![]() ![]() Software took center stage in 1978 when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston produced VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. The young industry exploded in 1977 as Apple introduced the Apple II, a color computer with expansion slots and floppy drive support Radio Shack rolled out the TRS-80 to its stores across the nation Commodore tapped into the pet rock craze with its PET Digital Research released CP/M, the 8-bit operating system that provided the template for MS-DOS and the first ComputerLand franchise store (then Computer Shack) opened. Shugart introduced the 5.25″ floppy drive it would become a key component in the personal computing revolution. ![]() That was also the year that Electric Pencil, the first word processing program, and Adventure, the first text adventure for microcomputers, were released. In 1976, Apple’s two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) designed the Apple I, Apple’s only “kit” computer (you had to add a keyboard, power supply, and enclosure to the assembled motherboard), around the 6502 processor. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC compiler for the Altair and formed Micro-soft. That was also the year Zilog created the Z-80 processor and MOS Technology produced the 6502. (Yes, cloning has been around that long!) Both used the Intel 8080 CPU. The first personal computers, introduced in 1975, came as kits: The MITS Altair 8800, followed by the IMSAI 8080, an Altair clone. Personal computer history doesn’t begin with IBM or Microsoft, although Microsoft was an early participant in the fledgling PC industry. ![]()
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