The History of Personal Computing

Listen along as David Greelish and Jeff Salzman discuss the history of the Altair 8800 and Kaypro computer. Well… at least listen to David’s clear, quality audio, along with Jeff’s misconfigured source microphone that sounds like he’s talking from a mile away! 🙂

The Altair 8800 is a Tier One computer presented as the first “commercially available home computer.” As such, it was chosen to be the first computer we talk about on this podcast.

The Kaypro was chosen due to a recent and unfortunate event. Its founder, Andrew Kay, had passed away. The computer he created is an early Tier Two computer, representing a line of portable computing devices.

Continue reading Podcast Episode 2: Altair 8800 and Kaypro…

Andrew Kay was the son of Russian immigrants and grew up in New Jersey. He graduated from MIT in 1940 with an engineering degree, then he moved to California to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena before moving to San Diego County in 1949 to join Bill Jack Scientific Engineering. In 1952, he invented the digital voltmeter to precisely measure electrical current. A year later, he founded Non-Linear Systems. In 1981, Non-Linear Systems decided to design

Kaypro II

a personal computer to compete with the popular Osborne 1 portable. Though briefly called the “Kaycomp II,” the “Kaypro II” was actually the first marketed model of the computer. This was because in 1982, a daughter company was organized called the Kaypro Corporation and thus the computer was rechristened with the same name.

Continue reading Kaypro…

Altair 8800

The Altair 8800 from MITS (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) was the “World’s first personal computer.” That is, the world’s first commercially successful, mass-produced personal computer. It established creator Ed Roberts as the “Father of the microcomputer” and Albuquerque, New Mexico as its birthplace. There were a few other earlier machines available in very limited numbers, but none of them came as a complete kit or fully assembled and tested as the Altair was.

Ed was one of the co-founders of MITS, along with key employee Forrest M. Mims III. The company was originally formed to sell electronic kits for model rockets. Later Ed bought out two other partners when he decided to go into the calculator kit market and they didn’t. By 1973, MITS sold over $1 million in calculators a year, but by mid-1974, competition from the Japanese with cheap calculators had the company in over $300,000 of debt. MITS needed another key product. There was a project rivalry between Radio-Electronics magazine and Popular Electronics, and R-E had published an article on a computer kit called the Intel 8008 processor based “Mark-8.” Ed decided that his company would create a computer based on the more power Intel 8080 and have it ready for a January 1975 issue of PE.

Continue reading Altair 8800…

Welcome to the first episode of the History of Personal Computing podcast!

In this episode, Jeff Salzman plays host, along with David Greelish, in the premiere episode of your bi-weekly guide to the history and development of arguably the single most important technological advancement of the last forty years, the personal computer!

Links mentioned in this show:

• SCELBI computer system
• Mark-8 computer
• ECHO IV (Electronic Computing Home Operator)

You can download the episode directly by using this link: http://www.historyofpersonalcomputing.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/HofPC11.mp3

or, you can subscribe to our podcast feed at: http://www.historyofpersonalcomputing.com/podcast/rss.xml

Welcome to the first episode of the History of Personal Computing podcast!

In this episode, Jeff Salzman plays host, along with David Greelish, in the premiere episode of your bi-weekly guide to the history and development of arguably the single most important technological advancement of the last forty years, the personal computer!

Links mentioned in this show:

• SCELBI computer system
• Mark-8 computer
• ECHO IV (Electronic Computing Home Operator)

You can download the episode directly by using this link: http://www.historyofpersonalcomputing.com/podcast/HofPC1.mp3

or, you can subscribe to our podcast feed at: http://podcast.historyofpersonalcomputing.com/rss.xml