Tech Nostalgia: Microcomputer + Software (Premium)

Most are at least passingly familiar with the story of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, BASIC, the MITS Altair, and the dawn of the personal computer era. But with the publication last week of the first of a promised three Gates autobiographies, Source Code: My Beginnings, we are treated to yet another retelling. It occurred to me in reading it that we now have the definitive version of this genesis story between the Gates book and the version told by Paul Allen in his autobiography, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft by Paul Allen.

It's an incredible story, and one I obsessed over as a young man, worried and convinced that I'd missed the PC revolution I was then trying to join. This was the same worry that Gates had had a decade earlier when he and Allen poured over the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which famously featured the "world's first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models" on its cover, the MITS Altair 8800. But that's pretty much where Gates and I diverge. I went on to spend my adult life chronicling the PC era. But Gates--with Allen and MITS founder Ed Roberts--created it.

Gates and Allen didn't know this at the time, but the Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics was a dummy unit, and not the one working hardware prototype that Roberts had created. According to Gates, Roberts shipped the prototype to the publication in New York, but "it never arrived (and was never found)." With the clock ticking--Roberts had pitched the story to the publication, which he co-wrote--he put together an "empty box, a mock-up cobbled together for the photo-shoot." If Gates' memory is correct, the front panel was made of cardboard.

The Altair 8800 was the culmination of a years-long dream--science fiction to most at the time--to bring computing down to human-scale. This required fundamental shifts in technology, size, and cost, not to mention geography. The minicomputer and earlier computing innovations were largely centered on the East coast of the United States, especially the Route 128 corridor outside of Boston that was home to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Data General. But personal computers would be built using microprocessors made in Silicon Valley in northern California on the West Coast. As is so often the case, disruption came from the outside. And where gigantic and expensive minicomputers served the government and the world's biggest businesses, personal computers--called microcomputers originally--would be small, inexpensive, and sold to people.

The hardware had to come first. Semiconductor maker Intel created the world's first microprocessor, the 4-bit 4004, in 1971, the key innovation was that Intel built all the 4004's data processing logic and control capabilities--its central processing unit, or CPU--into a single chip with external RAM (up to 4 KB). Though it came out of a calculator design, the 4004 was a general purpose microprocessor that could be used for other things...