PART 5: COMPUTERS FOR THE REST OF US

 

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

- Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

 

In the early seventies, Intel introduced their 4004, 4040, 8008 and 8080 microprocessors that were to become the basis for the personal computer revolution a few years later. The 4004 could process data at the then-astounding rate of 60,000 instructions per second and the 8080, released in 1974, became the heart and soul of the first personal computers. But that wasn't the reason Intel developed the 4004. You see, there was a rapidly growing market for electronic desktop calculators. In 1970, a Japanese calculator company called Busicom contracted Intel to develop a set of 12 chips for a new calculator they were going to make. The job was given to Marcian "Ted" Hoff, an engineer whose specialty was designing one-of-a-kind integrated circuits for specific tasks. But once he started on the Busicom job, he began to realize that he could design a single chip that would work as a general-purpose computer processor that could be used for all sorts of things, depending on the program behind it. Did Busicom hail his genius? Nope, they didn't get it and said they weren't interested, but Intel did, and the following year they released the 4004, the first microprocessor.

Another of the early entries in the microprocessor business was a Silicon Valley company called Zilog. The name is now known only to hard-core geeks and a handful of vintage computer collectors, But they could have become the world leader in the chip business instead of Intel, if only...

The company was started by two ex-Intel engineers in 1974. They designed and built one of the first microprocessors, the Z80, and for awhile it was the most widely used chip in the industry. In 1981, IBM was looking around for a chip to use in their new line of personal computers. They were considering two companies - Zilog and Intel. In the end they went with Intel and the rest is history. While they didn't become a world leader like Intel, they continued to design and produce microprocessors for the communications and consumer goods industries. In 1989, Zilog was bought by a venture capitol company, Warburg Pincus, and went public in 1991. You won't find it in the stock listings, because it was purchased by the Texas Pacific Corporation in 1997 and taken off the New York Stock Exchange. They're still around, though, still innovating and creating new products for the high-tech consumer industries. One of their latest efforts is the V-chip which is used to block violent and sexually explicit content from television programming when children are watching. The FCC has ruled that it must be installed in all new TVs by the year 2000.

It is arguable which was the first personal computer, but a little stretch of geekiness would probably make it the Kenback 1, designed by John V. Blankenbaker and introduced as a kit in 1971 by the Kenback Corporation. It was based on an Intel MOS chip and had a whopping 256 bytes of memory - that's bytes, not kilobytes - for comparision, today's bottom-of-the-line entry-level PC comes with 32, 000 bytes of memory. The kit cost $750 and you pretty much had to have an engineering degree to do anything with it, but those that did, did, and thought it was way cool.

Remember that personal computers weren't called personal computers or PCs yet - they were referred to as microcomputers. We'll stick to calling them personal computers to simplify things, but watch out - every once in awhile we'll call them microcomputers or home computers just to keep you on your toes about that thing geeks have for using several different names for the same thing.

French geeks would argue that the Micral was the first personal computer, or microcomputer, as they were known then. It wasn't particularly successful, but the word "microcomputer" was first used in print in reference to it, so it at least deserves a mention. Among the other not-particularly-successful contenders for the first micro were the Scelbi-8H, introduced in kit form in 1973 by the Scelbi Computer Consulting Company, and Jonathan Titus' Mark-8, which was a do-it-yourself project that appeared in the June, 1974 issue of Radio Electronics magazine.

Most reasonably rational, unbiased geeks would agree that the first successful personal computer was the Altair 8800 <<PIC>> , which was based on Intel's 8080 chip. The Altair was designed by Ed Roberts, who was running a small, not-too-successful calculator company next door to a laundromat in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His company, called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) , was struggling to survive, and Ed, in a last ditch effort to avoid bagging his dreams and getting a real job, scraped together his last resources and designed the Altair. The name Altair, by the way, came, in true geek fashion, from an early Star Trek episode - but why it was called the 8800 and not the 8080 remains to this day one of the great mysteries of geekdom. Ed offered the Altair as a kit for the incredibly low price of $439. When Popular Electronics featured it on their cover in January, 1975, and gave it an enthusiastic write-up, geeks began reaching for their wallets.

The Altair was definitely not a machine for the novice. To begin with, you had to build it. It had no keyboard - you had to program it in the 0s and 1s of binary machine language by flipping switches on the front panel, and read the results in binary from a row of blinking lights. It had a mere 256 bytes of memory - a quarter of a kilobyte, but the Altair was still a resounding success.

Part of that success was due to the efforts of a couple of young hacker geeks named Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Bill and Paul had seen the article about the Altair in Popular Electronics. They thought it needed software, so they got in touch with Ed Roberts and offered to write a BASIC compiler for it. (BASIC, which stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was developed back in 1963 by two mathematicians at Dartmouth, Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny, to provide novice geeks with a simple, easy to learn language for programming computers. It used simple commands like IF, THEN, and PRINT, instead of cryptic combinations of numbers and letters. Ed was a little skeptical, but told them to go ahead and try - he'd pay them if it really worked. It worked, and Ed sold 2000 Altairs that first year. He paid them for their work, and Bill and Paul, flushed with the success of their programming efforts, started their own little company and called it Micro-soft (they later dropped the hyphen). Legend has it that Bill came up with the name Microsoft one morning when he was taking a whiz. He looked down and, well, the rest is history...

The next personal computer to hit the market was the IMSAI, in the spring of 1975. Like the Altair, it had no keyboard or monitor and information was entered with switches on the front panel. The IMSAI was targeted at small businesses - of course, these would have to be small businesses with a resident geek who could operate the machine, but it was a better machine than the Altair and it enjoyed a reasonable success. In June, MOS Technology came out with a chip they called the 6502 which sold for only $25, compared to the Intel 8080 that cost about $150. Not long after, they introduced their own microcomputer, the KIM-1, which retailed, fully assembled, for the unheard of low price of $245. Of course, what you got fully assembled was a circuit board. You had to add everything else yourself. KIM, incidentally, stood for Keyboard Input Monitor, neither of which you got with the computer. The KIM-1 is forgotten by all but a handful of vintage computer geeks, but their inexpensive 6502 chip was to be instrumental in the founding of the company that started the concept of a personal computer. But before we get to that, there are a few other 1975 entries in this new microcomputer market that you should know about. They're obscure, but a little obscurity will go a long way toward establishing your FauxGeek credibility. Wavemate offered the Jupiter, Microcomputer Associates debuted the JOLT, and Southwest Technical Products came out with its M6800, all in kit form. The Sphere 1, from the Sphere Corporation, was based on the 6800 processor and was the first commercially produced computer to offer a keyboard and a video output so you could use your TV for a monitor. The Sol, built by a company called Processor Technology, was probably the best known and most successful of these early computers. The Sol, by the way, was named after the Editor of Popular Electronics magazine. There was also Martin Research's Mike, the Godbout PACE, and National Semiconductor's Imp-8 and Imp-16.

But it was the Altair that inspired two young hacker geeks to build their own computer and found the company that was to start the personal computer revolution. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and the Apple computer is one of the great Silicon Valley success stories.

Steve Wozniak was a 26 year old hacker who worked for Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California. In his spare time, he designed and built simple computers and hung out with the geeks at the Homebrew Computer Club. Many of his computer designs remained in the realms of his imagination because he couldn't afford the parts to actually build them. When Ed Roberts built the Altair around Intel's 8080 chip, it became the focus of the the Homebrew crew. The Woz wanted to build a computer based on the 8080, but the computer required several chips, and at $179 bucks a pop, it was more than he could spend. He considered Motorola's new 6800 chip, but it was just as expensive. Then he discovered MOS Technology's 6502 chip that was almost identical to the 6800, but sold for only $25. The Woz was stoked.

As he worked on his design, he incorporated some ideas that were the key to making personal computers accessible. He used a keyboard instead of toggle switches to enter data, and provided a simple way to attach TV to use as a monitor. He took it to the Homebrew club for show and tell as he worked on refining it, and one of the geeks who developed a serious interest in it was his friend, 21 year old Steve Jobs. The two Steves had worked together in the past designing a game called "Breakout" for Atari and naturally began to work together on the new computer. Jobs made several improvement on the design and when they had it finished, he suggested that they build a few and try to sell them. They pooled their money and on April Fools Day, 1976, they formed a company and called it Apple Computer, inspired by Steve Jobs' recent employment in an apple orchard.

They took their prototype computer to The Byte Shop, the world's first hobbyist computer store, and showed it to the owner, Paul Terrell. Their Apple computer wasn't much to look at - just a circuit board in a wooden box (the keyboard, power supply and monitor were extra) - but Paul liked it and placed an order for fifty of them, cash on delivery. The Steves jumped on the offer, even though they didn't have the money for the parts to build the computers. They managed to convince the suppliers to let them have the parts on 30 days credit and began to work around the clock assembling them in the Jobs' family garage. They finished the first fifty in time to collect their money and pay the suppliers, and in July, 1976, the first Apple computers <<PIC>> appeared on the shelves of The Byte Shop with a price tag of $666.66.

Ultimately, they built and sold 200 Apple 1 computers, but while they were doing it, they were working on an improved design. Since both Wozniak and Jobs were into computer games, they wanted it to have sound and color graphics. They knew that geeks would always want something more, so they made sure there were provisions for expanding its capabilities, and they added one of the new floppy drives so user could store programs. They showed their new Apple II <<PIC>> computer to the public at the First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco in the spring of 1977. It was an instant hit and they got 300 orders at $1300 a pop before the fair was over, and by the end of the year, the two Steves had sold more than $700,000 worth of Apple II computers. But that was just the beginning. The following year, their sales jumped to $7 million, and by the end of 1980, they had sold more than 120,000 Apple II computers.

The year that the Steves founded Apple, 1976, was also the year that Gary Killdall started a company called Digital Research and introduced the CP/M operating system. It soon become the standard for personal computers and held the market until Microsoft's DOS and Apple's Macintosh graphical operating system were introduced in the mid-eighties.

1977 saw the introduction of the first of a flood of early personal computers. In April, Commodore Business Machines released their Commodore PET <<PIC>> . and in August, Tandy/Radio Shack announced their TRS-80 (known not-too-affectionately as the Trash-80), which was powered by the Zilog Z-80 processor. Britain's popular entry in the microcomputer race, the Exidy Sorcerer, hit the streets early in '78, as did Sweden's Luxor ABC-80. In '79, Atari introduced the Atari 400 and 800 <<PIC>> , and Texas Instruments came out with the TI-99<<PIC>> , a surprisingly lame little machine from such an innovative high-tech company. There's not enough space here to go into these early home computers in detail, but the chapter on vintage personal computers will tell you enough about these early machines that you could pass for geek on that knowledge alone.

You still had to be a geek to use one of these early personal computers because you had to write your own software. Commercial software wasn't available until geeks had time to write programs for these new machines, so, until late 1978, you were on your own. One of the most important pieces of early software and one that would greatly influence the market for personal computers was a spreadsheet program called VisiCalc. It was written for the new Apple II by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, two students at the Harvard Business school. VisiCalc was released in early 1979, and many businesses bought Apple computers just to be able to use it. The success of VisiCalc triggered an interest in the development of more personal computer software, and soon word processors, graphics applications and other programs became available, making computers usable by non-geeks.

There were other events of geek significance in the seventies, but nothing of the magnitude of the founding of the personal computer - except perhaps for the introduction of the world's first supercomputer. One of the major figures in the development of BIG computers was Seymour Cray, ubergeek among ubergeeks, and one of the great minds in computer innovation. He's responsible for the design and development of the Cray supercomputers, the most powerful and exotic computers in the world.

Seymour Cray grew up in the forties in Chippewa Falls, Minnesota. Of course, computers were in their infancy then, but he studied electrical engineering and mathematics in college, and when he graduated in1950 he went to work for a company in St. Paul called Engineering Research Associates. The company was bought by Remington Rand, the first commercial computer company, and he found himself working on the development of the UNIVAC.

In 1957, Cray and two of his associates, Frank C. Mullaney and William Norris, left Remington Rand and formed their own company called Control Data to design and manufacture computers. They produced the CDC 1604, one of the first computers to use the newly invented transistors, and several very successful scientific computers. But Seymour Cray was an innovator and as the company became more involved in commercial computer production, Cray's interest waned and in 1972, he and Mullaney left CDC and started Cray Research, right near home in Chippewa Falls. Their goal was to build the fastest, most powerful high-performance computers in the world. And build them, they did. The Cray 1 <<PIC>>, introduced in 1976, set a standard for high-performance computing that was unequaled for nearly 10 years until the introduction of the Cray 2 <<PIC>> in 1985. It's difficult to describe Seymour Cray's innovations which made his supercomputers so super because we'd have to talk about things like gallium arsenide logic design and vector register technology - and we definitely don't want to do that. Let's just say that Cray was way out there when it came to innovation. For instance, cooling was a real problem in these hot-rodded machines, but Cray solved the problem in the Cray 2 by immersing the whole computer in a chilled liquid fluorocarbon - the same stuff that's used as artificial blood.

So who used these multi-million dollar Maseratis of the computer world and what did they do with them? They were used for everything from weather simulation to genetic research, but it was mostly scientists doing government research in things like nuclear physics and other incomprehensible matters of high geekdom. It has been suggested that the Cray supercomputers were in part responsible for the success of the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty because scientists could use them to simulate nuclear reactions instead of setting off real bombs. And that alone is sufficient reason to canonize Seymour Cray as a high saint of geekdom.

[SIDEBAR 2]

One final bit of trivia for the seventies: In 1978, Wang introduced their VS microcomputer system and promoted the idea of "office automation". Suddenly the future didn't look so promising for typists and file clerks, but hey - that's not much of a future anyway, is it?

 

THE PERSONAL COMPUTER COMES OF AGE

 

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

--- Bill Gates, 1981

 

The eighties began with the buzz of the personal computer. Adam Osborne introduced the Osborne 1 <<PIC>> , one of the first portable computers, and arguably the most successful. It weighed almost 25 pounds and was the size of a suitcase, but it had a cute little 4" monitor, a keyboard built into the lid, and a carrying handle, and geeks on the run thought it was wicked cool. Osborne expected to sell maybe 1000 of these machines. They sold 1000 in the first month. Some geeks will argue that the IBM 5110 that came out 10 years earlies was the first true portable, but its cost put it far out of reach for all but a handful of major business and research users.

Commodore Business Machines introduced the VIC-20 in 1981, and the following year they came out with the Commodore 64 <<PIC>> , an enormously popular little computer that more geeks cut their teeth on than any other, with the possible exception of the Apple. During its lifetime, there were more C-64s produced than any other computer.

When the flood of personal computers first hit the scene, the companies that had been building the big business and scientific computers looked askance at these new toys and dismissed them as a geek fad. It wasn't long, though, before the sound of ringing cash registers caught their attention. In 1980, The biggest of the big boys, IBM, hired the fledgling Microsoft company to develop an operating system for the personal computer they were designing. Bill and his geeks came up with something called MS-DOS - their first step on the road to obscene riches and world domination - and the following year, IBM introduced the IBM-PC <<PIC>> at a base price of $1365. Since many businesses were already using IBM typewriters and other office machines, it was easy for IBM to do an 800 pound gorilla bit on the insecure middle management weenies responsible for equipment decisions and IBM soon took the lead in the business end of the personal computer market.

Here's a bit of geek trivia about IBM: They had actually come out with a computer they called a "Personal Computer" way back in 1957. What they meant was that it could be operated by only one person. It was called the IBM 610 Auto-Point Computer and it cost about $55,000.

The following year the first PC clone was introduced by Columbia Dara Products and a lot of companies scrambled to get in on the act. 1981 also marked the first year that computer chips were used in automobiles.

Meanwhile, a kid named Michael Dell began to build computers in his college dorm room.

In 1982, Grid Systems introduced the first laptop computer, the Grid Compass <<PIC>> , designed by William Moggridge. It was not much bigger than a modern laptop, came in a magnesium alloy case and cost $8000. It was a sophisticated, lightweight, relatively powerful machine and was used extensively by NASA on the space shuttle program in the eighties.

Apple launched it's ill-conceived, ill-fated Lisa <<PIC>> computer, their first major failure, in 1983. The Apple III, released in '81, also bombed, but not as spectacularly as the Lisa. The Lisa was a problematic machine that cost $10,000, but it had a graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced "gooey"), which meant that you could do things by pointing and clicking a mouse instead of typing in words and numbers. It was aimed at businesses, but the businesses didn't buy it, so Apple slunk away with its tail between its legs, renamed it the Macintosh XL, then quietly dropped it from the line. But Steve Jobs held on to the idea of a graphical user interface. [SIDEBAR 3]

Xerox had developed a GUI back in 1973 and built an experimental computer called the Alto to display it, but failed to recognize the potential it offered to non-geeks. Of course, we can't really fault them for that, because the concept of a personal computer hadn't entered the industry's techno-consciousness yet. No one used computers except geeks, and they were happy with lines of code. Xerox tried to introduce the idea of a GUI to the public in 1981 when they marketed a commercial version of the Alto called the Xerox Star 8010, but it wasn't a notable success.

Microsoft saw the potential of the Lisa's GUI and quickly announced the Windows operating system in 1983, but it took them two years to actually bring it out. Incidentally, this practice of cutting into a competitor's sales by announcing a similar product but not delivering it became known as vaporware. The weasely idea behind vaporware was that if a company announced a competing product, consumers might wait for its release to see what it offered, rather than purchase the competitor's product which was already available.

Apple computers redeemed their loss of face with the Lisa by introducing the Macintosh <<PIC>> in a spectacular presentation at the 1984 Super Bowl game. The cute little all-in-one-box computer with an easy-to-use graphical operating system was a smash hit with thousands of new computer users who were intimidated by the techno-geekiness of most of the other computers on the block. Their famous Super Bowl ad was officially used only once, but for a handy bit of geek trivia, you should know that it was shown one other time - at an obscure TV station in Twin Falls, Idaho in December, 1983, so it could qualify for awards.

The eighties saw a few other events that are worth knowing. The US Department of Defense developed a programming language for their military computers and named it ADA after Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, the world's first programmer. At the other end of the spectrum, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) was developed in 1984 so that computers could be hooked up to digital synthesizers.

Intel introduced the 80286 or "286" chip for PCs in 1982, and followed it with the "386" in 1984 and the "486", with over a million transistors in 1989. Motorola kept pace with their chips for the Macintosh operating system by bringing out the 68030 chip in 1987 and the 68040 in 1990.

Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 and started a new company called NeXT Computer. After three years of development, they introduced the NeXT Cube computer <<PIC>> , a geek dream with an object oriented operating system. Of course, you don't know what an object oriented operating system is, but it was a Cool Thing and you can learn about it in the glossary. If we stopped to discuss every little techno detail this would be an 800 page history that would be read only by a handful of geeks and my tawdry little get-rich-quick scheme would be doomed to failure.

Sony announced its CD-ROM technology in 1982, and two years later Sony and Phillips jointly made it available to consumers. It's first used for music recordings, but it wasn't long CD-ROM drives became available for computers.

A new term, "desktop publishing", entered the language in1985 when Aldus introduced its PageMaker software developed by Paul Brainard, and Adobe Systems added PostScript to the publishers' toolbox the following year.

In 1987, Sun introduced its SPARC RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) based workstations. (EXPLAIN) By 1990, Hewlett-Packard and IBM had both jumped on the RISC bandwagon and announced their own RISC-based machines.

There were few truly significant advances in computer technology in the 90's, other than the implementation of the World Wide Web, and that's a whole 'nother story. Or, in the case of this book, it's a whole 'nother chapter. Silicon Valley had settled down to the business of serious competition. Computers got more powerful and cheaper, and software got more complex, requiring more powerful computers. And when they built the faster computers, the programmer geeks said, "Cool, now we can do.............", and they wrote more complex software and the technological worm ouroboros began devouring consumers' money along with its own tail.

Way up in the stratosphere of geekdom, Seymour Cray introduced the Cray Y-MP C90 supercomputers <<PIC>> in 1990. with a speed of 16 gigaflops. Gigaflops? It's a measurement of the computing speed of a computer, and one of my favorite words - though it's a bit difficult to work it into a conversation. A gigaflop is a billion (10^9) floating point operations per second. For comparison, a high-end PC today can do about 200 million calculations per second. But hey, you think gigaflops are fast - the Crays they're putting out now can do over two trillion calculations per second.

A couple of pages ago, I described the early Cray supercomputers as being the Maseratis of the computer world - today's Crays are more like supersonic jets.

Back down on earth, Microsoft had finally worked most of the bugs out of their Windows operating system by 1991 and introduced Windows 3.1, the first relatively stable version.

In 1992, a Danish college student, Linus Torvald, wrote a new PC operating system based on UNIX which he called Linux (pronounced "leen-ux". But unlike the corporate greedheads of Silicon Valley and Redmond, he gave it away, along with the source code so geeks could work on making it better, just like in the early days of computer development. Linux immediately attracted a following of devoted geeks who tweaked and improved it to the point that it's now a serious contender in the world of business and scientific computing.

Apple, IBM and Motorola announced the availability of their joint effort called Power PC in 1993, and the following year Apple licensed its operating system to other manufacturers for the first time. PC users were given a chance to keep up with the speed of the Macintosh PowerPC when Intel announced the Pentium chip. It had 3.1 million transistors and was able to perform 112 million instructions per second (MIPS). Two years later, following Moore's law, they released the Pentium Pro chip with 5.5 million transistors.

The one other event of the ninties that's worth mentioning was the release in 1994 of the first version of the computer game DOOM upon an unsuspecting world of gamers. Oh - and Microsoft released Windows 95, but we don't really care, do we?

1996 was the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC and it's as good a place as any to bring this history to a close - and what better way than with a few then-and-now comparisons?

In 1975, an IBM mainframe computer could perform 10 million instructions per second and cost $10,000,000. Today you can buy a home computer that will execute 200 million operations per second for about a thousand bucks.

The first commercial Apple computer, the Apple II, introduced in 1977, ran at a clock speed of 1 megahertz, had 4 kilobytes of RAM, no hard drive, and sold like hotcakes for $1300. Today the same amount of money will get you a new Mackintosh with a clock speed of 300 megahertz, 32 megabytes of RAM and a 4 gigabyte hard drive.

IBM's first PC, released in 1981, also sold for $1300. It had a clock speed of 4.77 megahertz, had 64 kilobytes of RAM and no hard drive. Today, $1300 will get you a PC clone with a clock speed of 200 megahertz, 64 megabytes of RAM, a 4 gigabyte hard drive, and they'll throw in a 15" color monitor.

In 1982, a 256 kilobyte RAM chip, 1/4 of a megabyte, cost $1100, and a 300 megabyte hard disk drive would set you back about $15,000. Today you can buy a 64 megabyte RAM chip for about 75 bucks, and no one makes a hard disk drive as small as 300 megabytes. You can, however, get a 3000 megabyte hard drilve for less than $200.

Of course, by the time you're reading this, it will all be cheaper, faster and more powerful.

Moore's Law can't go on forever, though, or we'd come to a time when companies would pay us thousands of dollars just to take supercomputers off their hands. Even Gordon Moore concedes that point. In September, 1997, he said that we're reaching the end of the exponential increase in computing power. He gives it a few more generations before we hit the wall. Of course, by then the Aliens will have landed and given us a whole new kind of technology to work with.

Or maybe they'll just eat us.

 

Robert Arnold
San Francisco, California
November, 1998

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