Personal Computers
The machine on the desk. The Altair and the Apple II, the IBM PC and the clones, the Macintosh and the mouse, Windows, the laptop, and the moment a computer stopped being something an institution owned.
Part of Technology
28 moments in this segment.
- - UNIVAC I Delivered. June 14, 1951. The first commercial computer in the United States. Used by CBS to predict the 1952 presidential election; the live broadcast made "computer" a household word.
- - SAGE Air Defense Computer. The IBM AN/FSQ-7, heart of the SAGE air-defense system. Half-acre rooms of vacuum tubes; the most ambitious computing project of the 1950s.
- - IBM System/360. April 7, 1964. IBM bets the company on the System/360, a compatible family of mainframes spanning the price range. Defined "computer architecture" as a concept; ran every large business in the world by 1970.
- - Mother of All Demos. December 9, 1968. Doug Engelbart's 90-minute live demo at SRI, the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, collaborative real-time editing. Every interactive computing concept of the next 50 years in one session.
- - Xerox Alto. March 1, 1973. Xerox PARC builds the Alto, the first personal computer with a GUI, mouse, ethernet, and WYSIWYG editing. Never commercialised; Steve Jobs visits PARC in 1979 and takes everything to Apple.
- - Altair 8800 (Popular Electronics Cover). January 1975. The MITS Altair 8800, the first commercially-successful personal computer kit. The cover of Popular Electronics that launched the homebrew industry; Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for it and founded Microsoft within months.
- - Cray-1 Supercomputer. March 1976. Seymour Cray's Cray-1, the most famous supercomputer of all time. Sold for $7.9M (≈$40M today); installed at Los Alamos. The shape of the modern supercomputer arms race.
- - Apple Founded. April 1, 1976. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne found Apple in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos. Wayne sells his 10% stake for $800 twelve days later; it would have been worth ~$300B by 2024.
- - Apple II Released. June 10, 1977. The Apple II, the first mass-market personal computer. 6M units sold over 16 years. The platform on which VisiCalc (1979) became the first killer app.
- - Xerox Alto Demo. Archival demos of the Xerox Alto, the GUI, mouse, ethernet, and WYSIWYG editing that Steve Jobs would see on his 1979 PARC visit.
- - IBM PC. August 12, 1981. IBM ships the 5150, the original IBM PC. Open architecture; clones flood the market; PC becomes the de-facto standard for business computing. IBM licenses DOS from a tiny Microsoft.
- - Macintosh - 1984 Super Bowl Ad. January 22, 1984. The "1984" Super Bowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott aired once. Two days later: the Macintosh launch keynote. First commercial PC with a GUI + mouse to reach mainstream success.
- - Macintosh Launch Keynote. January 24, 1984. Steve Jobs unveils the Mac at the Apple shareholder meeting. The Mac speaks for itself: "Hello, I am Macintosh." Iconic launch-keynote template that Jobs would revisit for decades.
- - Amiga 1000 Launch - Andy Warhol Demo. July 23, 1985. Andy Warhol demos the Amiga 1000's graphics by drawing Debbie Harry. The strangest computer-launch event of the 1980s.
- - Commodore Amiga 1000. July 23, 1985. The Amiga, multi-tasking 32-bit OS, true colour graphics, 4-channel sampled audio. Years ahead of its time; never reached the install base its tech deserved. Commodore folds in 1994.
- - NeXT Founded. September 1985. Steve Jobs, ousted from Apple, founds NeXT. The NeXT cube's OS becomes the basis of macOS (after Apple's 1996 acquisition) and indirectly of iOS. Tim Berners-Lee writes the first web browser on a NeXT machine.
- - Windows 1.0. November 20, 1985. Microsoft ships Windows 1.0, a GUI layered on top of MS-DOS. Slow, ugly, mocked. By Windows 3.0 (1990) it was the most-used desktop OS in the world; held that position for 30+ years.
- - Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement. June 12, 2005. Steve Jobs's commencement address at Stanford. "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." The most-quoted commencement speech ever delivered by a technologist; viewed 100M+ times.
- - Apple II Launch Commercial. 1977 Apple II commercials, Steve Jobs in suit-and-tie, Steve Wozniak demoing colour graphics. The dawn of consumer computer marketing.
- - Bill Gates on the Altair. 1975 interviews with the 19-year-old Bill Gates explaining BASIC for the Altair. The founding pitch of Microsoft.
- - Sony Walkman 1979 Commercial. The original TPS-L2 Walkman commercial. 30,000 units sold in two months in Japan; gave public space its first portable soundtrack.
- - Apollo Guidance Computer. The MIT-built AGC that landed Apollo 11. 64 KB of memory; software written by Margaret Hamilton's team. The first software ever called "software engineering."
- - Apple M1 Reveal. November 10, 2020. Apple's M1 reveal. First Apple Silicon in a Mac. 16-hour battery life on a MacBook Air; Intel's 14-year run inside Mac ends.
- - DEC PDP-11. Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11, the workhorse minicomputer that Unix was written on. 600,000+ sold; defined the architecture of every computer that followed.
- - Apple Vision Pro. February 2, 2024. Apple Vision Pro ships at $3,499. The most-talked-about consumer tech launch of 2024 but commercial disappointment. Marks the AR/VR plateau and Apple's first major product flop in the modern era.
- - Apple Vision Pro Launch Day. February 2, 2024. Apple Vision Pro ships at $3,499. Launch-day photographs from Apple stores; viral "guy wearing it in public" videos. The most-talked-about flop of 2024.
- - Margaret Hamilton on Apollo Software. Late 1960s footage of Margaret Hamilton, first person to use the term "software engineering", standing next to the printed AGC source code, taller than she was.
- - Doug Engelbart Demos the Mouse. Pre-1968 footage of Doug Engelbart prototyping the computer mouse at SRI. The patent was filed November 17, 1970.
