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The Xerox Alto absolutely FASCINATES me. Everything about it, just... HOW? HOW do you run an OS with a foldered file system and a windowed GUI, with Ethernet networking capabilities, driven with a mouse, all on nothing but 7400-series TTL ICs from 1973?!
The CS1 professor I had last semester actually worked on the Xerox Alto. He would always go on about how frustrating it was that the Xerox execs just didn't understand how innovative the machine was. He was there the day Steve Jobs came to visit. He's still a bit bitter over the fact Steve got most of the "innovative" idea that the Macintosh was applauded for from the Alto, a computer which existed 10 years prior to the Macintosh.
I was a computer tech for Data point back in the 70's and CTC 2200 (and later 5500 and 6600) formed the score of their commercial systems. No way were these a candidate for personal computer use. These ran a sophisticated programming language, could support about 16 async terminals and sync comms across what we would now call the wide area.
The onboard cassette decks (fully servo controlled) were used primarily for diagnostics as the main system was hooked up to what was then some serious hard disk capacity - 20, 40, or even 60mb! Ah, those were the days!!
LGR The 1970s. The decade where the home computer first found a foothold. Although for most of those years, the very idea of a personal computer wasn’t yet fully defined, with many machines appearing strange simply because they were the first of their kind. There were plenty of fascinating steps along the waySo let’s take a look.
These are the 70s computers that stand out for their weirdness in regards to look, usability, and specifications relative to their contemporaries. The CTC Data point 2200. Developed by the Computer Terminal Corporation in 1971, the 2200 was designed to be a cost-efficient terminal compatible with multiple mainframes.
Intel was originally contracted to design the processor for it, but CTC ended up using their own bit-serial processing solution made up of transistor-transistor logic, or TTL, components. emulating mainframe terminal connections through software. Oh, and that original processor CTC asked Intel for?
Well it turned into the legendary 8008 CPU, the basis of x86 architecture used in PCs for decades. The Triumph-Adler TA-1000. Released in 1973 by German document management company Triumph Adler, the TA-1000 is one of several computing systems from the time that aren’t simply desktops but are also the desk itself. The 1000 series was an all-in-one accounting computer solution for small-to-midsize businesses using 8-bit TTL logic, but with a 16-bit address bus.
It had a whopping one kilobyte ROM, two kilobytes of RAM, a built-in assembly language interpreter, a full-size dot matrix printer, and support for CRT displays, compact cassette tape storage, and even hard drive and floppy disk support later on.
The MCM/70. The Micro Computer Machines Model 70 hails from Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and is often considered to be the first portable personal computer, weighing in at 20 pounds. Shipping in Fall of 1974, the fully-loaded MCM/70 came spec’d with a one-line plasma display, and the brand-spanking-new Intel 8008 CPU, running at 0.8 MHz, making it one of the forerunners of personal computers using a microprocessor. It was meant to provide a convenient solution for educators and businesses to use the APL programming language.
And so the fully-loaded Model 70 with 8K of RAM and dual cassette drives was a bargain at just shy of $10,000 Canadian. The SWTPC TV Typewriter. Well here’s a crazy concept. How about instead of printing out results on paper or buying an expensive CRT display, you build the display hardware into the computer and use a standard television? Well that idea is exactly what makes the Southwest Technical Products Corporation TV Typewriter a milestone in personal computing, even if it wasn’t exactly a computer.
It was a kit of super low-cost terminal hardware that let you display 16 lines of 32 uppercase characters on a TV. But it wasn’t long before hobbyists figured out how to integrate this setup, designed by Goodyear Aerospace engineer Don Lancaster, into their home PCs as well, a solution used in many home computers years afterward.
The Xerox Alto. That it’s a wonder that Xerox didn’t dominate the personal computer marketplace in the latter part of the decade. Released in 1973, the Alto was the first computer with an operating environment designed from the ground up to use a graphical user interface.
It also pioneered the what-you-see-is-what-you-get style of document preparation, which made full use of its portrait-orientation CRT display. And of course, driving much of this interaction was a revolutionary device called a mouse, something that wouldn’t go mainstream in other computers until many years later. And all of this was available with 96K of RAM starting at just $40,000. The IASIS ia-7301. Also known as the computer-in-a-book, the ia-7301 is one of many training computers in 1976 based on the Intel 8080 CPU.
In a three-ring binder alongside a 250-page programming course. It was a bit more expensive and fully-featured than other CPU trainers, though, costing $450 for a model with 1K of RAM and ROM. and support for program storage through a tape recorder and even S100 cards through the use of an external expander board, making it decidedly less portable. The ISC Comp color II. Sometimes called the Renaissance Machine, Intelligent Systems Corporation of Norcross, Georgia first released this in 1976.
Not only does it have a colorific keyboard, but it’s the first home computer to house a color display. While its predecessor, the Comp color I, was a professional computer with a color vector monitor, the Two was a home micro with a 13-inch General Electric TV that displayed its 128x128 eight-color graphics. It even featured CD storage, but it’s not what it sounds like.
The Comp color Drive, or CD, was a custom-built 5 1/4-inch floppy drive the let its FCS operating system save up to 51.2 kilobytes on each disk. The APF Imagination Machine. By 1979, game consoles were all the rage, right alongside home computers, and APF Electronics placed their bets internal speaker and five-octave sound chip, and APF OS with its own BASIC language interpreter.
It could even be augmented with RS-232 serial, floppy drives, modems, and extra RAM, making it one of the most expandable consoles ever made, and setting the stage for later machines like the Coleco Adam. And finally. The Seattle Computer Products Gazelle. Making its debut right at the tail end of 1979, the SCP Gazelle is one of the very first computers to sport the Intel 8086 CPU.
It was also physically massive, with support for dual 8-inch 1.25 meg floppy drives, an 8-inch Winchester drive, and 18 S100 expansion boards inside. And if Seattle Computer Products sounds familiar, that might be because it was their own Tim Paterson.
This went on to become 86-DOS, which was infamously purchased by Microsoft for $50,000, owes its very existence to the Gazelle, even if the machine itself is just a footnote in the history of computing. If you enjoyed this episode o LGR, perhaps you’d like to see some of my others. There’s new videos every Monday and Friday, mas well as previous ones that I’ve made on the 80s, 90s and 2000s, so check am out if you’d like.
