilobytes), one or two floppy disks and an optional color monitor. When designing the PC, IBM for the first time contracted the production of its components to outside companies. The processor chip came from Intel and the operating system, called DOS (Disk Operating System), came from a 32-person company called Microsoft. The price tag started at $1,565, which would be nearly $4,000 today.
