Unit 20:C1: Timeline of the Personal Computer

IBM 610
This was the very personal computer, in a sense that it was operated by a singal person and a keyboard, it was made in 1957 and first bgan the design process in 1948, and was small enough to fit in a small office. The main designer of the machine was John Lentz, for the Watson Lab at Columbia University.
The computer had no electronic or air conditioning, and was controlled using a keyboard and is one of the first machines to be operated in this manner. The unit was $55,000 or $1150 per month to rent it, although if you were a student it would cost you $460 per month to rent. It was a very slow and limited machine, loading only 18 characters a second, compared to today's machines which could load whole text documents almost instantly.

Programma 101
This was the first commercial desktop computer, it was produced by an Italian company called Olivetti and was first introduced at the 1964 New York World's Fair. It's design was considered quite 'futuristic' for the 1960's and it sold approximatley 44,000 units. It was mainly used as a means of business for quick calculations.

Altair 8800
The Altair 8800 was released in 1975 and was based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest in this Microcomputer grew rapidly as it was featured on the front cogver of 1975 January Issue of Popular Electronics. To buy the product you mail ordered from hobbiest magazines and built it yourself, the company had hoped that they would sell a few hundered units but to their fortune the sold thousands in the first month of launch. This computer is still recognized as a unit that inflenced many other microcomputers to come


Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer and is one of the very first highly successful microcomputers of its time. Released in 1977 by Apple Computers (Now of course known as Apple Inc.) with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 kB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs. The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, upper-case-only text on the screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor, or on a regular TV set by way of a separate RF modulator. The original retail price of the computer was 1298 USD (with 4 kB of RAM) and 2638 USD (with the maximum 48 kB of RAM). To reflect the computer's color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing was represented using rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998. The earliest Apple II's were assembled in Silicon Valley, and later in Texas; printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland and Singapore.

 Today computers are far more powerful than what they were 40 years ago, today computers can have 3.4GHz Quad-core processors with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of hard drive space, and they're only going to get evn more powerful.