Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by Erickson wallace Page A
Authors: Erickson wallace
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crystals of germanium. Later, silicon became more popular.
William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, left Bell Labs to return home to Palo Alto in the Santa Clara Valley of California to form his own company in the heart of what would become known as the Silicon Valley. Other companies soon hired away the Bell Lab’s star scientists and began turning out semiconductors, including Texas Instruments.
Another technological leap came in the late 1950s, when networks of transistors were etched on a single piece of silicon with thin metallic connectors. These integrated circuits, or chips, became the foundation of all modern electronics.
Computers, meanwhile, got smaller, faster, and more powerful. IBM dominated the playing field in the 1950s. Business writers referred to the other makers of large, mainframe computers as the Seven Dwarfs—RCA, General Electric, Honeywell, Burroughs, NCR, Sperry Univac, and Control Data Corporation. The so-called giant brain computers made by these corporations were big and expensive. They could easily fill several rooms and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A priesthood of technicians was needed to watch over them. The machine had to be pampered with air conditioning. Access was usually through intermediaries. Scientists and engineers wanted a computer they could operate themselves, one that would be smaller, cheaper, and easier to maintain. The development of the semiconductor made possible just such a machine—the minicomputer. When IBM decided not to enter this new market, it left a fertile field of opportunity to be plowed by new computer companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation, which quickly became the leader. DEC established the minicomputer market in 1965 when it introduced its PDP-8 (shorthand for Program Data Processor). It cost $18,500. The price included a teletype. Digital called its machine a small computer.” The press, looking for a sexier name, tagged it the “minicomputer,” after the fashionable miniskirt. “We fought the name for years and finally threw up our hands,” recalled one engineer at Digital. The minicomputer was a highly interactive machine. Instead of feeding punch cards into the machine, the user communicated with the computer via keyboard—a novel idea at the time.
When engineers working at a Santa Clara company known as Intel developed the microprocessor in 1971, the next evolutionary step for the incredible shrinking computer was inevitable. The microchip allowed the entire central processing unit of a computer to be encoded onto a silicon chip no larger than a thumbnail. But this next step would not be taken by large corporations like DEC or IBM with money and expertise. Instead, it would be taken by entrepreneurs and hobbyists with vision and dreams . . . dreams of one day owning their own computer. A personal computer. A pretty radical idea.
One of these hobbyists was a hulking bear of a man by the name of Ed Roberts. He stood about six feet four and weighed nearly 300 pounds. Roberts had enormous energy and an insatiable appetite for food and information. If he became interested in a subject, be it photography or beekeeping, Roberts would read everything he could find in the library on the topic.
Roberts was something of a gadget nut. He loved tinkering with electronic hardware. He had joined the Air Force to learn more about electronics and ended up stationed at Kirtland Field outside Albuquerque. There, he formed a company called Model Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. (Later, the word “Model” would be changed to “Micro. ) At first, Roberts operated MITS out of his garage, selling mail-order model rocket equipment. He also sold radio transmitters for model planes. After Roberts left the service, he started selling electronic equipment. In 1969, he moved MITS out of the garage and into a former Albuquerque restaurant called “The Enchanted Sandwich Shop.” Roberts sunk all of his company’s capital into
William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, left Bell Labs to return home to Palo Alto in the Santa Clara Valley of California to form his own company in the heart of what would become known as the Silicon Valley. Other companies soon hired away the Bell Lab’s star scientists and began turning out semiconductors, including Texas Instruments.
Another technological leap came in the late 1950s, when networks of transistors were etched on a single piece of silicon with thin metallic connectors. These integrated circuits, or chips, became the foundation of all modern electronics.
Computers, meanwhile, got smaller, faster, and more powerful. IBM dominated the playing field in the 1950s. Business writers referred to the other makers of large, mainframe computers as the Seven Dwarfs—RCA, General Electric, Honeywell, Burroughs, NCR, Sperry Univac, and Control Data Corporation. The so-called giant brain computers made by these corporations were big and expensive. They could easily fill several rooms and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A priesthood of technicians was needed to watch over them. The machine had to be pampered with air conditioning. Access was usually through intermediaries. Scientists and engineers wanted a computer they could operate themselves, one that would be smaller, cheaper, and easier to maintain. The development of the semiconductor made possible just such a machine—the minicomputer. When IBM decided not to enter this new market, it left a fertile field of opportunity to be plowed by new computer companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation, which quickly became the leader. DEC established the minicomputer market in 1965 when it introduced its PDP-8 (shorthand for Program Data Processor). It cost $18,500. The price included a teletype. Digital called its machine a small computer.” The press, looking for a sexier name, tagged it the “minicomputer,” after the fashionable miniskirt. “We fought the name for years and finally threw up our hands,” recalled one engineer at Digital. The minicomputer was a highly interactive machine. Instead of feeding punch cards into the machine, the user communicated with the computer via keyboard—a novel idea at the time.
When engineers working at a Santa Clara company known as Intel developed the microprocessor in 1971, the next evolutionary step for the incredible shrinking computer was inevitable. The microchip allowed the entire central processing unit of a computer to be encoded onto a silicon chip no larger than a thumbnail. But this next step would not be taken by large corporations like DEC or IBM with money and expertise. Instead, it would be taken by entrepreneurs and hobbyists with vision and dreams . . . dreams of one day owning their own computer. A personal computer. A pretty radical idea.
One of these hobbyists was a hulking bear of a man by the name of Ed Roberts. He stood about six feet four and weighed nearly 300 pounds. Roberts had enormous energy and an insatiable appetite for food and information. If he became interested in a subject, be it photography or beekeeping, Roberts would read everything he could find in the library on the topic.
Roberts was something of a gadget nut. He loved tinkering with electronic hardware. He had joined the Air Force to learn more about electronics and ended up stationed at Kirtland Field outside Albuquerque. There, he formed a company called Model Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. (Later, the word “Model” would be changed to “Micro. ) At first, Roberts operated MITS out of his garage, selling mail-order model rocket equipment. He also sold radio transmitters for model planes. After Roberts left the service, he started selling electronic equipment. In 1969, he moved MITS out of the garage and into a former Albuquerque restaurant called “The Enchanted Sandwich Shop.” Roberts sunk all of his company’s capital into
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