In the early 80's nobody really knew what a computer was. Many people probably never saw a computer in person. The only real computers were called mainframe computers and they took up whole rooms in size. They were used by large companies to do basic things like billing. They used a special code called binary that only worked with 1's and 0's. All of the data had to be input into them by long stretches of tape or by flipping switches on the front. It took people to come up with a computer language for the computer to take off. The first language was called Cobal and it was followed by Fortran and Basic.
The computer's next big problem was the size of the computer. Nobody would want anything that took up the size of a large room. It took a company called Intel to develop a microprocessor. Intel was founded by Gordon Moore and they shrunk down the size of the processor by placing millions of transistors on a single chip. Now computers instead of taking up an entire room could fit on a large desk. After this discovery people started to work on how to make a computer that normal people could buy. Ed Roberts was that man. He had a small computer calculator company called MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He came up with the first P.C. and called it the Altair. It was designed as a kit that the buyer had to put together. If you did not do it correctly it did not work. It was a large box that had a front panel on it that had a number of switches on it to input the data. It had no external display and had no other inputs or outputs for anything. If you flipped the right switches in the correct order a light would blink on the display telling you did the process correctly. It needed a basic interpreter to do anything useful on it not requiring the switches.
Enter Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They worked on an interpreter for the Altair. After a successful demonstration to Ed Roberts Gates left Harvard and started a company with Allen called Microsoft. After the basic interpreter was introduced by them people were able to attach terminals to the Altair and start programing programs for it. Many of the programs were simple games or other non-useful things. Nobody really had anything useful for the computer to do other than look nice. It took another man to make that happen.
After the mild success of the Altair other people wanted to make computers as well. Two such men were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They started a computer company out of a garage called Apple and set about to make a better computer. The first one was called the Apple 1 and had no case or terminal. Jobs wanted the computer to be easier for people to buy and use so Wozniak started to work on making it smaller and cheaper. The Apple 2 was introduced two years later at the West Coast Computer Faire run by Jim Warren. They were able to get money from a venture capitalist and made 1,000 Apple 2's. They became a hit and soon became the bells of the ball. They soon had all the money they could every want and had everyone touting there work.
After the release of the Apple 2 many more people started to use a P.C. The main problem with it was it still had no real purpose or application to make you buy one. It took Dan Brinklin a professor at Harvard to come up with it. He and a programmer named Bob Franston came up with a spreadsheet program called Visicalc. It took the work one person could work a whole day on into something so simple a computer could do it in seconds. It changed how businesses ran companies and helped fuel the economic boom of the 80's. The Apple 2 became so popular in allowed Apple to go public in 1980 and made Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak instant millionaires. The P.C. market became a billion dollar industry that Apple had 50 percent of the market.
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