Early computers were large and expensive, but in the 1950s, technologists predicted they would become small enough for everyone to own. The military invested in smaller computers in the late 1960s, leading to the invention of the microprocessor. Minicomputers and the first PCs were released in the 1970s, with the Altair and Apple II becoming popular. IBM released their own desktop, the PC 5150, in 1981. Early PCs had similarities to modern computers, and features such as a graphical user interface and a mouse were introduced in the Xerox Alto. By the early 1980s, PCs had most of the features of modern computers.
Early computers were huge things, often filling entire rooms. Early technologists, however, predicted in the 1950s that within a few decades these behemoths would be small enough to fit on a desk and common enough that everyone would own one. Unlike many other extremely optimistic predictions of the time, this soon proved to be the case.
Until the late 1960s there was simply no way to shrink a computer beyond a certain point, even if there seemed to be a need. In the late 1960s, however, the military began investing heavily in smaller computers for use in fighter aircraft. By 1970 the microprocessor had essentially been invented, drastically reducing the amount of size needed for a computer processor and opening the door to ever smaller computers.
Minicomputers hit the scene a few years before the very first PCs. These were small enough to fit on a desktop, but prohibitively expensive for any normal consumer, making them somewhat different from the modern conception of a PC. Within a few years, however, the technology had declined and the first PCs began to be created in hobbyist basements and garages.
In 1975, the first PCs produced as kits for mass production were released by Altair, a year after a less comprehensive kit list was released as the Mark 8. These kits became enormously popular, with software written for them by two programmers, Paul Allen and Bill Gates and their Micro-Soft company. A year later, Stephen Wozniak and Steven Jobs started their own personal computer business, Apple Computer Company, also offering a kit along the lines of Altair. A year later the company released a pre-assembled version of their computer, the Apple II, which became practically an overnight success.
In 1981, the International Business Machine (IBM) company decided to enter the world of personal computers. With their massive resources and decades of experience building mainframes, they released their own desktop, which they called the PC 5150. This was the first widespread use of the term PC, although it was only one of the first PCs.
These early PCs were a far cry from today’s computers, but they had a surprising number of similarities. The Altair 8800 featured a motherboard with a number of slots for various cards that held things like memory and the CPU. On the front of the computer was a plate with various switches and lights, for inputting binary data directly into the computer and seeing instant feedback. Using these early PCs basically consisted of entering complex programs into the computer by flipping switches in specific sequences.
A few years earlier the Altair 8800 was another early PC, which, while it did not achieve widespread fame, implemented a number of important features that would later impact personal computers as a whole. The Xerox Alto was released in 1972 and had features such as a graphical user interface, the idea of a desktop that held various items, and a mouse to interact with the desktop. Though the Tall eventually faded into relative obscurity, many of the ideas it introduced would later be resurrected in Apple’s computers, and ultimately in PCs as a whole.
In 1977, the first PCs were close to looking like modern PCs, and by the early 1980s they had most of the features, albeit in less aesthetic and reduced capacity. Mice, full keyboards, disk drives and RAM were all found on popular computers such as the Apple Macintosh, Xerox Star and Atari ST. Color was widely introduced at this time, and over the years hardware became more robust, software became more efficient, and the Internet offered widespread connectivity, forever transforming these early PCs into modern machines that dwarf even the most powerful supercomputers of the 1970s.
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