Byte Magazine has come and gone, but traces of its existence are still online. Its founder, Wayne Green, was hailed as a visionary. He was definitely a “do it yourself” type of man who had the knack of being able to know what was coming up in the realm of …
One of the more iconic machines in computing history is headed for the auction block soon. On October 9th, 2012 Christie’s will be including an Apple 1 in its sale. Only around 200 Apple 1’s were designed and hand built by Steve Wozniak, partner of Steve Jobs at Apple, and …
The MOS KIM-1 was a single board computer created by MOS Technology in 1976. The acronym KIM stood for Keyboard Input Monitor, which I’m sure their marketing department spent a good few seconds coming up with. The MOS-1 was developed out of MOS Technologies need to build a processor that …
The Commodore PET was Commodore’s first fully featured computer for the home computer market. Introduced to the world in 1977 the Commodore PET soon became a best seller in the North American educational markets and spawned a whole host of products based on its 8-bit microprocessor. This firmly managed to …
The MITS Altair 8800 was a computer sold in 1975 through popular hobbyist magazines like Radio-Electronics, and Popular Electronics. MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) had hoped to sell a couple of hundred to hobbyists and enthusiasts and were shocked when their niche hobby computer sold thousands in the very …
Today we live in an age where we all expect results in an instant, as society seems to have lost its patience for waiting for stuff to just happen let me take you on a journey back to a much simpler time, the 1980’s and the birth of the Commodore …
The IMSAI 8080 was one of the earliest microcomputers released for the public, and was released towards the end of 1975. It was made and sold by IMS Associates Inc. It was essentially a clone of the earlier released MITS Altair 8800, and is known to most computer historians as …
The IBM 5100 Portable Computer was a portable computer initially sold towards the end of 1975. It was IBM’s more advanced version of their earlier Special Computer APL Machine Portable. It is also recognized as the predecessor to the more popular IBM PC which would be released in 1981. The …
In 1977 Steve Leininger left his Silicon Valley job to work for Texas based Tandy Corp. He built the prototype Tandy TRS-80 for less than $150,000 as a test project for his boss. John Roach, Tandy’s product manager, had gotten the company president, Charles Tandy to agree to 3500 units …
