Inventing the Personal Computer

INVENTING THE PERSONAL COMPUTER

Computer Lib

Despite the pin-striped reputation personal computers acquired from their rapid expansion into the business market in the 1980s, they began their existence with solidly countercultural credentials. An important early manifesto was Theodore Nelson's 1974 book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Nelson believed personal computers would free individuals from the big corporate computers, giving them access to their own computing power. Small, easy to use, and affordable, microcomputers would be available to all, with free software, community access, and "liberated information."

The Chip

The computers of the early 1960s were mammoth affairs, requiring entire rooms to house them, and so expensive that only large organizations and the government could afford them. Later, minicomputers were produced, more attractive to businesses and researchers in size and cost. The breakthrough that made the personal microcomputer possible came in 1971, when Theodore Hoff of Intel created the microprocessing chip. Much of the power of the bulky mainframe had been converted into a chip that could be held in the palm of the hand.

Kits

In keeping with its underground beginnings, the first microcomputers sold were kits. Featured on the cover of Popular Electronics, the kit was marketed by Altair for electronics amateurs beginning in January 1975. Meanwhile, the young technowizard Steve Jobs had sold his Volkswagen microbus to finance the development of a personal computer, which he watched his friend Stephen Wozniak build in his garage. In 1977 he introduced the Apple II, a line of personal computers upon which they would build a multibillion-dollar company. In the next two years Jobs and his entrepreneurial associates developed the essential tools for the explosion of personal computer use in the 1980s: a disk-drive system and a graphics and spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, that made it possible to use the machine for sophisticated applications without knowing computer programming.

Sources:

Alexander Hellemans and Bryan Bunch, The Timetable of Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988);

Phil Patton, Made in USA: The Secret Histories of the Things That Made America (New York: Penguin, 1992).