Category: Timeline Stories

The Macintosh, or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers, manufactured by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced on 24 January 1984, by Steve Jobs (see the nearby photo) and it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature two rather old known then, but still unpopular features—the mouse and the graphical user interface of Xerox Alto, rather than the command-line interface of its predecessors.

Production of the Mac is based on a vertical integration model in that Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system (called System Software, later renamed to Mac OS, OS X, and macOS) that is pre-installed on all Mac computers. This was in contrast to most IBM PC compatibles, where multiple sellers create hardware intended to run another company’s operating software. Apple exclusively produces Mac hardware, choosing internal systems, designs, and prices. Apple also develops the operating system for the Mac, currently macOS 13 “Ventura”. The modern Mac, like other personal computers, is capable of running alternative operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows. However, Apple does not license Mac OS for use on non-Apple computers.

The Macintosh project started in the late 1970s with Jef Raskin (1943–2005), an Apple employee and human–computer interface expert, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. Raskin wanted to name the computer after his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh, but the name had to be changed for legal reasons. In September 1979, he was authorized by the management to start hiring for the project, and he began to look for an engineer who could put together a prototype. Bill Atkinson, a member of Apple’s Lisa team (which was developing a similar but higher-end computer), introduced him to Burrell Smith, a service technician who had been hired earlier that year. Over the years, Raskin assembled a large development team that designed and built the original Macintosh hardware and software; besides Raskin, Atkinson, and Smith, the team included Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Bruce Horn, Jerry Manock, Susan Kare, Andy Hertzfeld, and Daniel Kottke.

The first Macintosh board, designed by Burrell Smith, had 64 kilobytes (KB) of RAM, used the Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and was capable of supporting a 256×256 pixel black-and-white bitmap display. Bud Tribble, a Macintosh programmer, was interested in running Lisa’s graphical programs on the Macintosh and asked Smith whether he could incorporate the Lisa’s Motorola 68000 microprocessor into the Mac while still keeping the production cost down. By December 1980, Smith had succeeded in designing a board that not only used the 68000 but bumped its speed from 5 to 8 megahertz (MHz); this board also had the capacity to support a 384×256 pixel display.

Smith’s design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, which made the production of the board significantly more cost-efficient. The final Mac design was self-contained and had the complete QuickDraw picture language and interpreter in 64 Kb of ROM and 128 KB of RAM. Though there were no memory slots, its RAM was expandable to 512 KB by means of soldering sixteen chip sockets to accept 256 Kb RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips. The final product’s screen was a 9-inch, 512×342 pixel monochrome display, exceeding the prototypes.

The design caught the attention of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. Realizing that the Macintosh was more marketable than the Lisa, he began to focus his attention on the project. Raskin finally left Apple Inc. in early 1982 over a personality conflict with Jobs, and the final Macintosh design is said to be closer to Jobs’ ideas than Raskin’s. After hearing of the pioneering GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC, Jobs had negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options. The Lisa and Macintosh user interfaces were partially influenced by technology seen at Xerox PARC and were combined with the Macintosh group’s own ideas.

The Macintosh 128k was announced to the press in October 1983 and was introduced in January 1984. It came bundled with two applications designed to show off its interface: MacWrite and MacPaint. Although the Mac garnered an immediate, enthusiastic following, some labeled it a mere “toy.” Because the machine was entirely designed around the GUI, existing text-mode and command-driven applications had to be redesigned and the programming code rewritten; this was a time-consuming task that many software developers chose not to undertake, and resulted in an initial lack of software for the new system. In April 1984 Microsoft’s MultiPlan migrated over from MS-DOS, followed by Microsoft Word in January 1985. In 1985, Lotus Software introduced Lotus Jazz after the success of Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC, although it was largely a flop. Apple introduced Macintosh Office the same year with the Lemmings ad.

For a special post-election edition of Newsweek in November 1984, Apple spent more than $2.5 million to buy all 39 of the advertising pages in the issue. Apple also ran a “Test Drive a Macintosh” promotion, in which potential buyers with a credit card could take home a Macintosh for 24 hours and return it to a dealer afterward. While 200000 people participated, dealers disliked the promotion, the supply of computers was insufficient for demand, and many were returned in such a bad shape that they could no longer be sold. This marketing campaign caused CEO John Sculley to raise the price from $1995 to $2495.

In 1985, the combination of the Mac, Apple’s LaserWriter printer, and Mac-specific software like Boston Software’s MacPublisher and Aldus PageMaker enabled users to design, preview, and print page layouts complete with text and graphics, it was an activity to become known as desktop publishing. Initially, desktop publishing was unique to the Macintosh but eventually became available for IBM PC users as well. Later, applications such as Macromedia FreeHand, QuarkXPress, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator strengthened Mac’s position as a graphics computer and helped to expand the emerging desktop publishing market.

The limitations of the first Mac soon became clear: it had very little memory, even compared with other personal computers in 1984, and could not be expanded easily; and it lacked a hard disk drive or the means to attach one easily. In October 1985, Apple increased the Mac’s memory to 512 KB, but it was inconvenient and difficult to expand the memory of a 128 KB Mac. In an attempt to improve connectivity, Apple released the Macintosh Plus on 10 January 1986 for $2600. It offered one megabyte of RAM, expandable to four, and a then-revolutionary SCSI parallel interface, allowing up to seven peripherals—such as hard drives and scanners—to be attached to the machine. Its floppy drive was increased to an 800 KB capacity. The Mac Plus was an immediate success and remained in production, unchanged, until 15 October 1990; on sale for just over four years and ten months, it was the longest-lived Macintosh in Apple’s history.

At its introduction, the Macintosh was targeted at two primary markets: knowledge workers and students. Referring to the telephone as the first desktop appliance, Steve Jobs hoped that the Macintosh would become the second desktop appliance. As Bill Gates stated, To create a new standard takes something that’s not just a little bit different. It takes something that’s really new and captures people’s imaginations. Macintosh meets that standard.

Through the second half of the 1980s, the company built market share only to see it dissipate in the 1990s as the personal computer market shifted towards IBM PC-compatible machines running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows.

Biography of Jef Raskin

Jeff (aka Jef) Raskin was born on 9 March 1943 in Brentwood, on Long Island, New York, to a secular Jewish family, whose surname is a matronymic from “Raske”, a Yiddish nickname for Rachel. He was the son of William Benjamin Raskin (1905-1991) (a son of Jacob Raskin and Ida Sarah Finkelstein Raskin, Russian Jews, who emigrated to the USA in the early 1890s), and Frieda Botfeld Raskin (1907-1986), who married in 1931. Jeff had two brothers: Jack (b. 1935), and David (b. 1941), who died in infancy.

After graduating from Brentwood High School in 1960, in 1964 Raskin received B.S. in Mathematics and in 1965 B.A. in Philosophy at State University of New York. In 1967 he got M.S. in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University. The first original computer application he wrote was a music application as part of his master’s thesis. In 1967 Raskin enrolled in a graduate music program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), but quit to teach art, photography, and computer science there. He worked as an assistant professor in the Visual Arts department from 1968 until 1974. Raskin announced his resignation from the assistant professorship by flying over the Chancellor’s house in a hot air balloon. In the early 1970s, Raskin was a visiting scholar at Stanford in their Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. While at Standford he visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and worked with the team developing the Xerox GUI. Later he was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to establish a Computer and Humanities center.

Raskin started working with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 when they were still in the garage. He was hired to write the manual for the Apple II personal computer. Raskin joined the fledgling Apple as employee No. 31 in January 1978. At Apple, he first worked as manager of publications and later became head of the team developing the Macintosh computer. Besides overseeing the development, Raskin is considered responsible for the machine’s drag-and-drop feature, a user-friendly innovation later adopted by other computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows. But Raskin felt Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was muscling in on the Macintosh project and resigned from the company in 1982, two years before the Macintosh was released.

After leaving Apple, Raskin formed his own company, Information Appliance (a classical music publisher), and developed a computer called the Canon Cat, with backing from Canon Inc., but it sold only 20000 copies before Canon ended its support. The “work processor” Cat dispensed with conventions popularized by the Mac, such as menus, overlapping windows, and rows of icons. You turned on the machine and simply started typing to create a new document. Within that document, you could create tables with formulas. It even allowed you to include computer code in the middle of a document that could be executed with a button press.

Raskin’s latest project was “Archy,” a computer interface designed to operate similarly on Windows, Apple, or other operating systems. Archy was a software system whose user interface introduced a different approach to interacting with computers with respect to traditional graphical user interfaces. It embodies his ideas and established results about human-centered design described in his book The Humane Interface. These ideas include content persistence, modelessness, a nucleus with commands instead of applications, navigation using incremental text search, and a zooming user interface. Alluding to Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics, one of Jef’s mantras was that “any system shall not harm your content or, through inaction, allow your content to come to harm.”

Raskin was said to be an archer, target shooter, model airplane designer, bicycle racer, and occasional model race car driver. He was known as an accomplished musician and artist. He performed on the recorder, rebuilt and installed an entire Swiss pipe organ in his home, and taught electronic music and other subjects at UC San Diego before joining Apple. Raskin also created works of sculpture that reflected his sense of humor, such as a piece of glass decorated with suction-cup darts, which he called “Objet Dart.” Some of his work was shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He also holds a number of patents and trademarks.

Jef Raskin married Linda S. Blum (born 1955) in 1982. They had three children together—a son: Aza Benjamin (born 1984), and two daughters: Aviva Frieda (b. 1987), and Aenea Hanna (b. 1992), with honorary/surrogate siblings Rebecca Fureigh, and Jenna Mandis.

Jef Raskin was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2004 and died in Pacifica, California, on 26 February 2005, at age 61.

In 1987, the Texas Instruments’ engineer John P. Fairbanks (Electrical engineer from Missouri University of Science and Technology 1971) started Poqet Computer Co. with his former TI coworker Stavro Prodromou (who became president of Poqet, while Fairbanks was a vice-president), and Robert William Wilmot (electronics engineer, former head of Texas Instruments’ British-based calculator operation and chairman of ICL, the largest British computer company) in the spare room of a colleague’s house in Sunnyvale, California.

The engineering team included John Fairbanks, Leroy Harper, Ian Cullimore, and Shinpei Ichikcawa. Fairbanks and his partners created the remarkable TI-30 calculator in the 1970s, and using their experience they were able to build a remarkable sub-notebook computer.

Using as an industrial partner Fujitsu Ltd., Poqet Co. announced in October 1989, the brilliant Poqet PC, a uniquely small and well-designed IBM PC compatible computer (see Poqet PC Users Guide).

The size of the machine is 220 mm 110 mm 25 mm; weight: 540 g with batteries. The CPU was 80C88, working at 7 MHz. RAM memory: 640 KB SRAM. The display was a monochrome LCD, with 80×25 symbols text, and 640×200 pixels graphics. PCMCIA: 2 × Type I memory card slots. Secondary storage: Drive A: 512 KB MB PCMCIA. Drive B: 512 KB PCMCIA. Drive C: Internal 768 KB ROM drive with MS-DOS 3.3, PoqetTools, GW-BASIC, and application programs. Drive D: 22 KB VRAM drive. Drive E: external floppy drive.

Built-in software: MS-DOS 3.3, PoqetLink, and PoqetTools (PoqetCalc, a calculator; PoqetWrite, a screen editor; PoqetSchedule, a calendar including an appointment scheduler, alarm, and To Do; PoqetAddress, an address book; PoqetTalk, a communication program). Additional programs (on PCMCIA ROM cards): Lotus 1-2-3, MetrolExpress and Agenda; WordPerfect; XyWrite; Lucid 3-D; ACT!

RS-232 and parallel ports are provided by using special cables.

The Poqet PC was a revolutionary machine, as regards its power consumption. It was powered only by two standard AA-size batteries, which can feed the machine for up to 100 working hours, but using aggressive power management, which includes “sleeping” (stopping the CPU) between keystrokes and other actions, slowing down and reducing the voltage whenever it is possible, these batteries were able to power the computer for anywhere between several weeks and a couple of months, depending on usage. The computer also uses a special “instant on” feature, such that after powering it down (i.e. hibernating), it can be used again immediately without having to go through a full boot sequence.

The Poqet PC was dubbed “A one-pound technological marvel” and “The most exciting advancement in personal computing of the year”. In 1989, the year of its introduction, Byte Magazine gave the Poqet PC the “Award of Distinction” and PC Magazine gave the Poqet PC the “Award for Technical Excellence” in the “portables” category.

The machine was launched to the market in March 1990, initial price was 1995 USD. Fujitsu Co. initially provided financing support and owned 38% of Poqet Computer, but they eventually bought 100% of the company and then released the Poqet PC Plus, which has 2MB RAM and a rechargeable battery, among other improvements. Later Fujitsu moved off in other directions, leaving the Poqet PC behind.

In early 1976, Jack Tramiel (1928-2012), the founder of Commodore Business Machines, had a talk with Chuck Peddle (1937-2019), the lead designer of MOS Technology Inc., an IC design and semiconductor manufacturer. Commodore, one of many electronics companies selling calculators, had just bought MOS Technology, trying to form a vertically-integrated calculator line in order to decrease its expenses. When Peddle told Tramiel that calculators were a dead end and computers were the future, Tramiel told him to build one to prove the point. And Peddle proved it, and how!

Commodore PET series
Commodore’s first personal computer, the PET (an acronym of Personal Electronic Transactor), the first model of which was the PET 2001, was officially announced in the middle of 1976 and Tramiel gave Peddle six months to have the computer ready for January 1977 Consumer Electronics Show. Peddle coped with his task and the working PET 2001 prototype was shown to the public at the Winter CES 1977 in Las Vegas in January, where its concept, added to a futuristic design, caused an enormous sensation. The first hundred units were shipped in October, at an initial price of $495. Following the initial PET 2001, the design was updated through a series of models with more memory, a better keyboard, a larger screen, and other modifications. The systems were a top seller in the American education markets, as well as for business use in Europe. The PET line was discontinued in 1982 after approximately 220 thousand machines were sold.

PET 2001 had a 6502 processor, controlling the screen, keyboard, cassette tape recorders, and any peripherals connected to one of the computer’s several expansion ports. It included either 4 KB or 8 KB of 8-bit RAM and was essentially a single-board computer with discrete logic driving a small built-in monochrome monitor with 40×25 character graphics, enclosed in a sheet metal case. It also included a built-in Datasette for data storage located on the front of the case, which left little room for the keyboard. The data transfer rate to cassette tape was 1500 baud, but the data was recorded to tape twice for safety, giving an effective rate of 750 baud. The computer’s main board carried four expansion ports: extra memory, a second cassette tape recorder interface, a parallel (“user”) port that could be used for sound output or connection to “user” projects or non-Commodore devices and a parallel IEEE-488 port which allowed for daisy-chaining peripherals such as disk drives and printers.

Commodore was the first company to license Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC, known as Commodore BASIC 1.0, but they changed the startup screen and prompts, added I/O support, the SYS command for invoking machine language programs, and fixed numerous bugs. The PET had somewhat of a competitive advantage over its Apple II and TRS-80 rivals as both were using relatively primitive integer BASICs for their first six months on the market while the PET had a full-featured BASIC with floating point support, a sophisticated screen editor, and lowercase letters, the last being a feature that the two competing platforms would not have for a few years.

Commodore 64
In 1981, Commodore’s engineering team proposed to Jack Tramiel a true low-cost sequel to the PET series. Tramiel dictated that the machine should have 64 kB of RAM. Although 64 KB of DRAM cost over 100 USD at the time, he knew that DRAM prices were falling, and would drop to an acceptable level before full production was reached. In November, Tramiel set a deadline for the first weekend of January, to coincide with the 1982 Consumer Electronics Show. The team that constructed the new computer consisted of Bob Russell, Bob Yannes, and David Ziembicki. The design, prototypes, and some sample software were finished in time for the show after the team had worked tirelessly over both Thanksgiving and Christmas weekends. The product was codenamed the VIC-40 as the successor to the popular VIC-20. When the product was to be presented, the VIC-40 product was renamed C64 in order to fit into the current Commodore business products lineup which contained the P128 and the B256, both named after a letter and their respective memory size.

The C64 made an impressive debut at the January 1982 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, as recalled by Production Engineer David Ziembicki: “All we saw at our booth were Atari people with their mouths dropping open, saying, ‘How can you do that for $595?'” The answer, as it turned out, was vertical integration; thanks to Commodore’s ownership of MOS Technology’s semiconductor fabrication facilities, each C64 had an estimated production cost of only $135.

The 8-bit home computer Commodore 64 (commonly known as the C64 or C=64), was a machine with remarkable market success. Volume production started sometime in the spring of 1982, with machines being released onto the market in August at a price of $595. During his lifetime, sales totaled some 17 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time. For a substantial period of time (1983-1986), the Commodore 64 dominated the market with between 30% and 40% share and 2 million units sold per year, outselling the IBM PC clones, Apple computers, and Atari computers. Sam Tramiel, a son of Jack Tramiel and a former Atari president said in a 1989 interview “When I was at Commodore we were building 400000 C64s a month for a couple of years.”

Part of the Commodore 64 success was because it was sold in retail stores instead of electronics stores, and these machines can be directly plugged into an existing home television without any modifications. Commodore produced many of its parts in-house to control supplies and costs. Improving the reliability, as well as reducing manufacturing costs, eventually, it cost only about $25.00 to manufacture, and the consumer price of the C-64 dropped to around $200.00. Another part of the Commodore 64 success was that approximately 10000 commercial software titles were made for it including development tools, office applications, and games. C64 is also credited with popularizing the computer demo scene. The Commodore 64 is still used today by some computer hobbyists.

The Commodore 64 home computer (see its Users Guide) remained in production from August 1982 as late as until April 1994. The Operating system was Commodore KERNAL/Commodore BASIC 2.0. The CPU was MOS Technology 6510, working at 1.02 MHz (NTSC version) or 0.985 MHz (PAL version). Memory: 64 kB RAM, 20 kB ROM. Display: 25×40 text. Graphics VIC-II (320×200, 16 colors, sprites, raster interrupt). Sound was SID 6581, with three channels of sound. Ports: TV, RGB & composite video, two joysticks, cartridge port, serial peripheral port. Peripherals: cassette recorder, printer, modem, external 170K floppy drive.

Biography of Jack Tramiel

Jack Tramiel was born Juda Jacek (aka Yehuda or Idek (“little Juda”)) Trzmiel (trzmiel is the Polish word for bumblebee) on 13 December 1928 in a Jewish family in Łódź, a city in central Poland. He was the only child of Abram Josef Trzmiel (1902-1944), a subcontractor for a shoe manufacturer, and Rifka Bentkowska (aka Regina Silberman). Idek grew up celebrating Shabbat at his maternal grandfather’s home, but with the 1939 Nazi invasion, life turned upside-down.

After the German invasion of Poland Trzmiel’s family was transported by Germans to the Jewish ghetto in Łódź, where Idek worked in a garment factory. When in 1944 the ghettos were liquidated, his family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Jacek was examined by Josef Mengele and selected for a work party, after which he and his father were sent to the labor camp Ahlem near Hanover, while his mother remained at Auschwitz. Like many other inmates, his father was reported to have died of typhus in the work camp in Dec 1944, but Tramiel believed he was killed by an injection of gasoline. Idek was rescued from the labor camp in April 1945 and remained in Germany, taking odd jobs including one in an American Army kitchen. In the middle of 1947, he met in Hanover and married Helen (Hinda) Goldgrub (1928-2019), also a Polish Jew, survivor, and Lodz native. They had three sons: Sam (b. 1948), Leonard (b. 1953), and Garry.

On 29 October 1947, Jacek departed from Bremen, Germany, and on 10 Nov 1947, he entered Ellis Island, New York, changing his name from Jacek Trzmiel to Jack Tramiel (if you wonder why, get an English speaker to say Yatzik Tʂmjɛl 🙂 In New York, Jack (not knowing the language and only having $10 on him), got a job in a Fifth Avenue warehouse, with the help of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society. He learned English from watching movies and in 1948 joined the U.S. Army. Helen joined him in the U.S. in 1948. Soon the Army put Jack in charge of repairing office equipment, at the same time he attended an IBM School for Office Technology. Upon leaving the army in 1952, in 1953, while working as a taxi driver, Tramiel bought a shop in the Bronx to repair office machinery and started importing typewriters from Italy, founding his first company—Commodore Portable Typewriter.

In 1956, Tramiel signed a deal with a Czechoslovak typewriter manufacturer,  to assemble and sell their typewriters in North America. However, as Czechoslovakia was part of the Warsaw Pact, they could not be imported directly into the U.S., so Tramiel set up Commodore Business Machines in Toronto, Canada. In 1962 Commodore signed an agreement with Rheinmetall-Borsig AG and began to sell Commodore portable typewriters made from the parts of older typewriters. In 1962, his business was hit by the arrival of Japanese typewriters in the U.S. market. Thus Tramiel re-launch the company in the mechanical adding machine business, which was profitable for a time before the Japanese entered that field as well. Stung twice by the same source, Tramiel departed to Japan to learn why they were able to outcompete North Americans in their own local markets. It was during this trip that he saw the first digital calculators, and decided that the mechanical adding machine was a dead end.

A part of the company was bought in 1966 by Irving Gould (1919–2004), a Canadian financier, and when it released its first calculators, combining an LED display from Bowmar and an integrated circuit from Texas Instruments (TI), it found a ready market. However, after slowly realizing the size of the market, in the middle 1970s, TI decided to cut Commodore out of the middle and released their own calculators at a price point below the Commodore’s cost of just the chips. Gould once again rescued the company, injecting another $3 million, which allowed Commodore to purchase MOS Technology, Inc. an IC design and semiconductor manufacturer, a company that had also supplied Commodore with calculator ICs.

In 1976 Commodore entered the computer business and was one of the world leaders when in Jan 1984, Tramiel resigned from the company because of a “disagreement” with the board. After a short break from the computer industry, he formed a new company named Tramel Technology (TTL), in order to design and sell a next-generation home computer. In July 1984, TTL bought the Consumer Division of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications. TTL was then renamed Atari Corporation and went on to produce the 16-bit Atari ST computer line based on Motorola’s MC68000 CPU, directly competing with Apple’s Macintosh and Commodore’s Amiga, which also used the same CPU. Under Tramiel’s direction, the Atari ST was a considerable success in Europe, and globally in the professional music market. In the late 1980s, Tramiel decided to step away from day-to-day operations at Atari, naming his eldest son, Sam, President, and CEO, and his other sons as financial and software managers. In 1995, Sam suffered a heart attack, and his father returned to oversee operations. In 1996, Tramiel sold Atari to disk-drive manufacturer Jugi Tandon Storage. The newly merged company was named JTS Corporation, and Tramiel joined the JTS board.

Jack Tramiel was a big, ebullient, tough, brawling businessman who had no fear and only one item on his agenda: winning the game. Under his rough brand of management, Commodore became the world’s first computer company to reach a billion dollars in sales and a million units sold. Unfortunately, Jack burned so many suppliers and employees in California, they had to leave. Vendors just did not want to sell to him. This cutthroat reputation would dog him the rest of his business life.

Jack Tramiel retired in 1996 and moved to a palatial estate atop a foothill in Monte Sereno, California, where he died of heart failure on 8 April 2012, aged 83.

Adam Osborne (1939-2003) was a British author, book, and software publisher, one of the most charming, persuasive, egotistical, and supremely confident people in the computing field, indeed, in all industries. He is most famously known for introducing the Osborne 1, the first commercially successful portable computer.

Osborne was a doctor in chemical engineering who used to work for Shell Oil in California, but he left in the early 1970s to pursue his interest in computers and technical writing. He became a computer hobbyist and began self-publishing on computing, writing a programming manual for Intel’s first microprocessors. In 1972 he founded Osborne and Associates to create a series of easy-to-read computing manuals (long before the For Dummies… series). By 1977, Osborne Books, as the company had become, had published over 40 computing titles. In 1979, Osborne sold his publishing company to McGraw-Hill. During the same time, he began writing columns for the computer magazine Interface Age and later Infoworld. He was becoming increasingly convinced that for computers to be truly useful, they needed to be mobile, as they needed to move with the people who used them and be available whenever and wherever people were. This was a concept he didn’t think the existing companies understood or were prepared to deal with.

The idea of the laptop computer wasn’t a new one. It was visualized by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1968 and talked of in his 1972 paper as the Dynabook. The idea was later developed in another Xerox PARC creation—NoteTaker. The laptop is a small portable computer having its primary components (processor, display, keyboard) built into a single unit capable of battery-powered operation, which typically weighs from 1 to 7 kg, depending upon dimensions, materials, and other variables. As the personal computer became viable in the early 1970s, the thought of a portable personal computer arose.

In March 1980, at the West Coast Computer Faire, Adam Osborne approached the ex-Intel engineer (and a nerd from the Homebrew Computer Club, just like Steve Leininger of TRS-80, and Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) Lee Felsenstein with the idea of starting a computer company that would not only produce an affordable, portable computer but would offer bundled software with the machine. Osborne asked Felsenstein to develop the hardware of the portable computer. Using the money from his publishing business along with venture capital Osborne found Osborne Computer Corp. in January 1981.

Following Osborne’s specifications, Felsenstein designed a portable computer that had a case with a carrying handle, could survive being accidentally dropped, and would fit under an airplane seat (see the nearby photo). The machine weighed only 11 kg, had a 52-column display that would fit on a five-inch screen, contained a cushioning tube, and had two floppy disk drives. The computer even has an optional battery pack, so it doesn’t have to be plugged into the power outlet. To meet the small screen requirements, Felsenstein stored a full screen’s worth of information in memory and gave the users keys that allowed them to scroll the memory screen across the display. In April 1981, at the same West Coast Computer Faire, Adam Osborne introduced the Osborne 1 Personal Business Computer for an initial price of $1795.

The Osborne 1 (see the lower image) featured a 5-inch 52-column display, two floppy-disk drives (capacity 92K), a Z80 microprocessor (working at 4.0 MHz), 64k of RAM, a parallel port (IEEE-488), and a modem/serial port (see the Technical Manual of Osborne 1). It included a bundled software package that included the CP/M operating system, the Microsoft MBASIC programming language, the WordStar word processing package, the SuperCalc spreadsheet program, and Digital Research CBASIC programming language (2000 worth of retail software alone).

Osborne 1 appears to be a huge market hit—in September 1981, Osborne Computer Company has its first US$1 million sales month. In the first 8 months since its introduction, 11000 Osborne 1 computers shipped. The peak sales per month for Osborne 1 personal computers over the course of the product lifetime was 10000 units, despite the initial business plan for the computer predicting a total of only 10000 units sold over the entire product lifecycle.

Despite early success, Osborne struggled under heavy competition. Kaypro Computer offered portables that, like the Osborne 1, ran CP/M and included a software bundle, but Kaypro offered a larger 9-inch display. Apple Computer’s offerings had a large software library of their own and with aftermarket cards, could run CP/M as well. IBM’s 16-bit IBM PC was faster, more advanced, and offered a rapidly growing software library, and Compaq offered a portable computer that was almost 100% compatible with IBM’s offering. Osborne’s efforts to raise $20 million in capital to rush an IBM-compatible computer to market were unsuccessful.

Besides the severe competition, Osborne made several heavy management and business errors—difficulty meeting demand, poor quality of production, overstocking, etc. The final blow occurred in 1983 when Adam Osborne boasted about an upcoming product months before it could be released, killing demand for the company’s existing products. It is unclear whether this boast was about the Osborne Executive, which was released in May 1983 for $2495 and featured a 7-inch display and did not sell as well as its predecessor, or, more likely, the Osborne Vixen, a smaller portable that promised to offer compatibility not only with earlier Osborne models but also with MS-DOS, allowing it to run software designed for IBM and Compaq computers. Dealers rapidly started canceling orders for the Osborne 1.

Unsold inventory piled up and in spite of dramatic price cuts—the Osborne 1 was selling for $1295 in July 1983 and $995 by August, the sales did not recover. Losses, already higher than expected, continued to mount, and Osborne declared bankruptcy in September 1983. This marketing blunder came to be known as Osborneing and the phrase circulated in Silicon Valley for the next decade.

Osborne emerged from bankruptcy in the mid-1980s and finally released the Osborne Vixen, a compact portable running CP/M, in 1984. However, the company never regained its early prominence.

Biography of Adam Osborne

Adam Osborne was born in Bangkok, Thailand, on 6 March 1939. His father was Arthur Osborne (1906-1970), a British teacher of Eastern religion and philosophy and a lecturer in English at Chulalongkorn University. His mother was Lucia Osborne (1904-1987), a Polish Jew (born Ludka Lipsziczudna in the Polish part of Silesia), and a homemaker. Arthur and Ludka met in Katowice, where he was teaching English in the early 1930s, and married in 1932. In February 1936, in Gdynia was born their first child, Catherine (she became an actress, known as Katya Douglas), and they left for England two years later.

Unhappy with the political climate in England at the time, Arthur applied for a job as a lecturer at the Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, then known as Siam. Adam (b. 1939) and his sister Frania (b. 1940) were both born there. Adam spent World War II in Tamil Nadu, India, with his mother (his father remained in Siam, and was interned by the Japanese). He attended Presentation Convent School in Kodaikanal until Class 6. At age 11, Adam was sent to live with relatives in England in order to get a proper British education. There he was educated at a Catholic boarding school in Warwickshire, and from 1954 to 1957 was a pupil at the grammar school Leamington College for Boys.

Adam graduated with a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Birmingham in 1961. That same year he immigrated to the United States for graduate studies in chemical engineering at the University of Delaware, from which he received an MChE in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1967. During his studies, in the mid-1960s Osborne married Cynthia Geddes, with whom he had three children—Marc, Paul, and Alexandra; the marriage later ended in divorce. He subsequently married Barbara Burdick (Zelnick), although the couple would ultimately divorce as well. Osborne became a naturalized American citizen in 1967.

After graduation, Osborne joined Shell Oil in California but was saved from a dull career in chemical engineering when he was fired. He started his own company, Osborne and Associates, and General Automation commissioned him to write manuals for its minicomputers. He is also reputed to have written the documentation for the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, in 1971. It was the start of a successful publishing company, that produced 40 personal-computing titles (of which he wrote 12 himself), and which was taken over by McGraw-Hill in 1979, making Osborne a rich man.

After the rapid rise and even more rapid fall of Osborne Computer Co. in 1981-1983, in 1984 Osborne returned to the computer field. Noticing the high price of popular software, Osborne began Paperback Software International (PSI), which sold software at lower prices through bookstores. Unfortunately for Osborne, the Lotus Development Corporation concluded that one of its products—the PSI spreadsheet program, VP Planner, was too similar to Lotus 1-2-3. In 1987 Lotus sued PSI for infringing Lotus’s copyright on its menu interface. In 1990 a court ruled in Lotus’s favor, and Osborne resigned from PSI.

In 1992 Osborne founded another company, Noetics Software, to explore artificial intelligence approaches such as neural networks and fuzzy logic, but a mysterious brain ailment caused him to have a number of strokes, so he had to retire. Osborne moved back to his childhood home, in India, to live with his sister Katya Douglas. He died of accumulated brain damage in his sleep on 18 March 2003 in Kodaikanal.

The biggest computer manufacturer in the world—IBM, was in a difficult situation in the 1970s. Despite IBM’s strategy and multimillion efforts to get into the small computer market, it was dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, and TRS-80, as well as various CP/M machines.

IBM dominated the market of mini, middle-range, and mainframe computers, but didn’t achieve even a small success in the very perspective microcomputers market. IBM’s first desktop microcomputer was the IBM 5100, introduced in 1975. It was a complete system, with a built-in monitor, keyboard, and data storage, but it was very expensive—up to $20000, so it didn’t achieve market success. It was specifically designed for professional and scientific problem-solvers, not business users or hobbyists. Gradually IBM management began thinking of producing microcomputers as a profitable business.

When the IBM PC was introduced in mid-1981, it was originally designated as the IBM 5150, putting it in the “5100” series, though its architecture wasn’t directly descended from the IBM 5100. The IBM PC was created by a team of several IBM engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge, the director of the IBM Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton, Florida. Starting in mid-1980, in just four months Estridge and his team developed a prototype and within one year the IBM PC was on retail shelves, a record time for product development in the giant company.

After hesitation between the Intel 8086 and the Motorola MC68000 (16-bit CPUs), they decided to use the Intel 8088 (8/16-bit) processor, as the two other ones were considered too powerful 🙂 Then they asked Digital Research (the creators of CP/M) to create an operating system for their new computer, but as DR was not very interested, they then asked a small company (known for its BASIC Programming Language, first used in Altair 8800) to write the operating system: Microsoft.

Microsoft wasn’t capable of doing it in the given timeframe, so its owner Bill Gates bought the rights to a small, hacked OS written by a small company called Seattle Computer Products: QDOS (which reportedly stood for “Quick and Dirty Operating System”, which itself bears a striking resemblance to CP/M) which became PC-DOS and then later MS-DOS. In fact, when IBM PC was launched, three operating systems could run on it: PC-DOS, CPM-86, but also the UCSD D-PASCAL system.

The original IBM PC wasn’t very powerful (and was certainly less powerful than a lot of 8-bit computers at the time). The very first PCs had only 16 KB RAM and no floppy disk units, they used cassettes to load and store programs (notice that the commands to handle the cassette drives were present in the operating system all the way up to MS-DOS 5). In fact, units could also be purchased from IBM with drives and more RAM. Only the lowest-cost version had no drives included (this is exactly how Atari, Apple, and the other manufacturers did it as well).

The model 5150 (see the nearby image) was introduced in August 1981 (see the IBM Personal Computer brochure). The system unit was a box with a size 50.8 (W) x 40.6 (D) x 14 (H) cm, with a built-in 63.5W switching power supply unit. It featured Intel 8008 CPU, working at a speed of 4.77 MHz, and an optional math co-coprocessor 8087. The RAM was 64 KB (the very first ones had only 16 KB), 256 KB max. (then later 640 KB max.) The ROM was 64 KB, including built-in language IBM BASIC (Special Microsoft BASIC-80 version). The keyboard was a full stroke ‘clicky’ 83 keys with 10 function keys and a numeric keypad. The display was monochrome, working in text mode: (40 or 80 char x 25 lines) or 2 CGA graphic modes: (320 x 200 and 640 x 200). The sound was a tone generator with a built-in speaker. The I/O ports were five internal 8-bit ISA slots, monitor, parallel (Centronics), and cassette. The built-in media was one or two 160 KB 5.25” floppy disk drives. Three OSs were provided—MS-DOS, CP/M-86, and USCD Pascal.

Although the IBM PC XT was launched in 1983 (the first IBM PC to come with an internal hard drive as standard), and IBM AT was launched in 1984 (with the new Intel 80286 CPU), IBM continued production of the original PC in various configurations, for several years. The model types were followed by an xx version number, i.e. 5150-xx, where the xx represented the included options (amount of RAM, single or dual floppy disk drive, etc.)

IBM PC 5150 became actually a success due to the name and fame of IBM, high-quality construction (especially the keyboard and monitor), great expandability, and IBM’s decision to publish complete technical specs. The IBM PC Technical manual included circuit diagrams and the full source code for the BIOS. While the original IBM PC technology is largely obsolete by today’s standards, many are still in service. As of June 2006, IBM PC and XT models were still in use at the majority of U.S. National Weather Service upper-air observing sites. The computers were used to process data as it is returned from the ascending radiosonde, attached to a weather balloon. Factors that have contributed to the 5150 PC’s longevity are its flexible modular design, open technical standard making information needed to adapt, modify, and repair it readily available, use of few special nonstandard parts, and rugged high-standard IBM manufacturing, the last of which provided for exceptional long-term reliability and durability. Most newer PCs, by contrast, use special-purpose chips (ASICs) implementing trend-driven technology which becomes obsolete in a few years, after which the parts become unavailable.

Biography of Don Estridge

Philip Donald “Don” Estridge, known as the “father of the IBM PC”, was born on 23 June 1937 in Jacksonville, Florida. He was the son of Lucius Luther Estridge Jr. (1908-1983), and Marie Isabel DeHoff Estridge (1907-1973), who married in 1935. Lucius held a BA degree from the University of Florida, was a chief clerk of the office of the work progress administration in Orlando, FL, and was a professional photographer. Marie was a graduate of St. Joseph’s Academy.

From 1942 to 1951, Don attended St. Paul’s School in Jacksonville from Kindergarten through the Eight grade. Then he graduated from Bishop Kenny High School in 1955 and completed a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Florida in 1959. Don joined IBM in June 1959 as a junior engineer in Kingston, New York, and held various positions in the Federal Systems Division, including working on the manned and unmanned programming support for NASA/Goddard. In 1969 he joined the General Systems Division and from 1975 to 1979 he was the Series/1 (a mini computer) programming manager. During 1979-1980, he had responsibility for the development of a Series/1 integrated product.

Don became manager of Entry Level Systems at IBM in 1980, responsible for the development of small microprocessor-based systems for tiny business and personal use, with a team of just 14 people and a revenue base of zero. By the time he gave up leading IBM’s PC division in 1985, the division had 10000 employees and annual revenue of $4.5 billion. After the extraordinarily successful development of the IBM PC, Estridge was promoted several times at IBM and in 1984 became Vice President, Manufacturing. In 1983 he turned down a lucrative multimillion-dollar offer from Steve Jobs to become President of Apple Computers.

Don married Mary Ann Hellier (1939-1985), a piano teacher, on 13 September 1958. Three children would eventually be born from his marriage: Patricia Ann, Mary Evelyn, and Sandra Marie.

Don and his wife, Mary Anne, were two of the 137 victims on board Delta Air Lines Flight 191, which crashed as it attempted to land during a storm in Dallas, Texas on 2 August 1985. It was a huge blow to IBM because, besides Estridge and his wife, they lost five other employees, six other family members of IBM employees, and two IBM summer interns.

In August 1979, Jim Westwood, the self-taught Chief Engineer of Science of Cambridge Ltd, a British consumer electronics company, incorporated in 1973 by Sir Clive Marles Sinclair (1940-2021), started a project to design a new microcomputer (to replace the first microcomputer kit of the company—MK14), based on Zilog Z80 microprocessor. Westwood and his group needed only six months to develop a remarkable device—Sinclair ZX80 (it was named after the Z80 processor with the X for the mystery ingredient), and it was announced in February 1980, as a kit form for £79.95, (purchasers had to assemble and solder it together), and as an assembled version at £99.95.

The low price opened up the market completely, with more people now able to afford a home computer resulting in over 50000 unit sales and a waiting list for the ZX80 of several months (an unheard number for the day), before they came out with the improved ZX-81 one year later.

Sinclair ZX80 (see ZX80 Operating Manual) had the ability to outperform many of its competitors and yet was built using readily available components. Proving hugely popular, the ZX80 weighed in at just 340 grams and was the first computer with a price tag of less than £100. In the USA the computer was advertised as The first personal computer under $200!

The ZX80 computer was mounted in a tiny white plastic case (designed by John Pemberton), weight only 340 g, with one piece blue membrane keyboard on the front.

Westwood designed the machine using 21 readily available TTL chips (the only proprietary technology was the firmware) around Z80 CPU (in fact, most machines used the NEC μPD780C-1 equivalent), running at 3.25 MHz. The computer was equipped with 1 KB of static RAM (64 KB max) and 4 KB ROM, containing the operating system and programming language—Sinclair BASIC, and an editor. The display was hooked to the TV, with 22 x 32 black-and-white characters. Ports are memory and cassette. Peripherals supported: Sinclair thermal printer.

The Sinclair ZX80 was an extraordinary personal computer, but it did have its drawbacks: No color and sound support; Very limited memory; The built-in BASIC programming language can deal only with whole numbers; Very slow program execution, as there are no video chips, and the CPU performs all of the computer functions; The keyboard is a membrane-type, a flat plastic surface which is difficult to use and wears-out rather quickly.

The always shy of publicity self-taught engineer Westwood stayed with Sinclair through the 1980s (he was hired by him as a teenager in 1963), developing the ZX81 and its successor, the Spectrum. After Amstrad acquired Sinclair Research (Science of Cambridge had become), Westwood co-founded Cambridge Computer with Sinclair in 1986 to design the hardware for the radical battery-powered portable Z88 computer and later to create the Astra set-top box and its associated satellite dish, the “Squish”.

William Grant “Bill” Moggridge (1943-2012), a British designer, author, and educator, is known as a pioneer of interaction design (he coined the term) and one of the first people to integrate human factors into the design of software and hardware. In 1972, he worked on his first computer project, a minicomputer (the size of a sewing machine) for the UK company Computer Technology Ltd, which was never produced.

In contrast to this, his next computer design—the remarkable GRiD Compass, ordered in 1979 by the start-up Californian company Grid Systems, is widely regarded as the first laptop computer in the world. This was the first portable computer with a display that closed over the keyboard, a patented innovation that Grid Systems licensed for many years (see the US patent of GRiD).

Moggridge designed the computer in 1979, but the first GRiD Compass (the computer was announced in marketing materials as Model 1100, but it did not exist, the released machine was the Model 1101) was released in April 1982, at price 8150 USD. Along with the Sharp PC-5000 and Gavilan SC computers, released in 1983, the GRiD Compass established much of the basic design of subsequent laptop computers, although the laptop concept itself owed much to the Dynabook project of Alan Kay.

The design of GRiD Compass (see the nearby image) used a clamshell-style die-cast case (where the screen folds flat to the rest of the computer when closed), which was made from a magnesium-alloy (GRiD had the patent on the clamshell idea). The size of the machine was 38 (H) × 29 (D) × 5 (H) cm.

The computer featured an Intel 8086 processor (8MHz) with 8087 math coprocessor, 256KB DRAM (up to 512KB), a 6-inch 320×240-pixel bright (80 chars × 25 lines text), sharp electroluminescent monochrome (yellow-on-black) display, 384K internal magnetic bubble memory (it is a type of non-volatile computer memory, developed by Andrew Bobeck in 1960s, that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles or domains, each storing one bit of data), and a 300/1200 baud modem.

I/O ports are RS-232/422 serial and GPIB parallel (Grid Processor Interface Bus), which allowed daisy-chaining of multiple computers. The keyboard was full-stroke 57 keys.

External devices such as hard drives and floppy drives (10 Meg hard drive/5.25-inch floppy drive combo or 360K 5.25-inch floppy drive model) could be connected via the IEEE-488 I/O. The power input is ~110/220 V, 47–66 Hz, 75 W.

The GRiD Compass ran its own operating system, GRiD-OS, which was a full-function, menu-oriented, and powerful operating system. The suite included also several applications: GRiDManager (communication and utility functions), GRiDPrint (control format and appearance of text files), GRiDPlan (electronic worksheets), GRiDFile (database utilities), GRiDPlot (converts data to graphs), GRiDBASIC (high-level programming language), and GRiDWrite (full-screen text editor).

Originally developed for business executives (who else can afford a personal computer for 8–10000 USD at that time?), GRiD Compasses were also used by the U.S. government, the U.S. military in the field (naval vessels, attached to paratroopers, etc.), and by NASA on the Space Shuttles during the 1980s (see the nearby image). It’s even believed that the US President’s nuclear football at one time included a GRiD computer.

The portable Osborne 1 computer sold at around the same time as the Compass (at the beginning of the 1980s), although lacked Compass’s refinement and portable size, was a cheaper and more popular device, moreover, it ran the popular CP/M operating system.

Biography of Bill Moggridge

William Grant “Bill” Moggridge was born in London on 25 June 1943, to Helen Mary Ferrier (Taylor) Moggridge (1900–1989) and Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Weston Moggridge (1880–1960) (married in 1935, it was second marriage for both of them). Helen was a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and teacher, and Henry was a civil servant, who served in the Army and was appointed Companion, Order of St. Michael and St. George for taking part in WWI. William had an elder brother, Harry Traherne “Hal” (born 1936), who became an architect.

Moggridge studied industrial design from 1962 to 1965 at the Central School of Art and Design, London. In 1965, he went to the US to find opportunities as a designer and landed his first job as a designer for the American Sterilizer Co. in Erie, Pennsylvania, designing hospital equipment. In 1969, Moggridge returned to London to study typography and communications and founded his first company, Moggridge Associates.

Moggridge returned to the US in 1979 to open another office, called ID Two, in Palo Alto, California. Later he also began teaching at Stanford University (1983-2010). In 1991, Moggridge became a co-founder of IDEO (an innovation and design firm with offices around the world) and stayed there until 2010, when he became director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.

Besides two patents for portable computers (one technical and one for design), Moggridge had a patent for a computer keyboard (Des. 267879) and a word processor (Des. 288567). As his career progressed, he moved away from physical design as he became increasingly interested in interaction design. His books included “Designing Interactions” (2006) and “Designing Media” (2010). He received many awards that included the Prince Philip Designers Prize, a prestigious British honor.

Moggridge married Karin Helbig Hansen, on 15 April 1966. They had two children: Eric Giffard, and Alex Zacho.

Bill Moggridge died at a hospice in San Francisco on 8 September 2012 (aged 69), the cause was cancer.

The two Steves—Steven Paul Jobs (1955–2011) and Stephen “Woz” Gary Wozniak (born 1950) started their business partnership in the fall of 1971 when Woz (the technical genius of the pair) designed a device that could place free long-distance phone calls by emitting specific tone chirps. Jobs (the business genius of the pair) managed to sell some two hundred devices for $150 each and split the profit with Wozniak.

Later Woz designed a video terminal that could be used to log on to the minicomputers. In 1974-75, when new microcomputers such as the Micral, Scelbi-8H, and Altair 8800 appeared, Wozniak was inspired to build a microprocessor into his video terminal and have a complete computer. He originally offered the design to Hewlett-Packard (HP), where he worked at the time, but was denied by the company (what a pity for HP 🙂

When Jobs saw Wozniak’s computer, he was immediately interested in its commercial potential and convinced him to go into business together and start a new company of their own. Together they sold some of their possessions (such as Wozniak’s HP scientific calculator and Jobs’ Volkswagen van), raised $1300, and assembled the first prototypes in Jobs’ bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs’ garage. On April Fool’s Day of 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer Inc. (Jobs came up with the name Apple because he was then on one of his fruitarian diets 🙂 Wozniak still remains at HP, but he will leave in several months and will become the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple.

Their first product, the Apple I computer, was similar to the Altair 8800, the first commercially available personal computer, except it had no provision for internal expansion cards. With the addition of these cards, the Altair could be attached to a computer terminal and could be programmed in BASIC. The Apple I, priced at $666.66, was purely a hobbyist machine, with a $25 MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, on a single-circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM, and a 40 character by 24-row display controller. It lacked a case, power supply, keyboard, or display, which had to be provided by the user.

Jobs and Wozniak sold their first 100 Apple I computers to a new computer shop, called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California. The owner bought just the circuit board for the Apple I, but he had to supply the keyboard, monitor, transformer, and even the case in which to put the computer.

In August 1976, Woz begins work on the Apple II. In December 1976, he and Randy Wigginton demonstrate the first prototype of Apple II at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting. In March 1977 Apple Computer moves from Jobs’ garage to an office in Cupertino. In April Apple Computer delivers its first Apple II system (see the lower image), for $1295 (with 4K RAM). The CPU was MOS 6502, working at 1.0 MHz. RAM was from 4K min, up to 48K max. Display supported two modes: 280X192 graphics and 40X24 text, six colors maximum. I/O ports were composite video output and cassette interface. There were 8 internal expansion slots. An external 143K floppy was offered in 1978.

The original Apple II operating system was only the built-in BASIC interpreter (written by Woz) contained in ROM. Most commercial Apple II software on disk, e.g. educational games and productivity programs, booted directly on the hardware and either had no operating system or incorporated one of its own (which was usually invisible to the user.) The Apple DOS Disk Operating System was added later to support the diskette drive (see the Apple II Reference Manual).

Apple I appears to be a market failure, in May 1977, 10 months after its introduction, only 175 Apple I kits have been sold. So Woz and Jobs focused on Apple II. And they won. In October 1979, 2.5 years after the introduction of the Apple II, 50000 units have been sold, all rivals (such as Sol-20) were smashed and this was only the beginning of the story. In 1982 was reported that sales of all Apple II systems to date were 750000.

The remarkable Apple II became one of the most successful and recognizable computers for over 15 years—from 1978 to the 1980s and early 1990s. It was aggressively marketed through volume discounts and manufacturing arrangements to educational institutions, which resulted in it being the first computer in widespread use in American colleges and secondary schools. A focused effort to develop educational and business software for the Apple II, including the 1979 release of the popular VisiCalc spreadsheet, made the computer especially popular with business users and families.

In 1975, Donald “Don” French, a buyer for the company Radio Shack (a successful American chain of electronics stores, owned by Tandy Corp.) on the West Coast, purchased a MITS Altair computer, which he used for inventory control. Don became so fond of his new toy, that began designing his own kit and tried to convince the vice president of manufacturing John Roach, the company to develop and sell such a device. In November 1976, TRS hired the 24 y.o. nerd Steve Leininger, an MS in electrical engineering from Purdue University (1974), then working for the chipmaker National Semiconductor (and a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, just like Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and Lee Felsenstein), to design the machine.

In December 1976 French and Leininger received official approval for their project and in February 1977 they showed their prototype, running a simple tax-accounting program, to Charles David Tandy, the owner of Radio Shack’s parent Tandy Corporation. A funny incident happened during the demonstration, as the big boss was asked to enter a salary and he entered 150000, but the variable for this figure was a 16-bit integer, thus the program crashed miserably. So Mr. Tandy was kindly asked to enter a number up to 32000 in order to get the program working 🙂 It was somewhat confusing for the constructors to make such an underestimation of their boss’ salary (and to miss a validation check for the input), but nevertheless, Tandy gave “OK” to the project, so TRS-80 (“TRS” stood for “Tandy Radio Shack” and the “80” referenced the microprocessor, the Z-80) was announced at a press conference on 3 August (see an advertisement), with first orders shipped in September 1977.

French and Leininger suggested that the company could sell 50000 computers, but more skeptical executives disagreed and suggested 1000 to 3000 per year. Roach persuaded Tandy to agree to build 3500 (the number of Radio Shack stores) so that each store could use a computer for inventory purposes if they did not sell.

Suddenly (for the bosses), in several days over 15000 people called Radio Shack to purchase a TRS-80, paralyzing its switchboard. Still forecasting 3000 sales a year, the company sold over 10000 TRS-80 Model Is in its first one and a half months of sales, and over 200000 during the product’s lifetime. Model I (see its User’s Manual) went on to become the best-selling microcomputer for several years and in 1979, it had the largest available selection of software in the microcomputer market.

So, what made the TRS-80 such a market hit?

1. The price. TRS-80 was announced at 399 USD as a kit, or 599 with a 12″ monitor and a Radio Shack tape recorder as data cassette storage, while its direct rivals, like Commodore PET, was announced at 795 USD, and Apple II was announced at 1298 USD.

2. The massive market invasion. Commodore PET was announced several months earlier but had not yet shipped. Moreover, Radio Shack used its more than 3500 electronics stores to distribute the machine and provided TRS-80 with excellent software and superb documentation and support.

3. TRS-80 was a technically sound machine. It featured a Zilog Z80 processor clocked at 1.77 MHz, 4 KB of RAM, Cassette I/O and video ports, a 12-inch monochrome monitor (64 X 16 text), and the operating system was BASIC in ROM.

The serious users eventually purchased the $299 Expansion Interface (see the attractive external module which sits under the monitor), which offered many improvements over the basic TRS-80 like a Printer port; Floppy disk controller (up to 4 drives); Expansion port; Optional serial port; Up to 32K additional RAM; Two tape drive connectors; Signals for a real-time clock.

The Model I was followed by the TRS 80 model II (a business computer) and model III which had almost the same characteristics as the model I.

It was in the late 1960s, when Charles Arthur Muench Jr (born in 1937 in Tampa, Florida), got the idea to design a color graphics terminal for use in the electric utility industry. Muench had a BSc degree in electrical engineering (1955-1960) at Georgia Tech, an MSEE at the University of Florida (1960-1964), and was a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech (1964-1968). He had already experience with computers as a young engineer while studying at the University of Florida when he worked as the Engineering Dept. Head of IBM 1620 Engineering Computer at Tampa Electric Co., Tampa, FL.

In 1968 Muench founded his first company, Integrated Systems Inc., which manufactured remote alarm and control equipment for the electric utility industry. In his daily work, he was using B/W terminals for test purposes, so he got the idea to design an improved color terminal. Until this time, computer terminals were mechanical Teletype or dumb (text only) electronic devices, using monochrome (black and white, green, or amber) displays. In 1971 Muench sold the company for about one million dollars in stock, and in June 1972 started in his basement in Duluth, Georgia, (together with Terry Hughey, a colleague from his previous company) his second company— Intelligent Systems Corp. (ISC). The initial goal of the new company was to design an intelligent and cheap color CRT (cathode ray tube) based terminal.

Their first product was ready in 1973 and several devices were built, but the production went slow, so the new machine was advertised as late as February 1976 in Byte Magazine, as the Intecolor 8001 A Complete 8 Color intelligent CRT Terminal Kit. It was a $1395 kit to be assembled by the purchaser, featuring a huge 19-inch CRT, and based on Intel 8080 CPU married with additional integrated circuit chips from Texas Instruments. ISC’s new design was a breakthrough in terminal design since it offered an 8-color display with text and graphics capabilities. A phenomenal breakthrough in technology at the time!

In December 1976, the Intecolor terminal was expanded from a computer interface device into a complete stand-alone computer—Compucolor 8001, an expanded, stand-alone micro-computer with a built-in BASIC programming language (After MITS built the Altair 8080 kit and had a Basic Language program for it, Muench reversed engineered the BASIC code and reprogrammed it so that it could run in ROM). He even started a new company, Compucolor Corporation, with the primary design goal to manufacture a low-cost retail color home computer. Compucolor 8001 is often regarded as the “First Desktop Color Graphic Computer”.

The Compucolor 8001 (see the User Manual of Compucolor 8001) is housed in a single cabinet with all CPU and monitor electronics in the same housing, and was powered by Intel 8080 CPU, running at 2MHz. RAM memory was 4K to 32K. The 19-inch color CRT display worked in 2 modes: 80 x 48 text or 192 x 160 graphics (8/8 foreground/background colors). Communication ports are one (or two) RS-232. External storage is a floppy tape (one or two external 8-track, continuous-loop tape drives, running at a 4800 Baud rate, storing up to 1024 KB of data per tape). The floppy tape drive was short-lived due to poor performance, thus by 1978, 8-inch standard Shugart devices were supported (with a formatted capacity of 110 KB each).

Compucolor had up to four modes of operation:
• CRT mode
• Compucolor BASIC mode
• CPU Operating System mode (optional)
• File Control System mode

When initially turned on or reset, Compucolor 8001 boots in CRT Mode, featuring only two-way communication with another computer via the RS-232 serial port (this is how most standard computer terminals of the day operated.) Pressing the keys “ESC”+”W” on the keyboard switches the computer into Compucolor BASIC mode, which allows the user to write, edit and run programs in the Compucolor BASIC programming language.

If so-called option 34 has been installed, pressing keys “ESC”+”P” on the keyboard switches the computer into CPU Operating System mode, which enables the user to manipulate the contents of the system memory, read and write magnetic tapes, and execute programs.

A fourth mode of operation was added to the system in 1978 to facilitate the newly added floppy-drive capabilities. Pressing “ESC”+”D” on the keyboard switches the system into File Control System mode (sort of DOS), to allow the user to access and manipulate the external data storage devices, like the mini-disk drives, to load and save data and programs.

Later Muench developed an updated version of Compucolor 8001, called the Compucolor II. In contrast with Compucolor 8001, which was aimed at the professional market, Compucolor II was marketed as a personal computer.

In 1982, Muench started a company called Colorocs Corp. in Texas to develop a full-color plain paper copier. It took several years to complete the design, which was covered with more than 40 patents and was put into production by the Japanese company Sharp in the late 1980s. Its technology was later used by all color laser printers and by most color copiers.