The History of the Personal Computer

The first computers looked nothing like what we use today, but the technology used back then paved the way for the modern computer. This article will provide you with a look at the history behind the personal computer- an invention that many of us would be lost without.

The First Computers

The first computer programmable via binary code was the Z1, created by Konrad Zuse in 1936 in his parents' house. The first fully digital computer was the ABC, or the Atanasoff Berry Computer. It was created by John Vincent Atanasoff and Cliff Berry back in 1937, and it was in development until 1942 at ISU. In 1973, Atanasoff was officially named the inventor of the digital computer when he was awarded a patent. There was another computer created around the same time, the ENIAC; it was invented by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania. It took up almost an entire building and it used over 18,000 vacuum tubes and it weighed over fifty tons. However, Atanasoff won the patent battle when Mauchly and Eckert's patent was declared invalid.

Stored Programming Computers

The first of these was the EDSAC, a computer invented in Britain. It did its first calculations on May 6, 1949, and it was the first computer to run a graphical game.

Personal Computers

That term was coined in 1975 when Ed Roberts introduced the Altair 8800. However, the first truly personal computer was the Kenback-1, which was sold for $750 in 1971. That machine used switches that controlled the in and outflow of data by turning a set of lights off and on. The first commercially available computer was the Micra1, using the Intel 8008 processor.

Workstations

It was never made available for sale, but the first workstation was the Xerox Alto which was introduced in 1974. It was far ahead of its time, including a tower, monitor, and mouse, and it functioned much the same as today's computers with menus, windows and icons as a graphical user interface to the OS.

IBM compatible PCs

The first electric computer was shipped by IBM in 1953 and later that company introduced the IBM PC (1981). Code named "Acorn", it had an Intel 8088 processor, and 16 KB of memory (expandable to 256KB). The Acorn used MS-DOS, an early and still used programming language.

PC Clones

The first IBM-compatible PC was designed by Compaq. The Compaq Portable was made available in 1983, and it was fully compatible with all IBM machines and their software.

Fast forward to today.there are desktop computers, laptops, and handheld computers that have more processing power than any early machine. However, we can't forget about the first computers- without the advances made by their inventors, we wouldn't have the very useful machines we have today.