The Digital Century

Beginnings

The Mother of All PCs

Trace the lineage of that PC portable on your lap, and you'll find the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer at the base of the family tree. The first high-speed digital computer, the ENIAC signaled the start of the computer industry.

Developed at the University of Pennsylvania 53 years ago, the machine housed over 17,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 6000 switches in its 3-ton bulk. It calculated 5000 additions per second.

Originally conceived to compute ballistics tables for U.S. Army gunners in World War II, the computer wasn't completed in time to help the war effort. But it broke new ground in scores of ways. Its designers pioneered the use of low-level power and the concept of "burning in" components. And it was probably the first computer to use the conditional IF-THEN statement.

A straight line runs from the ENIAC to the UNIVAC of 1951 (one of the first commercial computers), to the IBM PC, to the Palm Pilot in your pocket. The ENIAC is the mother of all PCs.

--Gregg Keizer

The 50-Pound Featherweight

Portability is relative. Consider IBM's Model 5100. Introduced in 1975, the portable system tipped the scales at 50 pounds and cost $19,975 fully loaded. Certainly it was a behemoth by today's standards. But in a day when mainframes took up an entire room, the 5100 seemed positively petite.

Computers didn't get really small until the early 1980s--and even then, the first popular portable, 1981's Osborne 1, was as big as a sewing machine and weighed 24 pounds. The first notebook, Epson's HX-20, crammed a built-in printer and tape drive into its 3-pound case but displayed just four lines of text at a time. In 1980, Radio Shack's Pocket Computer debuted. With a tiny QWERTY keyboard and 1.9KB of RAM, it was a primitive forebear of to-day's handhelds--call it the prehistoric digital assistant.

--Harry McCracken

Cover Girl

"The home computer is here!" crowed the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. The cover story on a mail-order computer kit called the Altair 8800 sparked the imagination of thousands of readers. "I got all excited," recalls Russell Banks, now a cartographer in Arlington, Virginia. "And it wasn't a couple of days before I put a check in the mail."

The Altair wasn't the first PC; among its forgotten predecessors were the Kenbak (1971), sold by a one-man company, and the Micral (1973), a French product. But it was the Altair that launched the microcomputer revolution.

Manufactured by MITS, a tiny company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Altair sold for $397 as a kit or $498 fully assembled; it came with Intel's 2-MHz 8080 processor and a whopping 256 bytes of memory, but no keyboard or display. "All you could do was flip switches and make lights blink," recalls Banks, who was nonetheless so taken by it that he opened one of the country's first computer stores.

The Altair soon acquired a display, keyboard, more memory, and mass storage (first via paper tape and then via floppy disk). It also spawned a microcomputer operating system (CP/M), and a little software vendor named Microsoft. After eyeing the cover girl in a Harvard dorm, Bill Gates, with Paul Allen, cobbled together the BASIC programming language and dropped out of college to parlay it into an empire.

Gates and Allen went on to become multibillionaires, of course, but MITS founder Ed Roberts sold his company in 1977 and became a country doctor. The Altair ceased production within two years.

--Harry McCracken

Computers Get Personal

The first PCs required some pretty daunting skills, such as a knack for programming and knowledge of binary math. That changed in 1977 with the first prepackaged PCs. The Apple II sported snazzy color graphics; Commodore's PET 2001 (named after the Pet Rock) had a built-in monitor.

Unlike the first microcomputers, these PCs were useful right out of the box. "You turned the TRS-80 on and it did something," remembers composer Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, who bought one in 1978. Not that they were perfect. Early TRS-80s--the first computer sold by a dealer (Radio Shack) tended to randommly rrepeat charracters as you typpedd; the PET's calculator-style keys made touch-typing impossible; and the original Apple II could handle only integers, not decimals. Once these flaws were fixed, all three systems prospered. By the mid-eighties, however, the IBM PC and its clones had gobbled up most of the market. Today, a cult of nostalgia freaks use emulation software to turn today's PCs into virtual Apple IIs, PETs, and TRS-80s.

--Harry McCracken