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30th Anniversary of the Microcomputer
FreezerJam writes "The Toronto Star is running an article on the 30th anniversary of the launch of the MCM/70, the first personal computer, complete with tape drive and APL programming environment. For those of you checking your timeline, this is over a year before the article on the Altair 8800 was published. Microcomputers? Blame Canada!" There's also a story in the Globe and Mail.
The computer, brought to you by the same country that brought you Hockey, beer, and cheap healthcare, the staples of American life!
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
Unfortunately, some of what the article says is true: many great Canadian inventors do not get the recognition that they deserve. It appears that Mr. Kutt had created the first computer, which was great.
How many other people do know that a Canadian doctor was the first man to map sections of the brain that indicate smell and other senses in an order to discover what causes seizures? (For the Canadians on here think: "Doctor, I smell burnt toast!")
There are many others worldwide who, unfortunately, do not get the recognition they so richly deserve because companies with more money and power take all of the credit and force the creators into obscurity around their own inventions. This is actually a great story about how an inventor, even though it was 30 years later, is finally receiving the recognition he so richly deserved.
Given that God is infinite, and the Universe is also infinite, would you like some toast?
But... That was in 1981! As usual, IBM slept right through the personal computer revolution, but then caught up quite well. Seeing the sentence
in 1979, everyone would have laughed out loud.There actually was something like a personal computer from IBM before the PC, a thingy called IBM 5120 with two 8" diskette drives and either BASIC or APL as programming language.
Seems APL was popular them, even though you needed a special keyboard.
The Altair 8800, Jan 1975, is considered the first PC built for the hobby market. Before that hobbyists would hack PDP/8s or other minis. These minis cost a good fraction of year's salary at the time. The other approach- which I tried- was build your own microcomputer: add a keybad, keybaord, tape punch, BIOS, TV, etc.
The first Altair just had dip switches and LEDs for the data and address register. People then added tape punches, keypads, keyboards, TV, etc. Someone Harvard dropout even wrote a BASIC in assembly language that was tape-punched in.
The first "full PC" with a monitor, keyboard, and OS was Radio Shack's TR-80. At thei time I deplored: "Whats the world coming to when people can even build their own PCs anymore?"
These events are fairly accurately recorded, though simplified, in Mark Stephen's documentary "Revenge of the Nerds; Part 1". Also in Stephen Levy's "Hackers" gave more of a an east coast perspective.
In case you were wondering what it looked like
Back then binary coded decimal (BCD) was common. It wasted memory space, but at least displaying values was easy.
Apple had the closed architecture,
Uh, no. At the time Apple's hot seller was still the Apple II, a very open architecture machine. The closed-architecture Mac didn't come out until the IBM PC had been around for several years.
Both Apple and IBM used proprietary ROMs in their machines -- Compaq reverse-engineered IBMs, and there was a brief market in Apple II clones (both name brands like Franklin and do-it-yourself clones starting from an empty circuit board and a bag of chips) until Apple clamped down on the bootleg (EP)ROM supply.
(I built an Apple II clone -- pretty easy given the 1 MHz clock (easy tolerances) and stock TTL parts. Mostly just soldering in dozens of chip sockets -- and using a scope to debug minor problems like putting a couple of transistors in backwards...oops.)
As for Gates and Microsoft -- yeah, they were supplying variations of their BASIC interpreter to all the hardware manufacturers (they got that lesson down early), and managed to cut a deal with IBM that let them independently market PC-DOS (as MS-DOS).
-- Alastair
It was actually used in a number of different designs.
It was designed as a terminal controller for CTC (later became Datapoint) but it seems they never actually used it. According to this post it was developed not by Intel but by CTC themselves, for use in the Datapoint 2200, which however wound up shipping without it and never used it. A firm called Traf-O-Data is said to have used it in a microcomputer designed to record highway traffic flow. The same year that this Canadian micro came out (1973), a French company called R2E used this in their Micral-N which has been credited as the first commercial, non-kit microcomputer. In the US, Scelbi Computer Consulting Company used it in Scelbi 8h, credited with being the first microcomputer available in the US. It was used in the Mark-8 micro, a design that was never mass produced but built instead by hobbyists from a published design - it appears less than 400 of them were ever made. MITS, described by one source as a dying calculator company, but apparently the same MITS that brought out the Altair a few years later, is said to have bought a large batch of them from Intel, planning to revive their business by building a large batch of cheap microcomputers with it, but I can't find any reference to them ever actually selling a computer based on this chip. Might be an interesting story for someone with the time to track it down. The NBI Hantu word processor used this chip.
Well that's enough for me, if you're interested this post should give you a ton of keywords to search for more data on.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Closer, but still no cigar.
The 8088 was not a cheaper version of the 8086. It was a version of the 8086 that used an 8-bit external bus so that it could be easily retrofitted into existing 8-bit systems which, back then, tended to have a passive backplane (like S100) and plug-in cards for RAM, CPU, serial port, diskette controller, etc. The thought was that designers would come up with new CPU cards and keep all of their existing investment in 8-bit hardware (Compupro, for instance, had an 85/88 CPU card which included an 8085 and an 8088). IBM elected (stupidly) to use the 8088 in a new design to save some pittance on external components (buffers, latches, etc.). As a result, the PC was about 40% slower than it would have been had it been designed with the 8086.
My very first job (at age 16) was programming business and accounting applications for an Altair 8800b. Summer of '77. The little computer tracked inventory, payroll, and did job costing for a cable manufacturing company with about 50 employees. It also sent assorted reports back to a corporate mainframe.
Believe me, at the time, microcomputers were very useful -- but only to those who needed them.
The field of microprocessors has a similar controversy. Intel frequently portrays itself as the inventor of the microprocessor because, supposedly, Ted Hoff and Frederico Faggin invented it when they were Intel employees.
In 1978, the United States Patent Office (USPTO) granted Texas Instruments a patent for a version of a microprocessor developed by Gary Boone, an employee. He had filed the patent in 1971.
In 1990, the USPTO granted Gilbert Hyatt a patent on another version of a microprocessor; he had initially filed the patent in 1970. His work pre-dates the work by Hoff and Faggin.
In 1996, the USPTO rescinded the patent granted to Hyatt and designated Gary Boone as the official inventor of the microprocessor. In short, neither Hoff nor Faggin are the first inventors of the microprocessor, yet we in the Slashdot community have heaped undeserved praise on them.
For further information, please read "Micro, Micro: Who Made The Micro?", "1970s -- The Altair/Apple Era", and "Processor Talk".
ahem.. 74181s are only ALUs, ie they perform only logical & arithmetic functions... they have no latches, no registers, ram etc. the common bit slive chip of the era was the AMD2901 fom the 2900 family...