Personal Computing

Personal computing was born of the encounter between the microprocessor and a Californian counter-cultural ethos committed to decentralising computing power. In 1971, Intel released the 4004 designed by Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin and Stanley Mazor, the first complete microprocessor on a single chip. The 8008 (1972) and 8080 (1974) followed, enabling Ed Roberts to launch in 1975 the Altair 8800 as a kit — a founding machine for which Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter and founded Microsoft the same year. The Homebrew Computer Club, meeting in Menlo Park from March 1975, brought together the enlightened hobbyists who would carry the revolution. In 1977, three consumer machines inaugurated the personal era: the Commodore PET, the Radio Shack TRS-80 and, above all, the Apple II designed by Steve Wozniak and commercialised by Steve Jobs. The arrival of the VisiCalc spreadsheet in 1979 turned the personal computer into an essential professional tool. IBM responded in 1981 with the IBM PC running MS-DOS, setting an open-architecture standard that would yield decades of compatible clones. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh, the first commercial success of a mainstream graphical interface directly inspired by the Xerox Alto. Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985 and, more decisively, Windows 3.0 in 1990, which imposed the GUI on the PC. On the free-software side, Richard Stallman founded the GNU project in 1983, while the 8- and 16-bit home machines (ZX Spectrum 1982, Commodore 64 1982, Amiga 1000 1985, Atari ST 1985) democratised programming for an entire generation. During this period the computer left the data centre for the office, and then the home. It imposed the lasting paradigms of WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer), of the proprietary operating system, of boxed software and of the Intel processor + Windows pairing. By the late 1980s, the convergence of networked PCs, consumer modems and the TCP/IP protocol would prepare the irruption of the Internet into civilian life during the following decade.