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.
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