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The Altair, the first home personal computer, was released in 1975. It was a basic machine that actually had to be built from a kit and was severely limited in terms of processing power and memory storage. The success of the Altair is measured by what it inspired:

"The Altair caused a sensation among electronic buffs in the computer industry who wanted their own computers to play with at home, and a mighty computer industry soon began to grow. A young computer hacker from Seattle by the name of William Gates, then a freshman at Harvard, sold the Altair's developers a computer language that would run on their machine and that made it possible to perform many advanced functions. Emboldened by their success with Altair, Gates and a friend founded Microsoft corporation, which has become the world's largest personal computer software company. The Altair also inspired electronics enthusiasts across the country to begin building their own computers. In 1976 in a spare bedroom in Cupertino, California, college dropouts Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak began assembling their own microcomputer, which they dubbed the Apple." (Straubhaar and LaRose 292-293)

Apple and Microsoft became the dominant operating systems to introduce people to PC technology. Their eventual graphical interfaces would make using PCs accessible without learning difficult programming languages. And when the first Apple Macintosh computer was first released in 1984, it included MacPaint, a software program designed by Bill Atkinson.

"Bill Atkinson can be seen as the man who made computing a "right brain" activity. People who had claimed to be totally uninterested by computers fell under the spell of the Macintosh when they played with MacPaint. Being able to create pictures on a computer shifted the whole idea of what computers were for." (Cotton and Oliver 34)

The DIY spirit of the early Altair carries on in a legacy of powerful PC technology that people can use at home. Innovators like Atkinson turned the PC from a faster way to process information into a creative visual medium.

Copyright 2000© Hart Snider