22) The Impact of the Grassroots Computer

  
One of the exhibits at the West-Coast Computer Fair

I first felt the arrival of the PC era when I took part in the "West-Coast Computer Fair" held in San Francisco, USA in April 1977. It was the first computer show to target amateurs and hobbyists, and a crowd of 20,000 people gathered for the two day session (the photo above is of one exhibition at the fair).

Among them, the exhibit that took the main stage was what was called a kit product, and legendary companies that are no longer major today such as MITS, IMSAI, and SWTPC gained their fame here. Many of these products were released as a kit by selling a package with a CPU board (Intel's "8080" or Motorola's "6800") and memory board connected with input / output circuitry, power supply, enclosure, etc. At first glance, it may look like a crude minicomputer but looks can be conceiving.

The most popular exhibit was MITS’ "Altair 8800”. MITS was originally a “garage company”, founded in 1968 and literally worked out of a garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It first sold build-it-yourself calculator kits, but as the price of calculators dropped sharply, the decrease in customers became noticeable and MITS eventually moved to the microcomputer business. Although it took about 40 hours to assemble, the BASIC programming language could be used to create the programs, and the creation of simple applications was possible.

Upon seeing the advertisement for the Altair 8800, Bill Gates presaged, "I really feel a revolution may occur". Together with his friend, Paul Allen, Gates completed a programming language no one had ever seen or experienced and handed it over to MITS. This was the birth of "Visual Basic", which became the standard programming language for personal computers from then on. It was the starting point for Microsoft, one of the largest and most influential companies in today's software market.


| To page top | To Part 2 index |

“Mr. Shimura’s Essays with Historic Photos”    Semiconductor History Museum of Japan
Society of Semiconductor Industry Specialists (SSIS), General Incorporated Association
Shiota Bldg 202, 6-27-10 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo Japan, 160-0022, Tel:81-3-6457-3245 Fax:81-3-6457-3246 E-mail:info@ssis.or.jp Url:http://www.ssis.or.jp
All the contents including the texts and the photos herein published are neither allowed to be reproduced, nor copied without permission of SSIS.
Copyright (C) 2016, SSIS All Rights Reserved