The History of PC's
The first personal computer was the Altair, produced in 1975 by a company called MITS of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was powered by the 8-bit Intel 8080 CPU and had 256 bytes of memory. It did not have a keyboard, monitor, tape, or disk, but for $400 it was a true bargain and was popular with people who had become bored building radios and televisions. A young man named Bill Gates wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair that enjoyed a modest following among early microcomputer users. This program eventually made Gates a billionaire. Within a few years, many companies started to make personal computers based on the 8080 chip. Nearly all of these ran an operating system called CP/M produced by Digital Research, a small California company. All of the personal computers (then called microcomputers) made from 1975 to about 1980 were essentially toys and were bought and used primarily by computer hobbyists. Around 1980, IBM, which then dominated the computer industry, decided that personal computers were an area it should be in. It knew that developing its own personal computer from scratch would take far too long, so it did something quite unusual for the normally bureaucratic and cautious IBM. It told one of its managers, Philip Estridge, to go to Boca Raton, Florida, 2000 km away from the prying eyes at Corporate Headquarters in Westchester County, New York, gave him a large bag of money, and told him not to come back until he had a personal computer. Estridge soon decided that the only way he could produce a personal computer quickly was to use standard, off the shelf components, rather than designing his own as IBM had always done in the past.