Personal Computer Origins: The Datapoint 2200

As We May Think, The Mother of All Demos, The Xerox Alto; all were breakthroughs in thinking about how to make the computer more personal. They were not, however, the true antecedents of the first ‘personal computers’. Instead, that line of descent runs through something much less visionary, capable or expensive: the humble computer terminal. The terminal can claim this role in three ways. First, it was the computing device that users would most commonly interact with in the decade or so before the personal computer first appeared. Second, some terminals bore a strong physical resemblance to many popular early personal computers. Finally, it was the development of one particular terminal that led to the creation of both the architecture that would power the very first personal computers, and its successor, which would come to dominate in both personal computers and servers. In fact, we can trace the line of descent of that second architecture, now commonly known as x86 , which is stil ... Read full article.