THE MICRO COMPUTER

The first computers made were big. Room size big. They were also very expensive and pretty slow and you had to be a specialist to program them. So the president of IBM, Thomas Watson, can be forgiven for his infamous quote from 1943: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

A huge first computer

a huge first computer

The first popular micro computer

A micro computer is defined as a computer with a single central processing unit (CPU) as a microprocessor.
Featured on the cover of the magazine Popular Electronics in January 1975 was the MITS Altair 8800 and this started the new era of the micro computer. Limited as it were, it was still widely popular - though mainly amongst geeks. The MITS could be purchased as a DIY project, and when is was assembled it had eight switches that could be used to program it. Each switch represented one bit in the memory register and instructions were made one byte at a time.

As the micro computers developed and became more advanced, they would have more memory and a build in keyboard. They would also come with some sort of text based interface – typically a specific flavour of a programming language like Basic or something similar.

MITS Altair 8800 article

article about the diy MITS Altair

Within the next couple of years a myriad of micro computers hit the marked. They were now becoming known as home computers and they include machines from well known brands like Acorn, Amstrad, Atari, Commodore, Texas and Sinclair. Two brands ended up stealing the scene - and the market: IBM and Apple.