Introduction

By Jeremy Reimer (mailto:[email protected]) Wednesday, December 14, 2005 http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/1 17Grudzień200523:06 Introduction Electronic digital computers moved out of science fiction and into reality during World War II. Less powerful than a modern pocket calculator, the first real job for these massive machines was to speed up the calculation of artillery firing tables. Thirty years later, computers had firmly cemented themselves in the public imagination. They were huge boxes, covered with blinking lights and whirring reels of tape. Banks and big corporations all had computer rooms, closely guarded by a priesthood of programmers and administrators. Science fiction novels and movies imagined impossibly brilliant supercomputers that guided spaceships and controlled societies, yet they were still room-sized behemoths. The idea of a personal computer, something small and light enough for someone to pick up and carry around, wasn't even on the radar. Colossus Even the major computer companies at the time didn't see the point of small machines. The mainframe industry was dominated by IBM, who was the Snow White to the Seven Dwarves of Burroughs, CDC, GE, Honeywell, NCR, RCA and Univac. Mainframes took up entire floors and cost millions of dollars. There was also a market for slightly smaller and less expensive minicomputers, machines the size of a few refrigerators that sold for under a hundred thousand dollars. This industry was dominated by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), with strong competitors such as Data General, Hewlett-Packard and Honeywell-Bull. None of these companies considered the personal computer to be an idea worth pursuing. ENIAC, the second electronic digital computer, circa 1943 It wasn't that the technology wasn't ready. Intel, at the time primarily a manufacturer of memory chips, had invented the first microprocessor (the 4-bit 4004) in 1971. This was followed up with the 8-bit 8008 in 1972 and the more-capable 8080 chip in 1974. However, Intel didn't see the potential of its own product, considering it to be useful mainly for calculators, traffic lights, and other embedded applications. Intel had built a reference design with a microprocessor and some memory that could be programmed using a terminal, but it was used for testing purposes only. An Intel engineer approached chairman Gordon Moore with the idea for turning it into a consumer product, but Moore, with a rare lack of insight, couldn't see any practical purpose for such a device and decided not to go ahead with the project. The task of inventing the personal computer, and with it the personal computer industry, was left instead to the manager of a small, little-known calculator company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His name was Ed Roberts. TheAltair(197577) Ed Roberts always dreamed of becoming a doctor, but instead he wound up starting his own private electronics company. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) started out selling model rocket telemetry kits and Strona nr 2 Z 32 subsequently recently branched out into selling pocket calculators. By 1973, the company had a couple of dozen employees, and was doing fairly well. Then electronics giants that manufactured their own CPUs and other chips, like Texas Instruments, began a calculator price war that nearly drove MITS into bankruptcy. With his company over US$300,000 in debt, Roberts took a fateful trip to the bank, to discuss whether or not he would have to shut down the company. He told the bank manager about his plans to sell a kit computer to electronics hobbyists. The manager wanted to know how many Roberts expected to sell each month, and he guessed that they might sell as many as a hundred. This was enough to stave off the company's execution. In the mean time, Les Solomon, the technical editor of Popular Electronics magazine, was looking for a cover story to compete with Radio Electronics' article on how to assemble a machine called the "Mark 8" from a collection of bare parts including an Intel 8008 CPU. The Mark 8 was merely a list of parts, but Solomon wanted a story about a fully-fledged personal computer that you could go out and buy, if not in fully assembled form, at least in an easy-to-build kit. He contacted Ed Roberts who told him about his plans, and a mockup of Robert's design made it on the cover of Popular Electronics' January 1975 issue. The machine needed a name. Les Solomon asked his young daughter what the computer on Star Trek was called, and she replied "Computer." Telling her that was less than helpful, she retorted that they should call it the "Altair," as that was where the Enterprise was headed that week. The name stuck. The Altair looked in some respects like a modern desktop computer (at least in the days when desktops actually sat on your desk). It was encased in a metal and plastic rectangular box that opened up to allow the user to connect add-on boards. However, there was no keyboard or display offered with the system initially. The machine was programmed by flicking a series of toggle switches on the front panel, and the results of the program could be viewed on a long string of LEDs. Roberts admitted that the design for the front panel was significantly inspired by the panel of Data General's popular Nova minicomputer. Strona nr 3 Z 32 The original Altair computer, with its top off Ed Roberts had worked out a deal with Intel to purchase 8080 CPUs. Normally, these CPUs sold for US$300 in small quantities, but Roberts was able to purchase a batch with cosmetic defects for only US$75 each. This enabled him to set the price of the Altair kit at US$399. He calculated that he would need to sell 200 units over the product's lifetime to reach the break-even point. After a week of being available on the market, MITS had orders for over 2,000 machines. Basically, the hobby electronics community went nuts. The pent-up demand for a personal computer was so great that MITS had far more orders than it could possibly ship. People were willing to wait for months for the company to work its way through the backlog, just so they could get a machine of their own. Some people even set up camp outside MITS headquarters. The success of the new machine spawned a collection add-on hardware products and imitators. Other companies cloned the Altair's 100-pin 8-bit bus, and called it the "S-100" bus, infuriating Roberts. Boards that interfaced with teletypes and CRT terminals made the Altair resemble a modern computer. A young HP employee named Steve Wozniak saw the Altair at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting and decided that he could make something like it himself, which ended up becoming the Apple I. And an unknown college dropout named Bill Gates, together with his partner Paul Allen, wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair, forming a company called Strona nr 4 Z 32 Micro-Soft in the process. He would later drop the hyphen and the capital S, and make billions of dollars. MITS struggled to keep up with demand, not only for the Altair, but for the 4k memory cards that were required to run BASIC. Competition from other add-on companies and new computer companies hurt MITS, and Roberts eventually sold the company to the hard disk manufacturer Pertec in May 1977. Pertec management failed to move the company forward and it went bankrupt a few years later. The Altair ultimately failed in the marketplace, but it sold thousands of units and jump-started the entire personal computer industry. The concept and form factor of desktop computers, with add-on boards that plugged into a standardized bus, the concept of third-party software, and the idea of retail computer dealers and dealer expositions were all pioneered by MITS. Ed Roberts took the millions from the sale of his company and reinvested them in himself. He completed his medical training and achieved his life-long dream of becoming a doctor. He still keeps an Altair in his office. Ed Roberts, with his creation Thefirsttrinity:theCommodore PET,theRadioShackTRS80,and Strona nr 5 Z 32 theApple][(19771980) Despite the success of the Altair, the big computer companies still considered these small machines to be the domain of a few slightly screwy enthusiasts, and not a product for the mass market. This didn't stop many of these same enthusiasts from starting their own computer companies, almost all of which no longer exist today. There was Processor Technology's Sol, designed by Lee Felsenstein who went on to design the first "portable" computer, the Osborne 1. There was Cromemco, which was started by two Stanford students, and made add-on boards for the Altair before designing their own computer products. Vector Graphic also started making S-100 memory boards before introducing their own computer system. A company called IMSAI built an Altair clone and had the distinction of having the first personal computer ever to be featured in a movie, Wargames, before imploding due to overexpansion and forced est training for management that distorted fiscal realities. SouthWest Technical Products (SWTP) built a machine using Motorola's new 6800 CPU. In the UK, the NASCOM-1 kit attempted to mirror the success of the Altair on the other side of the Atlantic. By the end of 1976, over 40,000 personal computers had been sold, with MITS selling approximately 25%, IMSAI 17%, Processor Technology 8%, and SWTP 8%.

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