established - Desktop Video Group

By Tracy Robnett Licklider
A RECOLLECTION:
PERSONAL COMPUTERS IN THE
BOSTON COMPUTER SOCIETY'S
FIRST TEN YEARS
We cruise down memory lane to check out what was hot
and what was not during the past decade
This is a look back at the revolution
in personal computers as
viewed, at least primarily,
through The Boston Computer Society's
general meetings, user groups,
expositions, and publications: how a
ten-year member of The Boston Computer
Society might have seen it, read
about it, and recollected the awesome
experience.
When The Boston Computer Society
first formed in February 1977, personal
computing was primarily the
province of hardware hackers, hobbyists,
and homebrew kit-builders. The
personal computer industry had been
born two years earlier, in January
1975, when Popular Electronics
magazine ran a cover story about the
Altair 8800 personal computer kit by
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry
Systems—or MITS, as it came to be
known. That early ancestor of today's
personal computer came with two
boards and slots for 16 more in an
open chassis. One board held the Intel
8080 processor chip and the other
held the 256 bytes—a mere one-fourth
Apple's first ad was as rudimentary as its
first office space.
of 1K (a "K" equaling 1,024 bytes)—
of memory. The unit's front panel had
toggle switches for input and lights
for output. The Altair sold for about
$300 without a case, and for about
$400 with one. This was the machine
that Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote
the first Microsoft BASIC for—that
first BASIC occupied a whopping 4K
and required an add-on memory
board.
Southwest Technical Products
Corp. was another early leader. In
1975, its first kit cost $395 and
provided a Motorola 6800-based system
with a huge 2K of RAM. In addition,
the SWTPC system could be
connected to a teletype machine for
input and output. Indeed, in the early
days, owning a used teletype machine
as an input/output device was the
sign true of a pioneer power user. The
earliest BCS meeting notices mentioned
that a "TTY" (that is, a teletype)
would be available at the
meetings. By late 1977, Southwest
had boosted its system up to 4K, still
at the $395 kit price, and it offered a
$500 kit for a simple video terminal
that displayed 64 characters per
screen line.
Tracy Robnett Licklider is a contributing editor to Computer Update and a vice president of The Boston Computer
Society.
46 COMPUTER UPDATE