Week 2: A Brief History of the PC

The First Personal Computer

The Altair 8800, 1975$395 for a do-it-yourself kit or $498 for a fully assembled unit.

256 bytes of memory“Hackers” flocked to the machine.

Within three months, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems received 4,000 orders.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs

1976. The Steves built a PC, called the Apple I, in Wozniak’s garage.The first Apple computer, the Apple I looked like a typewriter in a box. It was once of the first computers to incorporate a keyboard. In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer Company.

The Apple II

1977. The Apple II was an instant success. Shipped with colour monitor, sound, and game paddles. Priced at $1,300, it included 4 kilobytes of RAM, a optional floppy disk drive.

Enter the Competition

1977. One of Apple’s strongest competitors was the Commodore PET 2001. It was billed as “The new $595 home computer.”

IBM PCs

1980. Because many companies were already familiar with IBM mainframes, they readily adopted the IBM PC.

BASIC and Operating Systems

1980. When IBM was considering entering the PC market it approached Bill Gates at Microsoft to write an OS program. MS-DOS was based on and OS called “Quick and Dirty Operating System.

Machine of the Year

1983. The IBM PC was the first and only nonhuman object chosen as “Man of the Year” by TIme in its January 1983 issue.

GUI -- Graphic User Interface

Ahead of its Time!

Xerox PARC1972. The Alto included a word processor based on the WYISWYG principle - a file management system with directories and folder. It also had a MOUSE.

The Lisa and the Macintosh

1983. Lisa was the first PC brought to market to use a GUI. Included drop down menus, icons, heirarchical file system and a point and click device called ... a MOUSE.