The Computers That Time Forgot

the UK, you may be more familiar with it. But after I looked into it, I realized there really wasn't quite enough information for me to do a full episode and and have something that actually feels like a full tech Stuff episode, but didn't inspire me to dedicate a few shows to some of the early personal computers out there that competed directly with the big names that eventually went out in the consumer market. So this episode is

going to be about those machines and the stories behind them. Now, today, when you think about personal computers, you probably separate them into two big categories Mac and Windows machines, or maybe you say Max and PCs, but I usually say Windows machines because Honestly, I think max are personal computers. To PC is a term that IBM kind of coined, but we really just talk about those being computers that you would use at home, like one person at a time

uses it. We use a shorthand for the general form factor. There are, of course, other operating systems out there besides mac os and Windows. There are lots of different Linux distributions obviously, but I'm talking about the broad categories that the general public would identify in the market. So you don't tend to run across anything apart from mac os and Windows. For the general public, You power users out there, I'm not I'm not including you in the general public.

Your your laked, okay, so just just just embrace your lateness. Now, those two big names, Mac and PCs grew out of the tumultuous early days of personal computing. The Mac is a descendant of the Apple computer line, the Apple one and then really the Apple too, uh, and then later on of course the Macintosh computer. Windows machines trace their history back to Doss based personal computers such as the

IBM PCs and their numerous clones. And in the next couple of episodes, I'll dive further into the stories behind how Apple struggled to stay relevant before it experienced a real renaissance, and how IBM came about with their personal computer and the clones that helped really define what PCs were.

That will be in the next couple of episodes. But there were many other computers that companies introduced in the late seventies and throughout the eighties, and some of them you've probably heard of if you you may have owned or have had a chance to play with. But I hope you hear about at least a couple that are new to you. So what was the first personal computer. Well that's a matter of some debate, but you could argue somewhat convincingly that it was the micro in computer,

which was created by friend Sui Garnell. It became available in nineteen seventy three. They used an Intel eight zero zero eight microchip as its processor. Now, this chip was an eight bit CPU that could address sixteen kilobytes of memory. Now, this was certainly the first non kit computer that ran off a microprocessor that anyone could buy if you happen to have the one thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars or

so that it cost, and remember that's nineteen seventy three dollars. Well, there was a computer that actually preceded the micro in that some might put forth as a contender for the first personal computer. But it did not run off a microprocessor. It had several chips that served the purpose of a processing unit, and it debuted in nineteen seventy one. However, only fifty of those were ever made, and without a microprocessor, it's hard to compare it against the computers that would

follow it. So I really look at the micro in as maybe the first. Many of the earliest personal computers weren't sold in electronics stores or even as prebuilt machines. You would order a kit. You would get all the parts and some instructions, and then you'd busy yourself in your workspace with various tools and lights to put everything together in the hopes that you got it right. The

Altare eight hundred was such a kit. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems or m I t S MITS was the company responsible for the design and marketing of this early personal computer. MITS had made calculators in the nineteen seventies. The Altar eight eight hundred gave hobbyoists their first real chance to own an actual computer. Up to that point, computers were big and expensive machines that mostly belonged to

research organizations or universities or corporations, not individuals. The Altar kit came with a power supply. It came with a back plane that served as a motherboard, and five cards that would plug into that backplane, including the CPU, which was an Intel eight eight microchip, and there was also a card containing RAM to the tune of two fifty six bytes, not kill a bytes or megabytes, just just bites. And it had a lid that covered the sides and the top of the computer with a front panel that

had switches and lights on it. Those switches were input devices and the light was the output device, as in no display, no printer, little lights that would light up on the front to indicate the results of whatever it was you were programming. So if you wanted to program the earliest version of the ALTA hundred, you'd use the

switches to code in binary. Now, remember a computers read information in zeros and ones, So each switch had a position that represented zero and a second position that represented one, and you'd have to move them into whichever position to represent the value you wanted, then hit another switch to load that set of instructions into the outear's memory before going on to the next line of code. This was,

as you could probably imagine, a somewhat laborious process. I mean, you have to remember that a single character could take an entire byte of information as eight bits, so just to do one character it gets pretty tiresome to do this bit by bit literally, and when you were done, the output you would get would be in the form of those lights flashing up on the panel. And later mits offered kits that included paper tape readers, allowing you to code on tape first and then feed it into

the ALTE hundred rather than moving switches manually. Later still there were kits capable of sending information to a very low resolution screen capable of showing twenty four lines of eight characters, all an upper case, so it was always shouting at you. If you had the patients and the knowledge, you could program these machines to carry out certain tasks, but they fall far short of what we think of

when we consider personal computers today. So rather than go through all of the early machines that relied on switches and lights for input and output. How about we skip ahead of bit and get to a form factor. We tend to associate with personal computers, and by that I mean a computational device that uses a keyboard for input and a display for its primary output. Just know that there were other computers out there that did not have those luxuries that you could go out and buy or order.

Usually it was a mail order that you would do, and you might get a readout from a panel of lights, are printed page from paper tape instead of having a display. Just know that those did exist. I'm not going to go through all of them because it would just sound like a weird catalog from Night teen seventy six. The computers that incorporate keyboards and displays had a much wider appeal.

They seemed less intimidating than their predecessors, more accessible. In other words, the early personal computers were still very much in the world of hobbyists, as very few average consumers had much experience with computers or any idea of what they would do with one if they got one. I do have to mention one thing that Altaire did end up doing. It was the launchpad for a multibillion dollar company because the Altaire inspired two guys named Paul Allen

and Bill Gates to write a basic compiler. It's to compile code for this computer for the Altaire. They founded a company called micro Soft had a hyphen in the middle back in those days, and it was called that because it was micro for micro computers. That was the class of computers. These sort of things were considered, and then Soft obviously for software. In nineteen seventy six, another famous pair of people, this time Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs,

introduced a kit based computer called the Apple one. The kit was pretty much on mother board and you had to go out and purchase this power supply and a keyboard. Not to mention you had to build or or find a case for the thing. You just had sort of the guts of the Apple one. Otherwise, it didn't take the world by storm, but its successor, the Apple two,

definitely did. And then when we were off to the races for home computers, and in the next episode, I will definitely talk more about the Apple two and its effect on personal computers and the marketplace. That same year, at the Altaire convention, engineers demonstrated the very first video display module. This was a memory mapped alpha numeric video display for personal computers. This component is what made it possible to create interactive games and other types of software

for home computers. Short after the debut of the Apple two came the t r S a d TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack. The Tandy Corporation started off as a leather goods company. In fact, there still is a Tandy leather company. But the Tandy Corporation expanded well beyond leather goods, diversifying as it grew, and one of the companies it purchased in nineteen sixty three was Radio Shack. These days, the company that was the Tandy Corporation is now the Radio Shack Corporation. This, by the way, was

not completely unheard of. There was another company that started off doing something that uh it is now is no longer known for. So that would be Nintendo, that started off as a playing card company and of course now

is known as a video game console and title company. Anyway, the Tandy Corporation introduced the TRS eight and nineteen seventy seven the keyboard How's the actual computer, and this would become a form factor common among those early computers where rather than having a separate keyboard and like a CPU tower the way desktops today typically have, the whole thing

was in one big case. You had a keyboard and it was attached physically to a case that that contained the CPU, the memory, the motherboard, all of those components would be inside it, so you would look like just a giant, clunky keyboard. Uh. The t R S A D also came with a separate monochromatic monitor, meaning only one color on their you know, it's just black and white. He also came with a cassette drive. The cassette drivee

was your data storage device. So you would put a cassette into the drive and you could save data to it or read data from it. And when I say a cassette drive, I mean very much like an audio cassette, you know, if you had an old tape player. The cassette drives for these old computers were essentially the same thing. They were just storing the information magnetically on the tape inside the cassette, and the drive would read from it as if it were the same as a music based cassette.

Now you may think, well, that sounds like it might be really hard to locate a specific piece of code that you've saved to that particular cassette, and you'd be right. It's doing it all sequentially, So that takes quite some time to track down a specific bit of code. But that was a relatively inexpensive solution to figure out how you could save media from a computer onto something that's physical.

The computer's microprocessor was from a company called Zilog z I l O G. That company launched in ninety six, and the processor was called the z A D CPU. That's what powered the TRS A D. It was Zlog's first commercial product. It was based off the Intel A D E D processor. One of the co founders of Zilog was at Rico Fagen, who had previously worked for Intel.

The company developed not only the CPU, but also an assimilar based development system for the chip and the chips clock speed, which is the speed that a processor can run operations at, was one point seven seven mega hurts. That then it could essentially run one point seven seven million operations per second. That's oversimplifying, but generally speaking, that's

all you can understand it. It had four kilobytes of RAM, which a later version of that computer would boast up to sixteen kilobytes of RAM, and the operating system for the computer was basic. As in the actual operating system all caps be a S I C Basic. The whole thing cost five and nine cents, and that included the monitor. A year after Tandy debut the home computer, it launched a disk drive for four hundred dollars. At that point, the disk drive costs more than the basic computer system

that that you could buy without the monitors. So if you just went out and bought a computer and you didn't need a monitor, that would cost you four hundred dollars. The disk drive would cost you four dollars. That tells you how expensive those peripherals were in those early days. Tandy also offered an expansion interface for two d ninety nine dollars. It had a printer port to tape drive connectors up to thirty two kilobytes of additional RAM, a

serial port, and more. Tandy reportedly didn't have high hopes for the sales of the TRS eighty. They thought, well, this is an interesting product, but we don't know if there's a market there. The company was surprised when in the first month alone, they sold ten thousand units. Within a year or two, the company offered a slightly more

advanced model. Not everything was smooth sailing for Tandy, however, In nineteen eighty Tandy discontinued the Model one TRS eighty, and it's not the as of sales or because the computer was obsolete at that point. They could have technically kept selling it except for the fact that the f c C had some words for Tandy. They had formed some new rules about computers, and the old design that

Tandy had with the Model one violated those rules. Specifically, the Model one generated a radio frequency emissions in excess of f c C guidelines, meaning if you had a Model one and it happened to be near a radio or a TV set, it could actually cause all sorts of interference. Tandy would make several other computers, including the Model to, the Model three, the Model sixteen, and the

Model one hundred. Later it would introduce the Model For another reason the numbers jump around is that the Model six team in the Model one were departures from the design of the earlier tr S A D computers, but it does show that the conceit of creating a numbering or naming system for your computers and then abandoning it dates all the way back to the earliest day of

personal computers. So while I often will joke about Windows eight jumping straight to Windows ten and skipping Windows nine and all these other sort of like iPhone eight going to iPhone ten, these kind of ideas, it turns out this is not a new thing. It's been around sense the earliest days of personal computers. Eventually, Tandy would produce an IBM compatible computer called the Tandy one thousand. More on that in our IBM clone episode that will be

coming up not too long from now. Tandy would produce more computers in that IBM compatible line and sell them through radio shack stores. But eventually the company sold off its computer division to another entity, a st Computers in the nineteen nineties, and that was that for Tandy. Now, I've got a lot more to say about some of those early computers from various companies, but before I jump into it, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.

Getting back to nineteen seventy seven, that was the same year that the TRS eight Model one came out. Another company was getting into the home computer business at that same time, and that company was Commodore. Now, Commodore had started back in the nineteen fifties as a portable typewriter company. In the nineteen sixties they began to produce adding machines

and later on calculators. And in the nineteen seventies there was an engineer named Chuck Pedal who had worked for a company Commodore had acquired, who convinced the founder of Commodore, Jack Tramiel, that home computers were the next big market, and he even had a design in mind for what would become Commodore's first personal computer. That computer was called the PET two thousand one. According to Commodore, the letters

PET stood for Personal Electronic Transactor. There are those who believe that that's a bit of a fab racation, and that the company came up with the name PET first and then just went back and made it an acronym later. This particular computer had a microprocessor that was designed by

MS Technologies or Most Technologies if you prefer. Commodore had purchased this company, and Pedal, the guy who proposed this whole idea, had been an engineer for Most Technologies, So the chips designation was the six five zero two CPU. This is an incredibly important microprocessor because it was the one that powered lots of early computers, not just the Commodore machines, but then other devices like the Apple two computer, so it was a big deal. The six five O

two CPU, however, was not a superpowerhouse. It was a one mega Hurts processor. Uh. The PET computer had four kilobytes of RAM. Later models would knock that up to eight kilobytes, and it also had a built in screen. So at a casual glance, the PET look like it was one of those big, clunky keyboards I was talking about just a minute ago, with a small monitor perched on top of the case. But in fact it was all a single unit and you didn't wouldn't remove the

monitor from the case. It was all molded together. It also had a built in cassette drive for loading and reading data, and like the TRS e D, it used the Basic operating system. The keyboard for the PET was small, Some would call it a chick lit type of keyboard, so tiny little keys. It made typing on the device really challenging and uncomfortable, and this is typical of some of those early computers, especially the ones that came from

companies that were making calculators. The buttons look more like calculator buttons than keyboard buttons. The PET also had four external expansion ports, allowing users to plug in peripherals, including a disk drive. The PET cost sears, which meant it was more expensive than the TRS eight, and technically the PETS microprocessor was a little less powerful than Tandy's computer.

Commodore first showed off the PET of the nineteen seventy seven Winter Consumer Electronics Show, but this was just one of the computers Commodore would introduce. Another big one was the VIC twenty computer, known as the VIC one thousand one in Japan, VIC stood for Video Interface Chip. It was the first inexpensive color computer available on the consumer market. It cost two d dollars when it was released in January, and it also became the first home computer to sell

one million units. Like the PET, it relied on the most six five zero two processor and it operated at one mega hurts. It had five kilobytes of RAM, which sounds pretty weird because you typically see RAM and units divisible by four, and not all of that RAM was available to the user. The computer reserved one and a half kilobytes of RAM for its routine operations, leaving you

three and a half to play with. The computer consisted of a chunky keyboard case that housed all the computer bits, and you would connect this to a Commodore seventeen O one monitor via a five pen composite video cable. The display could generate sixteen different colors. In addition to the display port, the VIC twenty had ports for an Atari twenty joystick, a rom cartridge port in the back, and

a few other ports for peripherals. Like other computers I've mentioned in this episode, you could get a cassette drive for the VIC twenty. They also offered a floppy drive starting in nineteen eighty two. Commodore was able to keep the price down for the VIC twenty largely because the

company had its own microprocessor manufacturing division. Because it acquired that Most Technologies company I mentioned back in the nineteen seventies, it didn't have to purchase components from other companies, so that helped Commodore set the price point at an extremely attractive competitive figure for those who wanted a personal computer but felt the other options in the market were too expensive. So while Apple had to go and buy their chips

from Commodore, Commodore was producing their own chips. So that was how they were able to keep costs down. And we're not done with Commodore yet. Their next big product was the one that a lot of people fondly remember to this very day, and that would be the Commodore sixty four. It was called the sixty four because it

sported sixty four hole kilobytes of RAM. Like the other computers Commodore release, this one relied on the most sixty ten as at CPU, so slightly better CPU than what it had been using, but still from most technologies, and this one still operated at around one mega hurts of clock speed. The Commodore sixty four had a similar form

factor to the VIC twenty. It looked like a chunky keyboard that you plugged directly into a display, though this time you could actually use a color television as your monitor. The Commodore sixty four would go on to become the best selling computer model of all time, selling more than seventeen million units during its life cycle. The Commodore sixty four is operating system was wrong basic like the VIC twenty, it also had a joystick port. Actually technically it had

to joystick ports. It had a cartridge port and a serial peripheral port. Originally, the external media storage device was the Commodore Data set. That's a cassette based media transfer device, which was known to be very slow. Later Commodore would offer a disk drive system, which was also known for being very slow. Not to mention noisy, and I should mention about those cartridges. So the cartridges are rom based cartridges. That means that everything that's on the cartridge is permanently

part of that cartridge. You can't alter it. If you have a program on that cartridge, you can't overwrite it, you can't change it. All you can do is load the program onto the computer, and then the computer's memory could save certain results, and you could even save information to an external drive like a cassette drive or a disk drive. But the cartridge will always remain the cartridge. It is physically programmed onto the circuit board of the

cartridge itself. This is the same as for cartridge based video game systems like the twenty or the Intellivision or the Clico Vision. Now, the thing about these cartridges is that they take a lot of time and effort to

produce it. I mentioned this in the Naughty Dog episodes where Naughty Dog actually encountered a problem with this where they were launching one of their games, but the company that was manufacturing the cartridges had to give preference to Madden because Madden was definitely going to sell out and Naughty Dog felt like they got burned in the process. Well, that's part of the problem with the cartridges is that it's an actual manufacturing process. You can't just do it anywhere.

You have to do it in a plant where you've set it up to make cartridges and you only have a limited amoun of capacity. You can only produce so many cartridges within x amount of time. So it definitely has its downsides. The upside is that it's pretty fast to load the information if you have designed your computer system properly, and once you have a cartridge, as long as the cartridge remains undamaged and the computer remains undamaged, you're good to go. You just plug it in, you're

ready to launch that program. Getting back to the Commodore sixty four, it also had a sound interface device. It was called the six eight one. You gotta love these different devices that are named by numbers. This three channel component would allow digital mozarts the chance to create computer

generated music. The Commodore sixty four was one of the first home computers to offer such an opportunity where you could create computer generated music using a proper program, because it had the chip in it that would allow you to play it. When the computer went on sale in two it was priced at five dollars. Eventually Commodore was

able to drop that to about one. By that time, the company had streamline manufacturing, so it cost about twenty five dollars to make a Commodore sixty four, so bucks to make one sold for two hundred bucks. Not bad. Technically, Commodore was competing with itself a little bit here, because the VIC twenty computer hit one million sales a few months after the Commodore sixty four launched, so you had two different computer systems on the market at the same time.

Commodore would continue to introduce a few other computers in this line, but also made a move in nineteen four to expand its home computing division by acquiring another company called Amiga. We'll get back to Amiga a little bit later in this episode, but here's a spoiler alert. While Commodore was the number one computer company in the early nineteen eighties, outperforming all others, and the Amiga line became known for their advanced graphics and sound capabilities, none of

that really would ultimately matter. None of it would allow the company to remain competitive against IBM, Compatibles and Apple. The Commodore home computer divisions were either acquired by other companies or were liquidated by the mid nineteen nineties. Okay, now we need to jump back in our timeline a bit.

We followed Commodore for a while, and I know this is a lot of hopping around, but it makes sense to trace certain families of computers while we concentrate on them, as opposed to saying, let's go back to Commodore and now let's go to Tandy, now let's go to etcetera.

So we're gonna jump back to nineteen seventy eight. That's when another company announced that it was going to wade into the personal computer space, and that company had just released a home video game system called the VCS Game Console but better known as the Atari twenty six hundred. Atari introduced to computer models at the same time the four hundred and the eight hundred. The Atari four hundred was another example of a computer that had a keyboard

built into the form fact or. You could connect the computer to a television using an r FTV video output port and cable. There was also a monitor r GB output port if you prefer to use a computer monitor instead of a television. It had a single cartridge slot under a cover on the top of the computer, so he would flip up the top cover. It was on a little hinge and that's where the cartridge port was.

It ran on the proprietary Atari operating system, though you could buy a cartridge that would allow you to run Basic on the computer so that you could do some programming directly onto the Atari four hundred. Now, the four hundred was the low end entry computer that was best suited for playing cartridge based games. In fact, that was

the primary purpose for the four hundred. It was more robust than the AT twenty video game system, and the four hundred shiped originally with eight kilobytes of memory, though later models would upgrade that to sixteen kilobytes. The four hundred was technically expandable because it used the same motherboard as its big brother the eight hundred, but you would need to open up the case to do it, and that was supposed to only be done by a licensed

Atari dealer or repair service. The Yahoo's out there who like to mess with your own computers hands off, said Atari. Not that that ever stops anyone who actually has really determined to make modifications to their machine. The Atari four hundred used the popular six five oh two CPU, the one I mentioned before from most technologies that went into tons of different computers in those early days, and it had a processor speed of one point seven nine Mega hurts.

The keyboard was a membrane style input device that a lot of Atari enthusiasts absolutely hated because they said it was really hard to type on the thing. It cost five hundred dollars on launch. The eight hundred, as you would expect, was more powerful than the four hundred, and it shipped with eight kilobytes of RAM, expandable up to forty eight kilobytes. It also had an r GB and TV video outports, and like the four hundred, it ran

on the Atari operating system. It had two cartridge ports under the top cover, and unlike the four hundred, you could even remove the top cover to get at four expansion slots inside the machine. Both the four hundred and the eight hundred used special purpose coprocessors or sound and graphics that allowed the CPU to focus on other operations, and it boosted the power of both machines, making them some of the most sophisticated home computers in graphics and

sound at that time. Peripherals for the eight hundred included optional floppy disk drives, a dot matrix printer that could print text characters forty wide forty columns wide at about forty characters per second, so it was not the fastest. Uh. There were also additional chips that had onboard processors and you could plug those right into the eight hundred, which would further enhance its processing capabilities. It's kind of like

giving it a temporary brain boost. One thing the Atari eight hundred didn't have was standard ports for peripherals made by companies not called Atari. That changed when Atari introduced the Atari eight fifty interface module, which included standardized cereal ports and a printer port compatible with Centronics printers. Atari

would also offer up a modem peripheral. To use it, you would actually lift a phone off its cradle and I'm just gonna pretend that Tari is going to understand what I'm talking about here, but she's too young to remember these. I'm talking about those wired handsets from the old days, folks, so no cordless phones or anything like that. You would lift the handset off the cradle, you would stretch it over, and you would lay the headset onto

the modem itself. It had a pair of cups that the handsets receiver would slide into, so you would have the the microphone on one side and the speaker on the other side plugged into these cups, and then you would use a cartridge called the Telelink one to operate it. That's that was cutting edge technology back in the early eighties,

late seventies early eighties. Later, Atari would introduce another modem that could plug directly into a phone line and didn't require you to take an existing phone off the hook. You could use either a cassette based drive or a disk drive with the Atari eight hundred. The cassette drive, while less reliable, was also less expensive, and so a lot of folks would opt for that choice. The eight hundred sold for nine dollars and nine five cents when

it first hit store shelves. Atari would go on to produce more computers throughout its history before the company hit real hard times in ninety three, as I have talked about in this show, before the home video game market was collapsing in on itself. It was a terrible crash

due to an over saturation. Among other things, Atari introduced computers called the twelve hundred, six hundred XCEL, the fourteen fifty XL, and the fourteen fifty x L d E, but before three was over, the company had to cancel some of those, including the twelve hundred, due to production and design problems. In four, Jack Tramiel, the guy who had founded Commodore, left Commodore, or some would say was

ousted from Commodore, and bought Atari. He would redirect the company to sort of abandon their higher end systems that they were planning on releasing and concentrate more on the less expensive computer designs intended for the average consumer. Eventually, Atari transition from an eight bit based system to a sixteen bit based computer system, but those machines couldn't really compete with Apple or the IBM clones that were coming

onto the market at that time. Atari did release a line of their own IBM clones, but by then it was a little too too little, too late, and it wasn't enough to save the company. If you want to learn more about that, you should go listen to the episodes that Chuck Bryant and I recorded about Atari a couple of years ago. We dove into great detail about the company and the woes that they suffered. Ultimately, Atari's

shine wore off. The four hundred and eight hundred were successful systems with decent sales, but after those early successes, the machines Atari design began to see lower sales figures. By the nine nineties, the company had become little more than just a brand name and getting back to ninety nine again. The same year of the debut of the A four hundred and the hundred systems was when a company called Texas Instruments introduced its first home computer, which

was the t I slash four. Great names these computers. Texas Instruments had made a name for itself originally as the first producer of commercial silicon transistors. The company also made the first transistor radio in the nineteen fifties, so by the nineteen seventies it was producing scientific calculators. The T I N nine Slash four would become one of the other big contenders in the early home PC space

in the United States. So I'm going to talk all about that in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, So let's talk about the original T I Slash four. And for those of you who love this computer, you're probably thinking, why are you saying it like that over and over again? Just because I want to. It was a powerful computer for its time. While other computers were relying on the most microchip from Commodore UH, the T I nine had

its own proprietary CPU. It was called the t M sred and it ran at three mega hurts, nearly twice as fast as some of the other more powerful home computers on the market at that time. The form factor was similar to those other other early home computers I talked about, so it looked like a big, clunky keyboard. This one had a cartridge port built onto the front of it where you could slide rom cartridges into the

machine to run your programs. Texas Instruments also sold a monitor that was in fact a thirteen inch Zenith color TV that Texas Instruments had modified slightly to make it a working computer monitor, so it wasn't like an off the shelf Zeno of TV. It was slightly changed. When the t I nine launched, you had to buy a monitor with it because there was no way at that

moment to connect it to a regular TV. Texas Instruments was working on an RF adapter, so then you would be able to connect it to a television, but the adapter had not yet received approval from the f c C for those radio frequency emissions. Like some of the other personal computers of the era, the keyboard on the t I nine was in that tiny key chick lit style that made it kind of difficult to type on. Again, more clearly some influence from the Texas Instrument calcul later

days that were you know in that keyboard. It used a Texas Instruments flavor of Basic as its operating system, and booting the computer would allow you to run either an equation calculator whatever program was on the ROM cartridge, or you could load right into Basic programming on the t I was a bit of a frustrating experience. You could program in the Basic computer programming language, which was good, since that was more or less the standard programming language

and home computers at that time. But those programs would run much more slowly on the Texas Instruments computer compared to other computers even with that processor I was talking about. So why is that, Well, it was because the computer also had a proprietary graphics programming language coded onto it, so every program made on the t I nine had to be interpreted by the computer twice, which slowed things down.

You could get a cassette tape external drive, but most of the computers popular our programs were just on cartridges. On the right side of the computer was a system bus, and you could plug different expansion units directly into that system bus. Those expansions include some cool stuff like a speech synthesizer, a thermal printer port, a memory expansion card,

and more. The expansion units were called side cars, and they also had ports on their sides where you could attach additional side cars, So you could attach up to six side cars to the basic computer this way, daisy chaining them together, except each one was a physical device, and most of them were about the width of an external disk drive. So once you've got six of these attached off the side of your computer, you found yourself

with an incredibly wide machine. Also, the way the side cars worked meant that you always had to plug the speech synthesizer into the tin, and then you would plug the memory expansion side car into the speech synthesizer part on its side, and then you could add anything else on to the rest of the chain. Texas Instruments also created a special keyboard overlay system, and that would indicate what the alternate functions for certain keys were when you

ran specific programs. So you could buy a game that would come with an overlay, and you put the overlay on top of your keyboard, and that would let you know which keys would execute specific tasks within the game that you bought. But this was true for any program. If you had a program that wanted to repurpose certain keys for very specific functions, the overlay would help you remember which keys were the ones mapped to those functions.

The Basic computer with monitor cost one thousand, one fifty dollars in nineteen seventy nine, which made it one of the more expensive computers on the market. It achieved modest success, prompting Texas Instruments to revise the approach, and they discontinued the original computer by one and introduced the T I nine slash for a This new version had a brand

new graphics chip and an improved full sized keyboard. It also got rid of the sidecar solution for expansion, so instead you could purchase what was called the peripheral expansion box, which looked like what we would think of as a CPU tower today. It looks like, you know, a big computer case, only its purpose was to house the various expansions you could connect to this computer. The case could

hold up to seven expansion cards. Well technically you can hold eight, but one of those slots was needed for the interface card that allowed the case to communicate with the computer in the first place. The peripheral expansion case cost one thousand, four hundred seventy five dollars, which made it pretty darn expensive because the computer itself, if you got it without a monitor, cost only five dollars. So this expansion set cost almost three times as much as

the actual computer it was expanding. Now, I had one of the computers, not the expansion set, but I had the computer when I was growing up, but I only have some vague memories of it as I was a little tyke at the time when we had the t A, but I do remember seeing down to play a rousing game of Hunt the Wumpus. And yes, that was a real game. If you remember it, give me a shout, because I love to find other people who played it. The version that was for Texas Instruments was different than

the version that you could find on other platforms. On most platforms, it was a text based game, but on the Texas Instruments computer it was actually a graphic based game. So there you go, Hunt the wump Us. Some real computer history, right there. Texas Instruments sold about two and a half million units of this revised home computer, and ultimately they felt that the market for home computers was far too saturated by competitors and that was gonna be

really hard to carve out a profitable space. So Texas Instruments decided that they were gonna end this grand experiment. Now I just have a few more computers to mention. I should point out there were a lot of others that came out around this time, not just the ones I'm going to cover next, but honestly, to cover every single computer that came out, whether it was a one off or the beginning of a small chain of computers

would take several episodes. One of the ones I do want to mention is the one that was requested at the top of this episode. The request was specifically for the Sinclair z x e D also known as the Spectrum, and had a z e D a microprocessor with a three point to five mega hurts clock speed, and it was it used an adapter to send video signals to a user's television. The original model had sixteen kilobytes of RAM. A more advanced version shipped with forty eight kilobytes of RAM.

The operating system was ROM basic and the keyboard computer was very very small. In fact, it didn't have all the standard keys on the keyboard for this first model. You had to use function buttons to designate anything beyond the base a numbers and letters on the keyboard. The computer system could connect to a cassette drive or additional memory modules, and it was originally sold only in the UK, though it did make its way to the United States eventually.

It's very compact. It was a very small computer. It costs just two hundred dollars in the United States when it first became available here. However, there were some concessions that had to be made. You know, you got an inexpensive computer. It was small, didn't take up a lot of space, but it also didn't have any support for color graphics, it didn't have any support for sound, and the keyboard was a membrane style keyboard that was not easy to use and it would wear out relatively quickly.

Sinclair would follow this up with the z X eighty one, which in the US was sold by time X under the name Timex Sinclair one thousand. Time X would go on to release a couple of other computers, mostly Sinclair clones, but would get out of the home computer business by four In two thousand seventeen, a recreated version of the Sinclair z X Spectrum came available after some initial missteps happened not due to technology, but rather over arguments about

who owned the intellectual property. Once those arguments were settled, the initial run of ten thousand recreations of the classic system sold out right away. And this system looks pretty nifty. It's a kind of a black keyboard with a rainbow across part of it. And uh, you know, there's a lot of people with a lot of fond memories of it, just like there are people who have fond memories of the Commodore sixty four. Some people really love those old

spectrum computers. Now. Not too long ago, I did a multiple episode series about the company Xerox, and in that series I talked about the Xerox eight twenty, which was the company's attempt to get into the personal computer business, although they were looking really at office computers, not home computers.

Xerox's Park facility had already created a computer in nineteen seventy three that boasted many of the features consumers would find in state of the art PCs a decade later, like a graphic user interface or gooey and a computer mouse. But Xerox had no plans to market that computer, called the Alto, to the public. They used it pretty much exclusively internally. The Xerox eight twenty was meant to be

the next big thing in small businesses and offices. It sold for the princely sum of two thousand nine dollars. This put it out of reach for most average consumers, but Xerox had high hopes that would become the desktop machine and offices around the world, and that the company would be able to lay claim to that very fertile ground.

But unfortunately, the high price, the relatively slow speed of the machines at two and a half mega hurts processing speed, and the uninspired design of the hardware were all strikes against the eight twenty. Xerox tried again with the eight twenty two, but couldn't really make a dent in what was then IBM's domain. So Xerox got out of the office computer business by five Before I sign off earlier,

I said I'd talked more about Omega computers. Back in the nineteen seventies, a guy named j Minor joined Atari as a developer for the twenty six hundred game console. He also got to work designing the chip set that would find its way into the Atari four hundred and eight hundred line of home computers. Minor left Atari in nineteen seventy nine after having disagreements with the company's new management.

In nineteen eighty two, he joined a project that had been launched by Larry Kaplan, who was another former Atari employee and he was also the founder of Activision. This project was meant to create a new game platform. Kaplan wouldn't stick with it. He would actually leave this project in nineteen eighty two, but it found new life as it became the centerpiece for a company that was calling itself the Amiga Corporation, and uh J. Minor would become

the head engineer of the Amiga Corporation. Then we get into some soap opera level stuff going on, all right, So in nine you had the video game Crash. Atari found itself in a bad way. The company was floundering. Meanwhile, over at Commodore, Jack Tramiel, who was again the founder of Commodore, was effectively ousted from his own company by the board of directors. Tremuel left Commodore and he went on and decided to purchase Atari because Atari was kind

of reeling at that time. Atari, by the way, had loaned half a million dollars to Amiga, and Amiga was in danger of going bankrupt. Amiga had developed some technology that had promised. They had shown off some demonstrations at

various conferences, but they weren't getting any investors. No companies had actually stepped up to buy Amiga's technology, largely because Amiga was sort of positioning this as a gaming platform and the collapse of the video game industry had everyone very nervous, So in order to stay afloat, Amiga took a own from Atari. So Tramiel leaves Commodore, he goes

and purchases Atari. Several of his engineers and developers over at Commodore leave the company and go to joint Tramiel over at Aitari, and that left Commodore without a solid plan for its computer business. So you had this company, Commodore, that had previously been the most powerful home computer company in the world. In fact, only a couple of years previously, the Commodore sixty four was the top selling computer in the world seventeen million units. That's amazing. But now they

just had their talent rated. Effectively, they all defected, so they didn't really have a game plan for where they were going to go next. They decided that maybe what they should do is acquire Amiga. So this is a weird shuffling that you've you've got here, You've got Atari that lends Amiga five thousand dollars. Atari starts to wobble. The founder of Commodore leaves Commodore, sweeps in buys Atari,

bringing along some top talent with him. Commodore reaches out to buy Amiga and as part of this transaction pays off the Atari loan. J Minor got to work on the first Amiga computer now that the company was safely in the embrace of Commodore and the computer would not be ready until when it launched. It was called the Amigo one thousand. It had a Motorola sixty eight thousand CPU that ran at seven point one four mega hurts. It shipped with two hundred fifty six kilobytes of data,

expandable up to eight megabytes. It could show up to four thousand, ninety six colors, granted you had to set the resolution of the display to three twenty by two hundred. It had a thirty two bit multitasking graphic user interface. It had four channel stereo sound. You could even show multiple screens at different resolutions on the same monitor at the same time. It was a killer computer if you wanted to play games. It's tex specs left other machines

in the dust, specifically when gaming was considered. It was also a little expensive. The Amiga one thousand with monitor would set you back one thousand, seven nine dollars. The Amiga had no internal expansion slots, but you could plug expansions into various ports on the system bus. Commodore would release multiple computers in the Amiga line, but the problem was they weren't compatible with MS DOSS, which meant they

just weren't readily adopted. IBM had already managed to really insinuate itself into that world and people were starting to kind of solidify behind IBM and MS DOSS, So Amiga

was left out from that. Even though you could argue that the technical specs and the performance of the Amiga was far better than what you would get with any comparable IBM machine or IBM clone, it wasn't compatible with all the software and customers were kind of going where the software was, so for Amiga it just would eventually kind of fizzle out. It was sold off during the time where a Commodore was going out of business back

in the mid nineteen nineties. So what was it about Apple and IBM computers that allowed those versions to survive when all these other computers eventually faded away. Well, I'm going to cover that in the next couple of episodes. With Apple first, we're going to talk about them and how they were able to weather the storms of the late seventies early eighties home computer boom and how they

survived to the company that they are today. And we'll also talk about IBM and the decision that IBM made that ended up costing the company quite a bit because they were being very nice and that niceness ended up costing them. The home PC market, it gets pretty complicated, but it has all to do with clones. Will talk about clones a lot in the next two episodes, so tune in to hear about that and hear about how

the home PC market turned into what it is today. Uh. If you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it is a specific technology, a company, a personality and tech anything like that, let me know. Send me a message, Send it to me via email. The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is tech Stuff at hs W. Remember we've got an Instagram account you can follow, so

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