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THE RISE OF THE PERSONAL COMPUTER
The first personal computer, the Altair, was announced in Popular Electronics
in its January 1975 issue. The Altair was also the first example of new computer
hardware. It caused a sensation in the computer industry: those who wanted could
have their own computers to play with at home, and a mighty computer industry soon began to grow.
A young computer hacker from Seattle by the name of William Gates, then a
freshman at Harvard, sold the Altair developers a computer language that would run on their machine and that made it possible to program many advanced functions.
Emboldened by their success with Altair, Gates and his friend founded Microsoft
Corporation, which has become the world's largest personal computer software
company.
In 1976 Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak began assembling their own
microcomputer - the Apple. The second iteration of their design, the Apple II,
included such amenities as a keyboard*, a built-in power supply**, and a color
monitor (all lacking in the first version) and was an immediate success following its introduction in 1977.
With the inclusion of a floppy disk drive that stored computer-readable data on
a flexible plastic disc, the Apple II added a convenient way to read computer
programs. This development truly gave birth to the phenomenon of personal
computing.
In 1979 a remarkable program called VisiCalc appeared and made it possible
for the personal computer to manipulate complex arrays of data. VisiCalc not only
racked up impressive sales as a computer software package but also spurred adoption of the Apple II itself.
IBM made its entry in l981 with its Personal Computer (PC) which was
tremendously successful, soon outstripping sales of Apple and other early personal
computers. However, revenues from IBM's traditional computer business soon began a long-term decline. IBM was unable to dominate personal computers as it had the mainframe market, since IBM had exclusive rights neither to the central processing chip that was the "brains" of the personal computer nor to the disk operating system (DOS) software that made the hardware perform its basic functions.
The Intel Corporation, which made the chips, and Microsoft, which made the
software, were free to sell their products to all comers. Microsoft developed a full
line of software, such as word-processing and spreadsheet packages***, that rivaled IBM's own. Thus, it took only a matter of months to create "clones" of the IBM PC with technical specifications that matched the IBM machines and that would run all of the same software, at a much lower cost.
Meanwhile, Apple Computer began the transition to a multibillion-dollar
corporation by maintaining control of its own destiny with a proprietary operating
system and with a wealth of attractive and "user friendly" software applications,
allowing it to charge premium places for its computers. Continuing the apple motif, it called its next successful computer the Mackintosh.
Apple also specialized in the development of multimedia computers with
advanced sound and moving image display capabilities. Because Apple produced
only personal computers, it could focus its attention on that market, while IBM had to worry about protecting its mainframe business.
Microsoft emerged as a major force in the personal computer industry as the
profits shifted from the hardware to the software end of the industry. Under the
continuing guidance of William Gates, Microsoft had become a multibillion-dollar
corporation by the early 1990s. Its Windows operating system outclassed IBM's own efforts to update DOS and had an easy-to-use interface not unlike Apple's own.
Microsoft produced a full range of software packages that were among the leaders in virtually all of the most popular produced categories.