Published February 02, 2000
Computers didn’t begin to evolve until common people could afford them. Smaller than a bread box, the Personal Computer answered the need for a tool to do real work at home and the office.
Long before Pentiums, 486s, 286s, 68000s processor chips, before the 8088, 8080 or the 8008, Intel created the 4004 which was a simple programmable calculator device of its day. The 4004 suffered from one desperate annoyance for Intel: it became so hot that it would literally burn up or melt.
The bug (unexpected error) was the first of many for Intel and other companies. Intel seems to have had more than its share of problems extending to the family of Pentium chips.
Home-kit builders gobbled up the first really successful computer, the Altair—named after a star mentioned in an early StarTrek episode. It was a box without keyboard or monitor, just switches and light-emitting-diodes (LEDs). Sounds silly now, but in 1974, owning one was thrilling.
The kit was a panic solution to a dying calculator manufacturer known as Texas Interments. Les Solomon of Popular Electronics gave away the multi-user micro-computer concept to Ed Roberts of MITS. Pertec bought out the MITS Altair and began making one based on the Motorola 68000 chip.
MITS offered a reward to anyone who would offer a relatively easy to use programming language that would run on the Altair. Guess who did it? —a Harvard drop-out and his friend: Paul Allen and William Gates.
The Basic programming language wasn’t new; it had existed long before. Allen and Gates wrote the software with the help of a mini-computer simulator (unauthorized computational time). It worked, and they sold it for more than the kit cost, $300, which was considered insulting.
Academics and computer hobbyists shared their programs. The Gates’ Basic, both buggy and expensive, was soon being distributed freely. Talented programmer pirates repaired and improved it, better than the official version.
Gates was not happy, and his negative attitude was the spark that prompted others to write a different version of his program, called Tiny-Basic. It was sold as shareware for $5. Even more displeased, Gates filed the first industry lawsuit. In an amazing piece of historical irony, Gates claimed he was being driven out of business by unfair business practices.
The Tiny-Basic principals made their product public domain and gave it away for free. From that moment, Microsoft began its tradition of bullying competitors.
From their garage, two guys created another computer kit they called the Apple I, a treasured collector’s item today. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hit upon a concept that HP rejected, but AC Mike Markkula financed as the first pre-built home computer; and it appealed to consumers.
It was the Apple II. It could display high resolution graphics in color at a reasonable price for that time. The processor chip was a 6502 built by MosTek, owned by Commodore, a calculator company that soon went out of business following the demise of Amiga.
The Commodore PET was better in some ways, but the Apple’s functionality dominated with the development of Daniel Bricklin’s Visi-Calc. It was a columnar spreadsheet program to automate “What If” multiple calculations. Suddenly home computers were in demand.
Bricklin indirectly made the personal computer viable. He could have patented it and made himself wealthy, but didn’t. Apple didn’t either, but others imbedded it as their own and thereby assured their fortunes.
Apple’s sales of their personal computer products rose from one to ten million dollars, then 100 million and 1 billion dollars in each of three year increments.
Big Blue (IBM) rushed to manufacture its own personal computer, within constrained resources and time. Management’s concern was to safeguard their profitable mainframe business, so their new baby was deliberately made poorly. The Bocca-Raton Florida group used off-the-shelf parts hurriedly assembled; the IBM-PC was years out of date. But it didn’t matter; it was an I-B-M, and significant sales were anticipated!
An operating system written by IBM for their new home computer would be five years away. The market was ready, and they weren’t. So the Bocca Raton group wisely went shopping for one.
Mrs. Gates, Bill’s mother, was well know to the higher management at IBM, by way of her charity work. She recommended her son. Bill told the IBM representatives that his company already had a working operating system for that chip, which he hadn’t.
In one of the most remarkable deals of the century, IBM contracted with Micro-Soft to purchase a license for non-exclusive rights to the operating system, instead of buying it outright. IBM misjudged, believing that the “real money” was in the hardware.
Paul Allen, at the direction of his partner, negotiated the purchase of Seattle Computers software for a windfall sum of about fifty thousand dollars. It was actually the design of a group of “creative dweebs” known as Inter-Galactic Digital Research, which was stolen by Digital Research CP/M OS.
Most certainly if anyone at Seattle had known of Allen and Gate’s deal with IBM, the software industry would be considerably different today. When asked about their use of the product, Seattle wasn’t told the truth, which in business wasn’t illegal. Seattle Computers went out of business. Digital Research got nothing, and its founder later committed suicide. That’s how MS/DOS started.
See next week for part 2 of Micro-Computer Evolution.