Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Anniversaries

Every technical magazine I pick up lately seems to be editorializing about the 30-year anniversary of personal computing. Because all of us in the embedded-control community use the same technology, I suppose I have an obligation to chime in with my opinion and congratulations too. Well, up to a point, that is.

All these journalists keep pointing to one event—the Popular Electronics article about the Altair 8800 in January 1975—as the start of the revolution. Of course, the fact that Ziff-Davis owned Popular Electronics certainly doesn’t reduce the number of editorials with that historical perspective. Anyone who was actually there at the time knows there was a little more to the timeline. Yes, this article was important, but “personal computers” really started with the 8008 a couple years earlier. (While the 4004 was technically a microprocessor, in my opinion its limited addressing range made it useless as a “personal microcomputer.”) The first real microcomputers were the Micral (built in France) and the Scelbi 8H (built in the U.S.) in 1973. Both used the 8008.

This sensitivity to the history of the PC is completely personal. Ninety-nine percent of early computing initiatives were West Coast-driven, but the other 1% were East Coast-driven—in fact, here in Connecticut. When I heard about Scelbi, I made a beeline to where they were located in Milford, Connecticut (about 60 miles south of where I live). Consequently, my first computer, and the basis of my earliest articles, was a Scelbi 8B. To clarify the history, let me point out one other thing about Scelbi. Nat Wadsworth stopped making Scelbi computers just about the time when the Altair appeared. I remember him being upset that MITS (Altair’s manufacturer) could sell a whole computer for what Intel was quoting to him as the price of 8080 chips. While Scelbi’s immediate transition from hardware to book publishing looked to the world like he had failed as a hardware manufacturer, it wasn’t from lack of talent or initiative. Few people know it, but Nat had a history of poor health and had to choose his business pursuits accordingly.

Finally, if all these columnists are using a magazine article as the starting point of the timeline, then they are missing an earlier article of equal significance (to us computer geeks, anyway). In July 1974, six months before the Popular Electronics article appeared, Radio-Electronics presented Jonathan Titus’s Mark-8 8008-based computer. Two months later, Hal Singer started the Mark-8 Newsletter, one of the very first computer publications, and, coincidentally, the first place you would have seen a construction article by yours truly. ;-)

The starting point of a revolution is always a matter of opinion. I think it was the 8008, while most people in the media point to the 8080. Similarly, the 6800 or 6502 crowd acknowledges Intel, but the first real computer for them was very brand-specific. The business community thinks more in terms of a 20-year than a 30-year anniversary. For them the first real computer was a Pentium, not the 8088. The important thing to realize is that no single event (other than Intel’s first microcomputer chip) is a fixed milestone, so anniversaries are somewhat gray. In fact, by the end of 1975, there were about 50 different processors from the likes of Texas Instruments, RCA, National Semiconductor, Motorola, and others. I hesitate to point to specific dates, but I guess we can all safely agree that it started about then.

Having firsthand experience of all these events does have its downside. I chuckle every time I shake hands with someone at a convention and they say, “I’ve been reading you since BYTE.” Of course they don’t realize that they’ve also just implied, “you old fossil <grin>.” I laugh and typically answer them by saying, “That only means you’ve been doing this as long as I have, and we’re both getting old.”

The good news is that the last 30 years have been very good to me, and I owe my success primarily to the loyalty of my readers. I’ve lamented in a few past editorials that I was sitting at the table when some big computer company deals were being negotiated, and I chose to stay the course doing the things I enjoyed. Quite a few other editors and columnists went off and joined these ventures with various long-term results. I guess I just enjoyed writing and inventing too much back then to risk changing it all to reach for the brass ring.

While most of the tech companies, magazines, and computer brands that were common 25–30 years ago are gone, Circuit Cellar is still here. And I am encouraged daily about our future by your enthusiasm and interest. Soon we will be approaching the length of time that BYTE was a viable publication, and I have every intention of passing that mark by a wide margin. Of course, if someone comes up to me at a convention 30 years from now and says, “I’ve been reading you since BYTE,” someone shoot us both!