Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs had been friends in high school. They had both been interested in electronics, and both had been perceived as outsiders. They kept in touch after graduation, and both ended up dropping out of school and getting jobs working for companies in Silicon Valley. ( Woz…
If many people today know of CP/M at all, they think of it as the predecessor to DOS. CP/M was developed on Intel’s 8008 emulator under DEC’s TOPS-10 operating system, so naturally many parts of CP/M were inspired by it, including the eight character filenames with a three-character extension that…
The first Cray-1® system by Cray Research (originally Control Data Corporation) was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 for $8.8 million. It boasted a world-record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second (160 megaflops) and an 8 megabyte (1 million word) main memory. The Cray-1’s architecture reflected…
Byte was a hugely influential computer magazine that begain in 1975 and was published throughout the 1980s. It covered development in the entire field of software and computers, was published monthly, and sold for a yearly subscription of $10. The first issue was printed in September 1975, and featured ads…
The MITS Altair 8800 was built by Ed Roberts, who founded MITS in the early 1970s. Originally producing lights for electronic hobbyists, they were heavily in debt by 1974. Roberts had a new idea, a computer affordable for the average person, and managed to make a deal with Intel to…
Lee Felsenstein is an electronic design engineer who was a participant in the early development of personal computers. Two of his designs (the Sol-20 and the Osborne-1) are on display in the Smithsonian, as is the story of the Homebrew Computer Club, which he chaired and where open architecture was…
Telnet was and is the way of connecting to computers on the Internet. Before the World Wide Web made graphical access to the Internet possible, computers on the Internet understood only typed commands very much like DOS. Telnet is designed to allow a user to log in to a foreign…
Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. Designed by Nate Wadsworth and Bob Findley in 1973, it was based on the Intel 8008 processor, and was the first microprocessor based kit to hit the market. It came with 1KB…
Zilog was founded in 1974 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Exxon Corp. by 1980. The company’s management and employees purchased Zilog back from Exxon in 1989. Zilog became a publicly-held company in February, 1991. In March of 1998, Zilog was privatized, as a result of the merger and…
The Xerox Alto was designed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It was the first personal computer with a desktop/GUI. Designed by Chuck Thacker, it had 128kb of memory that was expandable to a whopping 512kb. It also held a hard drive with a 2.5mb cartridge, all inside a small refrigerator-size…