The purpose of this research is to examine the rise and development of the personal computer (PC), social context in which the PC achieved prominence and the people and companies that made its emergence possible, as well as three consequences of its appearance and spread in the culture.
Although the raw technology for personal computers had been known to high-technology specialists for decades, and large-scale mainframe computers were in fairly wide use by industry and government by the 1960s, the real onset of the PC industry can be dated to the mid-1970s, when Intel Corporation put the 8080 8-bit microprocessor on the market. It was at that time, too, that Bill Gates and his partners were refining the BASIC computer language for use on the Altair personal-computer kit that was being marketed through the magazine Popular Electronics. They also wrote versions of BASIC for "other microcomputers as they came to market, leveraging their core technology" (Cringely, 1996, p. 55). That practice of leveraging persisted through the 1970s, by which time Microsoft Corporation had been formed by Gates and Paul Allen.
During the 1980s, Microsoft developed the MS/DOS operating system for IBM-PCs; IBM's hardware became the industry standard for DOS (and later Windows) software (Davis, 1986). The IBM/DOS platform ran 8-, 16-, and 32-bit processors in succession, as well as the Pentium and other high-speed processor configurations, and remains the most widely used and imitated PC structure.
Parallel with development of BASIC by Gates and partners was the development of an operating system known as CP/M by Gary Kildall. CP/M was a PC-derivative of a minicomputer setup running an operating system called TOPS-20. It was the first operating system that actually worked on the Intel 8080 microprocessor, under the hardware name Imsai. The system went into thousands of PCs under other names as well, and out of that dynamic grew Digital Research. Howe...