Seaoat: this is for you

I gather from you making that thread after seeing the Steve Jobs movie,  that you're interested in the story of the how the microcomputer came about.

If I've assumed right,  then you share that with me.  I've been obsessed with it for the last 20 years.
And I'll tell you why.  It's because you and I just happened to live at the time a seminal moment in human history was occurring.  And an argument could be made that it will prove to make all earlier seminal moments in human history insignificant in comparison.  And that moment is the advent of the microcomputer (prefaced by the inventions of the transistor and integrated circuit and microprocessor).
And as with all seminal moments in history,  the human personalities who made it all happen are always the most compelling part of the story.

So,  what is this leading to.  Well it's that I found a Vanity Fair article from 2011 that I was unaware of until now.
It was written by Paul Allen,  one of the Fab Four personalites in the story (Gates,  Allen,  Jobs and Wozniak).  So it's coming from the horse's mouth.
And it turns out Allen is not only a technological wizard,  but he's equally adept at telling the story of how it all happened,  at least the part of it he was involved in.   Best eyewitness account I've run across so far.  Really gives you a feel for who these people were and how it happened.  And more than anything it's the most interesting glimpse into who Bill Gates actually is/was than anything else I've read. 
Give it a read.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/paul-allen-201105

Seaoat,

If you read the article you got to this part...


I came out of the terminal sweating and dressed in my professional best, a tan Ultrasuede jacket and tie. Ed Roberts was supposed to pick me up, so I stood there for 10 minutes looking for someone in a business suit. Not far down the entryway to the airport, a pickup truck pulled up and a big, burly, jowly guy—six feet four, maybe 280 pounds—climbed out. He had on jeans and a short-sleeved shirt with a string tie, the first one I’d seen outside of a Western. He came up to me, and in a booming southern accent he asked, “Are you Paul Allen?”


Ed Roberts is referred to by some as "the father of the personal computer".
He created the world's first production microcomputer,  the Altair.

It was learning about his Altair that inspired Gates and Allen to quit college and instead create the operating system for it which was the genesis of making them into eventual living legends. 

When you read Allen's account of him sitting in front of Ed Roberts' Altair for the first time,  and feeding the software into it he and Gates had created,  and not having any confidence that it would actually work which would mean he and Gates both would have at that moment gone by the wayside of history (lol);  this is what the device looks like...





That's one of my Altairs.  I have several.  And the reason I have them is because I'm convinced that,  in the future,  that scene Allen paints for us  with him and Roberts seeing his software operate Robert's computer for the first time,  will have all the significance of the object Alexander Graham Bell was speaking into when he said "Mr. Watson,  come here I want to see you".  Except it will have exponentially more significance.
But since I'll be dead and gone when that happens,  someone else will have the privelege and fun of possessing mine when it does.  lol

But the most remarkable thing about it all is who Ed Roberts was.
Unlike most every other party involved in this whole story,  Roberts was not a product of the west coast and Stanford or Seattle or what would become known as "Silicon Valley".

Ed Roberts grew up on a farm in rural Georgia.  And after his stint at creating the world's first production personal computer,  five years later he went back to rural Georgia to become a country doctor.

So much for what Sal told us in a thread the other day.  That the South has never contributed anything to anything.  lol





 

Bob....I am sorry....never heard of him.

2seaoat wrote:Bob....I am sorry....never heard of him.

Most people know who Gates and Jobs are,  seaoat.  And to a lesser extent Wozniak and Allen.
But for the most part,  when it comes to the name Ed Roberts,  don't feel alone.  He is little known to anyone who isn't familiar with the story of how this all began.

And that's mainly because,  even though in 1974 he created the first of something that has now changed the world in so many ways,   he walked away from it all in 1977 to live a completely different life.
And since the other four individuals decided to stay with it,  and go on to build products which became worldwide household names,  it made them them  become worldwide household names too.

But back then,  when all of these people were collectively giving birth to this thing,  nobody ever heard of any of them. 
And the fact that people still don't know who Roberts was,  does not take anything away from his contribution.  Ask three of the other four (since Jobs can no longer be asked a question) who Ed Roberts was.  And don't worry,  THEY all know who he was.  lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_%28computer_engineer%29

Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, on Friday sent the Wall Street Journal this remembrance of Henry Edward Roberts, who died Thursday at the age of 68. Gates, who argues that Roberts deserves to be called the father of the personal computer, discusses the origins of Roberts’ company, MITS, how Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen came to write software for the early machine, and visiting Roberts in his final days.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/02/bill-gates-remembers-personal-computer-pioneer/

If you ask most people who Robert Noyce was,  seaoat,  they wouldn't have a clue.

And that's even though history will probably credit Noyce with being the single most important individual in this whole story.  And even though,  unlike Roberts, he DID make a career out of inventing stuff which changed the world.

His contribution is unique. 
He worked alongside William Shockley to invent the transistor.
He was the principle founder of Fairchild and is as responsible as anyone for creating the integrated circuit.
AND he founded Intel which invented the microprocessor.

All three advances,  and especially the invention of the microprocessor,  are the key to the whole thing.
The microprocessor is to all this what the filament was to Edison's first light bulb.  The microprocessor is essentially what the personal computer was and still is.  A personal computer is a microprocessor with some related stuff added to make it functional.  It's like what the brain is to a human body.

Without Noyce's contribution,  there would have been no Bill Gates, no Steve Jobs,  no Wozniak and no Allen.
And Carlos Slim would be the richest man in the world,  not Bill Gates.
Not actually.  Because if Noyce hadn't given them all the microprocessor,  there wouldn't be any Carlos Slim either.  Slim made his money in the cellphone business.  And without Noyce's microprocessor there wouldn't be any such thing as a cellphone or a cellphone business.  lol

It isn't much to look at,  seaoat...



And this is the person who gave it to us...



But forget about that robotic arm stored in the safe in the Terminator movie.
Or the much heralded invention of the "warp drive" in that Star Trek movie.
That's all just fiction.  That little thing you see above is what has changed the world forever.
And if that fictional stuff in both of those movies ever does become a reality,  it will happen only because the invention of that little thing preceded all of it.

I just do not share your excitement. When I worked for Borg Warner with IBM mainframes and punch cards and a computer the size of a car, it was not the size of the computer, but the utility of the software. We were working on MRP systems driven by IBM mainframes which were revolutionizing industry with sophisticated platforms of capacity planning, forecasting, which ultimately lead today to the just in time inventory systems which virtually created Wal Mart and Amazon.

The early CPM systems or the early IBM clone battles which dealt with speeding up, increasing storage were all good, but it was the simple word processor and spreadsheet which exploded the use of the personal computer and the software which had utility. Across this landscape there were many from the advent of the main frame to the current smart phones we use, and I saw horrible mistakes made by the largest companies who had already succeeded with mainframes making the conversion to the smaller personal computer because they had an unlimited market in industry and commerce, but when a simple spreadsheet and word processor could increase the productivity of individuals and could be networked a revolution began. To me it is like saying that William Whipple was one of the most important people in the American revolution......yea he signed the declaration of Independence and had a part, but the big players of that revolution are what history notes, and usually rightfully so........

2seaoat wrote:  To me it is like saying that William Whipple was one of the most important people in the American revolution......yea he signed the declaration of Independence and had a part, but the big players of that revolution are what history notes, and usually rightfully so........

Those who lived at the time of the Declaration of Independence did not yet know "what history notes",  seaoat.  "What history would note" had not yet been written.  It would have all been speculation at that time.

To understand this,  all you have to do is go back only about 20 or 30 years. 
At that time,  the name Thomas Edison was a name everyone in the world knew.  "What history noted" at that time had Edison as the be all and end all of invention.

But another name was really only known to science geeks at that time.  Very few in the public were aware of any of the very many contributions this person had made.  Nor did they know much of anything about the relationship between this person and Edison. 
But fast forward only a few years and now a lot more people do know his name.  History is finally "taking note" of the name Nikola Tesla.  But it took a hundred years for that to happen.

And I can point to another name as an example.   Go back only about five years and neither you nor I nor hardly anyone else (outside of some really dedicated science geeks as was the case with Tesla) ever heard of the name Alan Turing.  I think you do know that name now.

Just like those who lived during the Declaration of Independence,  you and I are way too close in time to this now to know what history will write about it.  All we can do now is speculate.
You can speculate that a name you hadn't heard until last night will always be just a "Mr. Whiffle".  I can speculate that the name will become more than that.
Time will tell.

Although I have to be honest,  I do have "a dog in this fight" so I have an inherent bias. 
I own just about every example of the computer hardware Ed Roberts ever sold.  All four versions of the Altair computer including a still unassembled Altair 8800 kit of which I know of only one,  most of the peripherals,  a hard disk drive which is as large as a suitcase and weighs 80 lbs (of which I also know of no other example still in existence although I feel certain there must be others out there),  and my prized possession of all,  a copy of the punched paper tape which contains the BASIC for the Altair,  the very first product Bill Gates ever created and sold.

If I thought Ed Roberts would remain just another "Mr. Whiffle",  I would have unloaded all that junk years ago.  So I hope you prove to be wrong and he becomes more than that.  I'm personally invested in that.  Spent a good portion of my life searching for it and finding it all.  
But since most of it is in storage which has no contents insurance,  hell it could all go up in smoke tomorrow and that would be all she wrote.  lol

Actually if I'm going to tell this story the right way,  I need to correct something in that last post. 
I do know of one other example of the hard disk drive.  I sold it to another collector in 1997 when I first started selling stuff on ebay.
I came across two of them shortly before that in a large find in Tulsa.  Not being wealthy,  I always had to sell some of whatever I found because the proceeds from those sales is what put food on the table and gave me the capital to keep buying. 
But as with so much I've possessed,  I wish I had never needed to sell that.  Because I had no idea at the time how hard it would be to find others.  It proved to be impossible.

This is what we all think of as a hard disk drive for a personal computer today...


But in 1976,  the first hard disk drive made for a personal computer (microprocessor computer) didn't look like that.  It looked like this. 
I put a modern disk drive on top of it (the little black one) to give you some perspective of the size of it... 



It was only after I ran across the two of them that I learned why so few of these were produced.  Two reasons.

One,  the damn thing cost a fortune.  The first production microcomputer was sold mostly to hobbyists.  With those being mainly HAM radio operators (the original electronic geeks).  Most of those could barely afford the high price of the personal computer itself,  let alone any of the peripherals which were made for it.
And as expensive as the computer itelf was at that time,  the hard disk drive was MUCH more expensive than anything else made for it.
The other reason was that nobody had yet figured out how to make much practical use of it.  The very few of these HDD's that were sold were bought by a handful of large real estate agencies and used to store their records,  and with few exceptions that was about it.

It's hard to believe now,  but the first personal computer came with only 256 bytes of RAM.  Not 256 megabytes or even 256 kilobytes.   But 256 bytes.

And to add 4k bytes of RAM to it cost a whopping additonal $256.   And that's 1975 money.  lol
Today you can buy 4 gigabytes of RAM for about ten bucks on ebay.  That's 4 billion bytes of memory as opposed to the 256 total bytes which was supplied with the Altair.  lol

Bob,
I spent almost twenty minutes on a response and it timed out. It was the history of the mainframes and personal computers from a corporate and business perspective, and why I think the xerox cpm systems, the early apple, and the first IBM systems were like the Model T and will have more value than your items, which like my keeping a mainframe IBM or its card reader has a small market, but you are the value expert, I simply wasted a half hour giving a detailed history of the early eighties and pooooooooof gone.....I am quite piszed and will double back on this thread at some other time.

I've only talked to one other person who worked around mainframe computers,  seaoat.  So I'm sorry to learn what happened to what you wrote too.
I've made a couple of lengthy posts disappear too.  And every time I do they can hear me cussing across the street.

Do you remember when you first heard about the microprocessor and how it could miniaturize a computer? 
What I'm told is most people working with mainframes thought it was just a novelty like a hula hoop.  Never believed it would ever rival a "real computer".  lol