The personal computer industry began in 1971 with the introduction of the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004.
But the industry really took off right after the January 1975 issue of Ziff-Davis' Popular Electronics magazine, which announced the "Project Success" Altair 8800, from MITS, cited by the magazine as "the first minicomputer kit in the world to compete with the models commercials". By today's standards, this starter kit developed by Ed Roberts, who led MITS, a small electronics company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was pretty limited. It was based on Intel's 8080 microprocessor and had only 256 bytes of memory.
At a very affordable price, US7, the Altair was the first personal computer available on a large scale to the general public. It attracted hundreds of requests from electronics enthusiasts. One of those who noticed this embryonic event was a young Honeywell programmer named Paul Allen, who showed the Popular Electronics article to an old friend, a Harvard freshman named Bill Gates. The duo quickly joined forces to craft a version of BASIC for Altair. Before long, Allen went to work for MITS as its director of software, and then Gates left. Harvard to join Allen in Albuquerque and start a company that would later be known as Microsoft. (Another former MITS employee, David Bunnell, would later publish a variety of computer-specialized magazines, including PC Magazine.)
With the introduction of Altair, the personal computer industry took off. 1977 saw an explosion of interest in personal computers and the introduction of a long succession of machines - Commodore PET, Radio Shack TRS-80 and - most important of all - the Apple II, by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.
The Apple II quickly developed its own standard, with invaluable help from Wozniak's 1978 design of an economical floppy disk drive and - most importantly - VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. With the introduction of VisiCalc, business people suddenly found a reason to use personal computers. This was no longer a world of leisure.
The rest of the decade saw several different projects pass, as company after company tried to define a unique combination of power, price, performance and features. Machines introduced in this period ranged from offerings for home users and hobbyists - such as the Commodore's Vic-20 and 64, to 400 series from Atari and TI-99 from Texas Instruments - even the most commercial-oriented devices such as a series of machines from Tandy/Radio Shack and several projects running Digital Research's CP/M operating system, designed by the pioneer of personal computing, Gary Kidall.
Due to the rapid growth of the market and the fact that top-down compatibility didn't mean much at first, the period was marked by unprecedented hardware creativity. Of course, the software business has also started to grow, with the rapid appearance of a variety of programming languages, games and even commercial applications like the popular Word Processor WordStar.
Before long, no one saw personal computers as toys or hobby anymore, but as personal productivity devices with visible commercial applications. The era of the personal computer was established, once and for all. And IBM, which had long dominated the field of mainframe computers, wanted its share of the pie.
IBM in 1980, far more than IBM today, was not a company used to fast-changing markets and end-user sales. It sold commercial machines - mainly computers and typewriters - to large companies, using its technology and relying excessively on a well-structured sales and service system for large bills.
The PC business needed something different. This new market was changing with great speed and a newcomer would have to move fast. In addition, it would have to split between individual users and companies, even if the main goal was to continue to sell commercial computers. This is what William C. said. Lowe, laboratory director for IBM's Entry Level Systems unit in Boca Raton, Florida, to IBM Corporate Management Committee, which included IBM President John Open in July 1980.
Lowe told the committee that IBM needed to build a personal computer and that there was market space not yet channeled by Apple and other companies. However, he told the committee, it could not be built into the standard IBM culture at that time. So they gave him the freedom to recruit 12 engineers to form a task force, called Project Chess, and build a computer prototype.
The following month, Lowe's task force had several meetings with other representatives of the young woman. industry and made some important decisions that would later affect the PC arena by next years. One of these decisions was to market the IBM personal computer through retail stores, in addition to offering it through IBM's own commissioned sales team. But perhaps the company's most important decision was to use an "open architecture": selecting the building blocks and operating system from sources outside IBM. This was a big change for IBM which, up to this point, had been designing all the major components of its machines.
In August, Lowe and two other engineers, Bill Sydnes and Lew Eggebrecht, demonstrated a prototype to the Committee on Corporate Management, which approved the basic plan and gave Project Chess the OK to create a personal computer called Acorn.
To lead the group that would build it, Lowe turned to Philip D. "Don" Estridge, another former IBM employee who worked in Boca Raton's lab. Estridge recruited a team that included Sydnes, lead engineering, Dan Wilkie, responsible for manufacturing, and H. L. "Sparky" Sparks to sales leadership.
One of the first decisions to be made was the choice of the Processor that would power the PC. The task force had decided that it wanted a 16-bit computer, as it would be more powerful and easier to program than existing eight-bit machines. Intel had recently announced the 16-bit 8086, but Sydnes later said that IBM was concerned that the 8086 was too powerful and would compete too much with other IBM items.
So they opted for the 8088, a version of the chip with an eight-bit bus and a 16-bit internal structure. This eight-bit technology offered the added benefit of working with existing eight-bit expansion boards and devices. relatively inexpensive eight bits, like controller chips, which could thus be easily and inexpensively incorporated into the new machine.
Another important decision was the software. In July, members of the task force paid a visit to Digital Research to ask the company to port its CP/M operating system to the 8086 architecture. Legend has it that its founder, Gary Kildall, was flying his plane at that time. Whatever the reason, Kildall's wife, Dorothy, and DR's lawyers did not sign the exclusivity agreement presented by IBM. So the IBM team left, heading north to Seattle to meet with Microsoft, from whom they hoped to get a version of BASIC.
Microsott executives signed a contract with IBM to supply BASIC, and soon Bill Gates and the company were discussing not just BASIC but an operating system as well. Immediately thereafter, Microsoft acquired an 8086 operating system that went by several names, including "Quirk and Dirty DOS", or QDOS, written by Tim Patterson of a company called Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft enhanced this operating system by licensing it to IBM, which marketed it as PC-DOS.
There followed, then, feverish months of uniting hardware and software, until, on a Wednesday, the 12th of August 1981, almost a year after the OK given to Project Chess, IBM introduced the IBM Personal Computer. Initially marketed by Computerland stores and Sears Commercial Centers, that first PC - with an 8088 CPU, 64Kb of RAM and a 160Kb single-faced floppy disk drive - it had a list price of US.880.
When the IBM PC was released in October, Estridge—then considered the father of the PC—and his team were an example of success.
Source: The Introduction of Computers by Raimundo G. - http://www.di.ufpb.br/raimundo/HistoriaDoPC/PChist1.htm
Computing - Brazil School
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/informatica/introducao-dos-computadores.htm