
The man who made 'the world's first personal computer' - kercker
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34639183
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Animats
1971 was late to be doing that. Take a look at the Viatron, from 1968.[1][2]
$39 a month. This was a respectable computer, with 4K of (core-type) RAM, two
cassette tape drives, keyboard, and CRT. The company had trouble manufacturing
it, because it pushed the limits of what you could do at that price point, but
systems were built and delivered.

[1] [http://www.retrogator.com/2014/07/23/1969-viatron-
system-21-...](http://www.retrogator.com/2014/07/23/1969-viatron-
system-21-computer-original-vintage-print-ad/) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viatron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viatron)

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johansch
It came with a:

"Printing robot – fit over the keyboard of a standard IBM Selectric typewriter
and generated typed output at 12 characters per second."

Interesting solution.

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billforsternz
Interesting story, about a (very) early 8 bit leds plus switches style
computer with a discrete custom CPU. I was amused at the assertion that this
computer (with its 256 bytes of Ram) could "handle word processing". Perhaps
they mean processing one CPU "word" (=byte) at a time ?

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teh_klev
There's a website dedicated to the Kenbak-1:

[http://www.kenbak-1.net/](http://www.kenbak-1.net/)

The history section is written by John Blankenbaker himself:

[http://www.kenbak-1.net/index_files/page0001.htm](http://www.kenbak-1.net/index_files/page0001.htm)

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WalterBright
> In 1970, I had no vision of what the future would bring.

There were other companies as well that had all the pieces in place, but
lacked any sort of vision. They just didn't know what they had. I worked for
one in the 70's, Aph.

That's the ingredient that people like Gates and Jobs brought.

