Jack Tramiel
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..Read More
Steve Leininger
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..Read More
Dan Bricklin
In the spring of 1978, a Harvard Business School student, Dan Bricklin, came up with the idea for an interactive visible calculator, the program (called VisiCalc), which will be called later the First Killer App of the Computer Era. ricklin certainly was not the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet. The first..Read More
Douglas Fairbairn
In early 1978 some of the greatest technology minds of Xerox Corporation PARC in Palo Alto, California—Adele Goldberg (b. 1945) (the initial idea was her), Douglas Fairbairn (b. 1948) (he became a chief hardware designer), and Lawrence “Larry” Tesler (1945-2020), who used to work on the famous Xerox Alto project..Read More
Barnaby and Rubenstein
In June 1978, Seymour Ivan Rubenstein, director of marketing for IMS Associates Inc. (a California-based computer manufacturer, which designed the IMSAI computer), left the company with $8500 in cash and established his own software company, named MicroPro International Inc, one of the first software companies. Soon he hired another IMSAI..Read More
Jim Westwood
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...Read More
Adam Osborne
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. sborne was a doctor..Read More
Don Estridge
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. BM dominated..Read More
Bill Moggridge
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..Read More
Apple Macintosh (Jef Raskin)
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..Read More