With the introduction of the Wang , Wang Laboratories successfully transitioned from calculator manufacturer to computer company. The Scelbi was initially advertised in the back of an amateur radio magazine in The product would only sell about units and was discontinued before the end of the decade.
A decade earlier, a computer with the same processing capacity would weigh about half a ton. The Apple I was the first product sold by Apple. It was originally designed for computer hobbyists who could make use of its bare circuit board. It was replaced by the more user-friendly Apple II the following year. In , the world was introduced to a personal computer that dramatically improved on the Apple I. Notably, the Apple II provided the entire personal computer package.
It was pre-assembled, rather than in a kit. It is considered by many the first widely successful PC. More: What are the worst companies to work for? New report analyzes employee reviews. The IBM was designed to be an affordable machine to assist businesses with accounting and reporting.
Despite the company's hopes, the computer never achieved mainstream success. Incidentally, was the year computers were first installed in the White House. Staffers in the president's home were given access to Hewlett-Packard's far more expensive HP Even after pre-assembled machines such as the Apple II were being sold, many still bought personal computers sold as kits.
Like many kits at the time, buyers of the H needed to put together and even solder some components. Once released, the Commodore was extremely popular and the company struggled to produce the VIC fast enough to meet demand. The machine was also the first computer to ever sell more than a million units. The PC was IBM's most successful attempt at a personal computer at the time and was used as the basis for most computers that followed.
It may surprise some to learn that the best selling personal computer in history is not an Apple or an IBM, but rather a Commodore. The now-defunct Commodore International, which had also built the VIC, introduced the 64 in , which was widely loved for its gameplay capability and state of the art sound chip. The Commodore 64 sold roughly 20 million units during its run. More: Can you afford that new vehicle?
The Apple Lisa was one of the first commercially available personal computers with a graphical user interface. However, the Lisa's high cost ultimately doomed its chances of success. The machine was inspired by the nearly decade old Xerox Alto, which also had a graphical user interface though was never made commercially available. The Macintosh is considered to be the first commercially successful computer to have a graphical user interface.
Users could navigate by clicking through images with a mouse as opposed to the text-based commands used in earlier computers. But while every home computer ad bragged about technical specs and affordability in big blocks of text, Apple more quickly understood that it was selling a way of life. This was something also grasped by its biggest competitor: IBM, the first giant in the American computer industry.
Apple and IBM would lead the revolution, but not before the market weathered a video game bust that turned the public against buying such fancy toys. When prices came down, and programs became more practical, the idea of an Apple on the kitchen table became less and less fanciful. Just watch the TV advertisements for the Apple Watch, derided by some tech critics as useless and inconvenient. Out and about? Planning meetings at work? Atari leveraged its video game experience and household name to enter the personal computing market, and Epson shipped the TX, the first low-cost dot matrix printer.
That was also the year Hayes introduced a bps modem and established telecommunication as an aspect of personal computing. It was hobbled by an 8-bit bus for memory and peripherals, which slowed memory access significantly.
In early , Adam Osborne introduced the first portable computer. The first laptop computer also arrived in , the Epson HX a. The HX was about 8. It displayed 4 lines of 20 characters on an LCD screen above the keyboard. Of course, the most significant event of for the personal computing industry was the introduction of the IBM PC on August The astronauts were responsible for entering more than 10, commands into the AGC for each trip between Earth and the Moon.
The Nova line of computers continued through the s, and influenced later systems like the Xerox Alto and Apple 1. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its byte memory. In , after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors. Initially designed for internal use by HP employees, co-founder Bill Hewlett issues a challenge to his engineers in fit all of the features of their desktop scientific calculator into a package small enough for his shirt pocket.
They did. The HP helped HP become one of the most dominant companies in the handheld calculator market for more than two decades. The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel , appears in Electronic News.
Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the had transistors and could perform up to 90, operations per second in four-bit chunks. Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture. Under the direction of engineer Dr. Based on the Intel microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. Designer Thi Truong developed the computer while Philippe Kahn wrote the software.
Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that did not require high performance, such as process control and highway toll collection. In , Truong sold R2E to Bull. Designed by Don Lancaster, the TV Typewriter is an easy-to-build kit that can display alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store characters as 16 lines of 32 characters.
A cassette tape interface provided supplementary storage for text. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the s. Wang was a successful calculator manufacturer, then a successful word processor company. The Wang makes it a successful computer company, too. Wang sold the primarily through Value Added Resellers, who added special software to solve specific customer problems. The first commercially advertised US computer based on a microprocessor the Intel , the Scelbi has 4 KB of internal memory and a cassette tape interface, as well as Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces.
Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. In , Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market.
The Alto is a groundbreaking computer with wide influence on the computer industry. It was based on a graphical user interface using windows, icons, and a mouse, and worked together with other Altos over a local area network.
It could also share files and print out documents on an advanced Xerox laser printer. For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders.
Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor. The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications. Southwest Technical Products is founded by Daniel Meyer as DEMCO in the s to provide a source for kit versions of projects published in electronics hobbyist magazines.
Of the dozens of different SWTP kits available, the proved the most popular. Tailored for online transaction processing, the Tandem is one of the first commercial fault-tolerant computers. The banking industry rushed to adopt the machine, built to run during repair or expansion.
The Video Display Module VDM marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers. Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March , the visual display module enabled the use of personal computers for interactive games.
The fastest machine of its day, The Cray-1's speed comes partly from its shape, a "C," which reduces the length of wires and thus the time signals need to travel across them.
High packaging density of integrated circuits and a novel Freon cooling system also contributed to its speed. Typical applications included US national defense work, including the design and simulation of nuclear weapons, and weather forecasting.
Intel and Zilog introduced new microprocessors. Five times faster than its predecessor, the , the Intel could address four times as many bytes for a total of 64 kilobytes.
The Zilog Z could run any program written for the and included twice as many built-in machine instructions. Designed by Sunnyvale, California native Steve Wozniak, and marketed by his friend Steve Jobs, the Apple-1 is a single-board computer for hobbyists.
With an order for 50 assembled systems from Mountain View, California computer store The Byte Shop in hand, the pair started a new company, naming it Apple Computer, Inc.
In all, about of the boards were sold before Apple announced the follow-on Apple II a year later as a ready-to-use computer for consumers, a model which sold in the millions for nearly two decades. When connected to a color television set, the Apple II produced brilliant color graphics for the time. Millions of Apple IIs were sold between and , making it one of the longest-lived lines of personal computers. Apple gave away thousands of Apple IIs to school, giving a new generation their first access to personal computers.
The TRS proved popular with schools, as well as for home use. The TRS line of computers later included color, portable, and handheld versions before being discontinued in the early s. The first of several personal computers released in , the PET comes fully assembled with either 4 or 8 KB of memory, a built-in cassette tape drive, and a membrane keyboard.
The PET was popular with schools and for use as a home computer. After the success of the PET, Commodore remained a major player in the personal computer market into the s. The success of the VAX family of computers transformed DEC into the second-largest computer company in the world, as VAX systems became the de facto standard computing system for industry, the sciences, engineering, and research. Shortly after delivery of the Atari VCS game console, Atari designs two microcomputers with game capabilities: the Model and Model The served primarily as a game console, while the was more of a home computer.
Atari's 8-bit computers were influential in the arts, especially in the emerging DemoScene culture of the s and '90s. The Motorola microprocessor exhibited a processing speed far greater than its contemporaries. This high performance processor found its place in powerful work stations intended for graphics-intensive programs common in engineering. Intended to be a less expensive alternative to the PET, the VIC was highly successful, becoming the first computer to sell more than a million units.
Commodore even used Star Trek television star William Shatner in advertisements. About 50, were sold in Britain, primarily to hobbyists, and initially there was a long waiting list for the system.
The machine was expandable, with ports for cassette storage, serial interface and rudimentary networking. The DN is based on the Motorola microprocessor, high-resolution display and built-in networking - the three basic features of all workstations.
Apollo and its main competitor, Sun Microsystems, optimized their machines to run the computer-intensive graphics programs common in engineering and scientific applications. Apollo was a leading innovator in the workstation field for more than a decade, and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in IBM's brand recognition, along with a massive marketing campaign, ignites the fast growth of the personal computer market with the announcement of its own personal computer PC.
It featured a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, a modem, and two 5. Thousands of software titles were released over the lifespan of the C64 and by the time it was discontinued in , it had sold more than 22 million units. It is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest selling single computer of all time. Franklin was able to undercut Apple's pricing even while offering some features not available on the original.
Sun Microsystems grows out of this prototype. Sun helped cement the model of a workstation having an Ethernet interface as well as high-resolution graphics and the UNIX operating system.
Lisa is the first commercial personal computer with a graphical user interface GUI. It was thus an important milestone in computing as soon Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh would soon adopt the GUI as their user interface, making it the new paradigm for personal computing.
The success of the Portable inspired many other early IBM-compatible computers. Compaq's success launched a market for IBM-compatible computers that by had achieved an percent share of the personal computer market.
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