The first Apple computers shipped without a case, keyboard or power supply
When a shop owner ordered 50 Apple I computers in 1976, he insisted they arrive assembled, not as a kit for solder-wielding hobbyists. What Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak delivered was a finished circuit board with about 30 chips, but still no case, keyboard or power supply. The personal computer was barely personal yet.
Personal computers are machines meant to be run directly by one ordinary user, rather than shared through time-sharing or tended by technicians. Some early machines already came close. ENIAC, working from 1946, could be operated by one highly trained person, and small interactive computers such as the LGP-30 of 1956 served laboratories. By the early 1970s researchers could sit alone at a computer for hours, but nobody could afford to own one.
Chips changed that. Robert Noyce's silicon integrated circuit and the MOS transistor of Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng both date from 1959, and in 1971 Federico Faggin used silicon-gate MOS technology to put an entire processor on one chip, the Intel 4004. In 1968 Douglas Engelbart's so-called Mother of All Demos had previewed the mouse, hypertext, email and video calls, though it depended on a costly shared mainframe. Xerox's Alto of 1973 introduced a graphical interface that later inspired both the Macintosh and Windows, but it was never sold because its parts cost too much.
Claims to be first are crowded. The Micral N, built from 1972 around an Intel 8008, was the earliest commercial microcomputer that did not come as a kit, and a few hundred were sold. IBM's 1973 SCAMP prototype, which PC Magazine later called the world's first personal computer, now sits in the Smithsonian. Many give the title to the 1974 Altair 8800, the first commercial success, whose first programming language, Altair BASIC, was Microsoft's founding product. Then in 1977 came the Commodore PET, the Apple II and Tandy's TRS-80, the so-called trinity that brought ready-assembled machines to a mass market and shifted attention from hardware to software.
From the early 1990s, Microsoft operating systems running on Intel's x86 chips, nicknamed Wintel, dominated the market, and PC came to mean a Windows machine as opposed to a Mac. That x86 design traces back to the processor of the 1970 Datapoint 2200. Not everyone found the transition easy: a 1995 CBS report joked that for many newcomers PC stood for Pain and Confusion.
Source: Personal computer
