The personal computer

The story

The computer was a giant

Until fifty years ago, a computer was not something you kept at home. It was a cabinet, or a whole room, full of valves and wires, found only in the big computing centres, banks and universities. It cost as much as a mansion and ran on punched cardboard cards. To use it you had to ask permission, queue up and wait for hours to see the result of a program.

Something began to change in 1971, when a small Californian company, Intel, put an entire electronic brain onto a chip the size of a fingernail, the microprocessor. With that little piece of silicon it became possible to build a small, cheaper computer. In 1975 an electronics magazine presented the Altair 8800: it was a kit to assemble, with no screen or keyboard, just a few little lights and some switches, but it was cheap. Thousands of enthusiasts bought it. Two young men, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, wrote a program in the BASIC language for the Altair and founded Microsoft.

The boys in the garage

In California, around Palo Alto, a group of young enthusiasts was meanwhile forming, the “Homebrew Computer Club”, where people swapped ideas and circuits. Among them was a shy and brilliant engineer, Steve Wozniak, who loved building machines with very few components, and his friend Steve Jobs, who had another gift: he understood what ordinary people would want. Together, in 1976, they founded a company called Apple. Their first computer, the Apple I, was sold without a case, as a board to be completed.

1977: three computers for everyone

The real step forward came in 1977, when three ready-to-use machines reached the market, with a keyboard, a screen and a BASIC language for programming. The Apple II, presented in April at a California fair, had a handsome beige plastic case, showed colours on the screen and cost 1,298 dollars in its simplest version. The Commodore PET was a compact machine with keyboard and screen in a single block. Radio Shack's TRS-80 was sold in electronics shops all over the country. For the first time a family could buy a computer the way it bought a washing machine. This was the moment when the “personal computer” was born.

At first home computers were used mostly by people who loved programming, and for playing simple games. The next step came in 1979, with the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, which let accountants and shopkeepers do in a few minutes sums that had once taken days. At that point companies began to buy them too.

IBM and the Macintosh

In 1981 IBM, the biggest computer company in the world, entered the market with its “Personal Computer”, built with parts from other firms, including an operating system written by Microsoft, MS-DOS. Because its circuits could be copied, other companies built compatible machines, and the “PC” became a standard. In 1984 Apple presented the Macintosh, which for the first time brought a graphical interface with icons and a mouse to an affordable, hugely successful computer: instead of typing commands you could click, and this made the computer easy even for people who could not program. The idea of the mouse and windows came from the Xerox laboratories in Palo Alto.

Italy also had an important tradition: Olivetti of Ivrea had presented the Programma 101 in 1965, a desktop calculator regarded as one of the first personal computers in the world, and in 1982 it launched the M20.