History of computing hardware (1960s-present)
The
history of computing hardware starting in the 1960s begins with the development of the
integrated circuit (IC), which was later used for the first computer kits and
home computers in the 1970s with the
MITS Altair,
Apple II and
Commodore PET and eventually for personal and business computers such as the
IBM PC and
Apple Macintosh in the 1980s. Throughout the mid 1970s to late 1980s, hundreds of computer hardware companies were founded, most out of business. Many companies did however survive, such as
Dell and
Apple Computer. From 1977 until 1983, Apple dominated the personal computer market.
By the mid 1990s, IBM PC cloners such as
Compaq,
HP,
Gateway and Dell had dominated the market, using
Microsoft Windows as the operating system of choice, making the Macintosh a minority in the market. Today, Dell is the largest manufacturer of personal computers in the world.
The mass increase in the use of computers accelerated with 'Third Generation' computers. These generally relied on
Jack St. Claire Kilby's invention of the
integrated circuit (or microchip), though the
IBM System/360 used
hybrid circuits.
The first integrated circuit was produced in September
1958 but computers using them didn't begin to appear until
1963. Some of their early uses were in
embedded systems, notably used by
NASA for the
Apollo Guidance Computer and by the military in the
LGM-30 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile.
While large '
mainframes' such as the System/360 increased
storage and processing capabilities, the integrated circuit also allowed the development of much smaller computers. The
minicomputer was a significant innovation in the 1960s and 1970s. It brought computing power to more people, not only through more convenient physical size but also through broadening the computer vendor field.
Digital Equipment Corporation became the number two computer company behind IBM with their popular
PDP and
VAX computer systems. Smaller, affordable hardware also brought about the development of important new
operating systems like
Unix.
Large scale integration of circuits led to the development of very small processing units, an early example of this is the processor used for analyzing flight data in the
US Navy's
F14A Tomcat fighter jet. This processor was developed by Steve Geller, Ray Holt and a team from
AiResearch and
American Microsystems.
In 1966,
Hewlett-Packard entered the general purpose computer business with its
HP-2116, offering a computational power formerly found only in much larger computers. It supported a wide variety of languages, among them
BASIC,
ALGOL, and
FORTRAN.
In
1969,
Data General shipped a total of 50,000 Novas at $8000 each. The
Nova was one of the first
16-bit minicomputers and led the way toward
word lengths that were multiples of the
8-bit byte. It was first to employ medium-scale integration (MSI) circuits from
Fairchild Semiconductor, with subsequent models using large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits. Also notable was that the entire
central processor was contained on one 15-inch
printed circuit board.
In 1973, the
TV Typewriter, designed by
Don Lancaster, provided the first display of alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. It used $120 worth of electronics components, as outlined in the September 1973 issue of Radio Electronics magazine. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store 512 characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A 90-minute cassette tape provided supplementary storage for about 100 pages of text. His design used minimalistic hardware to generate the timing of the various signals needed to create the TV signal.
Clive Sinclair later used the same approach in his legendary
Sinclair ZX80.
The basis of the fourth generation was
Marcian Hoff's invention of the
microprocessor.
Unlike Third generation
minicomputers, which were essentially scaled down versions of
mainframe computers, the fourth generation's origins are fundamentally different. Microprocessor based computers were originally very limited in their computational ability and speed, and were in no way an attempt to downsize the minicomputer. They were addressing an entirely different market.
Although processing power and storage capacities have increased beyond all recognition since the 1970s the underlying technology of LSI (large scale integration) or
VLSI (very large scale integration) microchips has remained basically the same, so it is widely regarded that most of today's computers still belong to the fourth generation.
Microprocessors
On
November 15 1971 Intel released the world's first commercial microprocessor, the
4004. It was developed for a Japanese calculator company,
Busicom, as an alternative to hardwired circuitry, reaching the market in
1971. Fourth generation computers developed, using a microprocessor to locate much of the computer's processing abilities on a single (small) chip. Coupled with one of Intel's other products - the
RAM chip, based on an invention by
Bob Dennard of IBM, (kilobits of memory on a single chip) - the microprocessor allowed fourth generation computers to be even smaller and faster than ever before. The 4004 was only capable of 60,000 instructions per second, but later processors (such as the
Intel 8086 upon which all of the IBM
PC and compatibles are based) brought ever increasing speed and power to the computers.
Supercomputers
At the other end of the computing spectrum from the
microcomputers,
supercomputers of the era also harnessed integrated circuit technology and were immensely powerful. In
1976 the
Cray-1 was developed by
Seymour Cray, who left Control Data in 1972 to form his own company. This machine was known as much for its horseshoe-shaped design as it was for being the first supercomputer to make
vector processing practical. Vector processing, which uses a single instruction to perform the same operation on many numbers, has been a fundamental supercomputer processing style ever since. The Cray-1 could calculate 150 million floating point operations per second. 85 were shipped at a cost of $5 million each. The Cray-1 had a
CPU that was mostly constructed of
ECL SSI/MSI circuits.
Xerox PARC
The
Xerox Alto, developed at
Xerox PARC in
1973, was the first
personal computer and the first computer to use a
mouse, the desktop metaphor, and a
graphical user interface (GUI), concepts first introduced by
Douglas Engelbart while at
SRI International.
While its use was limited to the engineers at Xerox PARC,
The Alto had features years ahead of its time and would later serve, along with the
Xerox Star, as a model for The
Apple Macintosh.
MITS Altair 8800
The
MITS Altair, the first
home computer, was featured on the cover of
Popular Electronics magazine in January
1975. It was the world's first mass-produced personal computer kit, as well as the first computer to use an
Intel 8080 processor. It was a commercial success with 10,000 Altairs being shipped. The Altair also inspired the software development efforts of
Paul Allen and his high school friend
Bill Gates who developed a BASIC
interpreter for the Altair, and then formed
Microsoft.
The MITS Altair 8800 effectively created a new industry of home computers and computer kits, with many others following, such as a wave of small business computers in the late 1970s based on the Intel 8080,
Zilog Z80 and
Intel 8085 microprocessor chips. Most ran the
CP/M-80 operating system developed by
Gary Kildall at
Digital Research. CP/M-80 was the first popular microcomputer operating system to be used by many different hardware vendors, and many ground-breaking software packages were written for it, such as
WordStar and
dBase II.
Many hobbyists during the mid 1970s designed their own systems, with various degrees of success, and sometimes banded together to ease the job. Out of these house meetings the
Homebrew Computer Club developed, where hobbyists met to talk about what they had done, exchange schematics and software and show off their systems. Many people built or assembled their own computers as per published designs. For example, many thousands of people built the
Galaksija home computer later in the early 80s.
Apple Computer
|
The Apple II microcomputer dominated the market from 1977 until 1983. |
Based on the business and technical savvy of
Steve Jobs and
Steve Wozniak, and the marketing expertise of
Mike Markkula, Apple dominated the personal computer industry from
1977 to
1983. Wozniak (Woz), a regular visitor to Homebrew Computer Club meetings, designed the
Apple I, a single-board computer and first demonstrated it there. With specifications in hand and an order for 100 machines at US$500 each from the Byte Shop, Woz and his friend Steve Jobs, founded
Apple Computer.
About 200 of the machines sold before the company announced the Apple II as a complete computer. The
Apple II was one of three personal computers launched in
1977. Despite its higher price, it quickly pulled away from the other two, the
TRS-80 and
Commodore PET, to become the leader in the late 70s and to become the symbol of the personal computing phenomenon; due to its color graphics, high build quality, open
architecture, and its
floppy disk drive and interface, the
Disk II.
Another key to success for Apple was software, the Apple II was chosen by programmers
Daniel Bricklin and Bob Frankston to be the desktop platform for the first "
killer app" of the business world — the
VisiCalc spreadsheet program. VisiCalc, as the first spreadsheet, created a business market for the Apple II; and the corporate presence attracted many software and hardware developers to the machine.
More than 2 million Apple II's were shipped at a price of $970 for the 4KB model by the end of its production.
Commodore and others
|
The Commodore PET, circa 1977. |
The
Commodore PET (
Personal
Electronic
Transactor) – the first of several personal computers released in 1977 – came fully assembled and was straightforward to operate, with either 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, a built-in cassette drive, and a calculator "
chiclet keyboard". It was followed by the
VIC-20, which had a full typewriter keyboard, color and sound, 3.5K of user accessible memory, and a much lower price than Apple's offerings.
The best-selling personal computer of all time was released by
Commodore International in
1982: the
Commodore 64 (C64). Magazines became available which contained the code for various utilities and games. All of these machines used the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor
CPU;
MOS Technology, Inc. was owned by Commodore. The C64 and Commodore's other 8-bit computers were followed in 1985 by the more powerful
Commodore Amiga 1000, built around the
Motorola 68000 CPU.
Many other home computers came onto the market, including the
Atari 8-bit family, the
Sinclair ZX80 and successors
ZX81 and
ZX Spectrum, the
TI 99/4A, the
BBC Micro, the
Amstrad/Schneider CPC 464/CPC 646/CPC 6128 family, the Oric Atmos, the
Coleco Adam, the SWTPC 6800 and 6809 machines, the
Tandy Color Computer/
Dragon 32/64, the Exidy Sorcerer, and the Japanese
MSX range.
Of these, the Sinclair and BBC models were very influential in the
British market, with the former introduced at an exceptional low cost (under £100), and the latter developed to meet the
BBC and UK government's goals of introducing computer literacy to all schools and elsewhere in education and becoming wildly popular in the home.
The IBM PC
In
1980,
IBM decided to enter the personal computer market in response to the success of the
Apple II. The first model was the
IBM PC, released in August,
1981. Like the Apple II and S-100 systems, it was based on an open, card-based architecture, which allowed third parties to develop for it. It used the
Intel 8088 CPU running at 4.77 MHz, containing 29000 transistors. The first model used an audio cassette for external storage, though there was an expensive floppy disk option. While the original PC design could accommodate only up to 64k on the main board, the architecture was able to accommodate up to 640KB of RAM, with the rest on cards. Later revisions of the design increased the limit to 256K on the main board.
The success of the IBM PC lay in
QDOS, the operating system which was based upon
Gary Kildall's
CP/M-80 operating system. In
1980, IBM approached
Digital Research, Kildall's company, for a version of CP/M for its upcoming
IBM PC. Kildall's wife and business partner, Dorothy McEwen, met with the IBM representatives who were unable to negotiate a standard
non-disclosure agreement with her. IBM turned to
Bill Gates, who was already providing the
ROM BASIC interpreter for the PC. Gates offered to provide the operating system,
QDOS, a CP/M compatible OS developed by
Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, which Microsoft had obtained the rights to. Q-DOS was next licensed to IBM and
MS-DOS/
PC-DOS was born.
The impact of the Apple II and the IBM PC was fully demonstrated when
Time magazine named the home computer the "Machine of the Year", or
Person of the Year for 1982 (January 3, 1983, "The Computer Moves In"). It was the first time in the history of the magazine that an inanimate object was given this award.
IBM PC clones
The original PC design was followed up in
1983 by the
IBM XT, which was an incrementally improved design; it omitted support for the cassette, had more card slots, was available with an optional hard drive. While the architectural memory limit of 640K was the same, later versions were more readily expandable.
Although the PC and XT included a version of the BASIC language in read-only memory, most were purchased with disk drives and run with an operating system; three operating systems were initially announced with the PC. One was
CP/M-86 from Digital Research, the second was
PC-DOS from IBM, and the third was the
UCSD p-System (from the University of California at San Diego). PC-DOS was the IBM branded version of an operating system from
Microsoft, previously best known for supplying BASIC language systems to computer hardware companies. When sold by Microsoft, PC-DOS was called
MS-DOS. The
UCSD p-System OS was built around the
Pascal programming language and was not marketed to the same niche as IBM's customers. Neither the p-System nor CPM-86 was a commercial success.
Because MS-DOS was available as a separate product, some companies attempted to make computers available which could run MS-DOS and programs. These early machines, including the
Seequa Chameleon and a few others were not especially successful, as they required a customized version of MS-DOS, and could not run programs designed specifically for IBM's hardware.
Because the IBM PC was based on relatively standard integrated circuits, and the basic card-slot design was not patented, the key portion of that hardware was actually the
BIOS software embedded in read-only memory. The first truly
IBM PC compatible machines came from
Compaq, although others soon followed.
In
1984, IBM introduced the
IBM Personal Computer/AT (more often called the PC/AT or AT) built around the
Intel 80286 microprocessor. This chip was much faster, and could address up to 16MB of RAM but only in a mode that largely broke compatibility with the earlier 8086 and 8088. In particular, the MS-DOS operating system was not able to take advantage of this capability. A popular urban legend has Bill Gates of Microsoft stating "Why would anyone need more than 640KB?".
Xerox Star
Introduced in 1981, the
Xerox Star workstation, officially known as the "8010 Star Information System" was introduced by
Xerox Corporation. Drawing upon its predecessor, The
Xerox Alto, it was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in
personal computers, including a bit-mapped display, a windows-based
graphical user interface,
icons, folders,
mouse,
Ethernet networking,
file servers,
print servers and
e-mail. It also included a programming language system called
Smalltalk.
Both the Xerox Alto and the Xerox Star would inspire the
Apple Lisa and the
Apple Macintosh.
Apple Lisa and Macintosh
|
The original Apple Macintosh, circa 1984. |
In 1983,
Apple Computer introduced the
Lisa, the first mass-marketed microcomputer with a graphical user interface, its development was central in the move to such systems for personal computers. The Lisa ran on a
Motorola 68000 microprocessor and came equipped with 1 megabyte of RAM, a 12-inch black-and-white monitor, dual 5¼-inch floppy disk drives and a 5 megabyte Profile hard drive. The Lisa's slow operating speed and high price (US$10,000), however, led to its commercial failure. It also led to the decision by
Steve Jobs to move to the
Apple Macintosh team.
Drawing upon its experience with the Lisa, in 1984 Apple launched the
Macintosh. Its debut was announced by a single broadcast during the 1984
Super Bowl XVIII of the now famous television commercial
"1984" created by
Ridley Scott and based on
George Orwell's novel
1984. The intention of the ad was to equate
Big Brother with the IBM PC and a nameless female action hero, portrayed by
Anya Major, with the Macintosh.
The Mac was the first successful
mouse-driven computer with a
graphical user interface (also known by the deprecated term 'WIMP' - Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers). Based on the
Motorola 68000 microprocessor, the Macintosh included many of the Lisa's features at a much more affordable price of $2,495. The Macintosh was initially introduced with 128 kb of RAM. Later that year a 512 kb RAM model, dubbed the "fat Mac" became available. Though only a year younger than Lisa, Mac was made affordable by eliminating an internal hard drive, providing only a single 3.5" floppy drive, greatly reducing storage capabilities, and also simplifying the motherboard design. Applications that came with the Macintosh included
MacPaint, a bit-mapped graphics program, and
MacWrite, which demonstrated
WYSIWYG word processing.
While not an immediate success upon its release, the Macintosh set the standard for the personal computer for years to come. This is particularly due to the introduction of
desktop publishing in 1985 through Apple's partnership with
Adobe. This partnership introduced the
LaserWriter printer and
Aldus PageMaker (now Adobe PageMaker) to users of the personal computer. After
Steve Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985 to start
NeXT, a number of different models of Macintosh were released to a great degree of success such as the
Macintosh Plus and
Macintosh II. The entire Macintosh line of computers was IBM's major competition up until the early
1990s.
Other graphical computers
|
The Atari ST featured the first graphical user interface with colour. |
In 1985, the
Atari ST, also based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, was introduced with the
Atari TOS GUI. It could be modified to
emulate the Macintosh using the third-party
Spectre GCR device.
In the Commodore world,
GEOS was available on the
Commodore 64 and
Commodore 128. Later, a version was available for PCs running DOS. It could be used with a
mouse or a
joystick as a pointing device, and came with a suite of GUI applications. Commodore's later product line, the
Amiga platform, ran a GUI operating system by default.
In Europe and Australasia,
Acorn launched the
Archimedes range of high performance 32-bit home computers. Initially the systems shipped with a GUI OS called Arthur, which was shortly superseded by a multi-tasking GUI-based operating system called RISC OS. By default, the mice used on these computers had three buttons.
Transition
The transition from a PC-compatible market being driven by IBM to one where it was driven primarily by a broader market began to become clear in
1986 and
1987; in 1986, the 32-bit
Intel 80386 microprocessor was released, and the first '386-based PC/compatible was the
Compaq Deskpro 386. IBM's response was nearly a year later, part of the general release of the
IBM Personal System/2 series of computers, which were a closed architecture and a significant departure from the standard architecture of the PC, and in the long run it has been the standard architecture (as evolved significantly) which has persisted in the market.
In late 1989 and early 1990, the
NeXTstation workstation computer went on sale, for "interpersonal" computing as Steve Jobs described it. The NeXTstation was meant to be a new computer for the 1990s, and was a cheaper version of the previous
NeXTcube. The NeXTstation was somewhat a commercial failure, and
NeXT shut down hardware operations in 1993.
|
The CD ROM and CDRW drives became standards for most personal computers. |
The early 1990s saw the advent of the
CD ROM coming as an
industry standard, built-in to many desktop computers, and towards the end of the 1990s, in laptops as well. Although introduced in 1982, the CD ROM was mostly used for
audio during the 1980s (and also
video as the
LaserDisc), and then for computer data such as
operating systems and applications into the 1990s. Another popular use of CD ROMs in the 1990s was
multimedia, as many desktop computers started to come with built-in stereo speakers capable of playing CD quality music and sounds with the
SoundBlaster sound card on PCs. Later,
CD-RW drives were included instead of standard CD ROM drives.
IBM introduced their successful
ThinkPad range at
Comdex 1992 using the series designators 300, 500 and 700 (allegedly analogous to the
BMW car range and used to indicate market), the 300 series being the "budget", the 500 series "midrange" and the 700 series "high end". This designation continued until the late 1990's when IBM introduced the "T" series as 600/700 series replacements, and the 3,5 and 7 series model designations were phased out for A (3&7) & X (5) series. The A series was later partially replaced by the R series.
In 1994, The
Zip drive was introduced by
Iomega as a medium-capacity removable
disk storage system. It aimed to replace the standard 3.5 inch
floppy disk but failed to do so. Before the Zip was introduced,
SyQuest was popular in the market of removable media, but were expensive and largely unsuccessful due to reliability issues. More modern Zip drives are still being produced into the latter 2000s, however are more common.
By the mid 1990s,
Amiga,
Commodore and
Atari systems were no longer on the market, pushed out by strong IBM PC clone competition and low prices. Other previous competition such as
Sinclair and
Amstrad were no longer in the computer market. With less competition than ever before,
Dell rose to high profits and success, introducing low-cost systems targeted at consumers and business markets using a direct-sales model. Dell surpassed
Compaq as the world's largest computer manufacturer, and as of 2006 remains that title.
In 1994, Apple introduced the
Power Macintosh series of high-end professional desktop computers for
desktop publishing and
graphic designers. These new computers made use of new
Motorola PowerPC processors as part of the
AIM alliance, to replace the previous
Motorola 68k architecture used for the Macintosh line. During the '90s, the Macintosh remained with a low
market share, but as the primary choice for creative professionals, particularly those in the graphics and publishing industries.
In 1995,
Be Inc released the
BeBox computer, which used a dual
PowerPC processor running at 66 MHz, and later 133 MHz with the
Be operating system. The BeBox was largely a failure, with less than 2000 units produced between October 1995 and January 1997, when production was ceased.
|
The 1998 iMac brought Apple back into profit. |
Due to the growth amongst IBM cloners in the '90s, they became the industry standard for business and home use, and with the introduction of Microsoft's
Windows 3.0 operating system in 1990, and later with
Windows 95 in 1995, the Macintosh was sent into a period of decline by the mid
1990s, and by 1996, Apple was almost
bankrupt.
Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, and brought Apple back into profitability, firstly with the release of
Mac OS 8, a new operating system for Macintoshes, and with the
PowerMac G3 and
iMac computers for the professional and home markets. The iMac was one of the first computers to not use the beige color for casing, but a transparent
bondi blue in an ergonomic shape, the iMac sold several million units and is still in production as of 2006 using a different
form factor.
Mac OS X,
iLife and
iBook were later introduced by Apple.
The first PC
motherboards to support
Rambus RDRAM (Rambus Direct DRAM), a type of synchronous
dynamic RAM, were released in 1999. RDRAM was also two to three times the price of PC-133
SDRAM due to a combination of high manufacturing costs and high license fees. RDRAM is very rarely used today.
Towards the late 1990s, many more personal computers started shipping that included
USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports for easy
plug and play connectivity to devices such as
digital cameras,
video cameras,
personal digital assistants,
printers,
scanners and other peripheral devices. As of 2006, all currently shipping computers for the consumer market include at least 2 USB ports. Also during the latter 1990s,
DVD players started appearing on higher-end, usually more expensive, desktop and laptop computers, and eventually on consumer computers into the 2000s.
In 2002,
Hewlett-Packard (HP) purchased
Compaq. Compaq itself had bought
Tandem Computers in 1997 (which had been started by ex-HP employees), and
Digital Equipment Corporation in 1998. Following this strategy HP became a major player in desktops, laptops, and servers for many different markets. The buyout made HP the world's largest manufacturer of personal computers, until Dell later surpassed HP.
In 2003,
AMD shipped its
64-bit based
microprocessor line for desktop computers,
Opteron and
Athlon 64. Also in 2003,
IBM released the 64-bit based
PowerPC 970 for Apple's high-end
PowerMac G5 systems.
Intel, in 2004, reacted to AMD's success with 64-bit based processors, releasing updated versions of their
Xeon and
Pentium 4 lines. 64-bit processors are common in high end systems,
servers and
workstations, but are slowly becoming more popular in consumer desktop systems.
In
2004, IBM announced the proposed sale of its PC business to Chinese computer maker
Lenovo Group, which is partially owned by the Chinese government, for $650 million US in cash and $600 million US in Lenovo stock. The deal was approved by the
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in March 2005, and completed in May 2005. IBM will have a 19% stake in Lenovo, which will move its headquarters to New York State and appoint an IBM executive as its chief executive officer. The company will retain the right to use certain IBM brand names for an initial period of five years. As a result of the purchase, Lenovo inherited a product line that featured the
ThinkPad, a line of
laptops that had been one of IBM's most successful products.
|
Third $100 laptop prototype, 2006. |
In the early 2000s,
WiFi began to become increasingly more popular as many consumers started installing their own wireless home networks. Many of today's laptops and also desktop computers are sold pre-installed with
wireless cards and
antennas. Also in the early 2000s,
LCD monitors became more popular for
computer monitors, with
CRT production being slowed down. LCD monitors are typically sharper, brighter, and more economical than CRT monitors. In 2005, prototypes of the
$100 laptop computer for education in
third world countries was shown, it is part of the
One Laptop per Child non-profit organization. The laptop will use
Linux, and is an attempt to provide better education in third world countries.
Microprocessor-Based Server and Networks
The invention in the late 1970s of
local area networks (LANs), notably
Ethernet, allowed PCs to communicate with each other (
peer-to-peer) and with shared printers.
As the
microcomputer revolution continued, more robust versions of the same technology were used to produce
microprocessor based
servers that could also be linked to the
LAN. This was facilitated by the development of server
operating systems to run on the
Intel architecture, including several versions of both
Unix and
Microsoft Windows.
With the development of
storage area networks and
server farms of thousands of servers, by the year 2000 the
minicomputer had all but disappeared, and
mainframes were largely restricted to specialized uses. The
Google server farm is thought to be the largest, with a total calculation rate three times that of
Earth Simulator or
Blue Gene, as of
September 29,
2004.
*
Timeline of computing*
CPU design- a technical discussion of computing history
*
History of operating systems*
History of Apple Computer*
History of the Internet*
History of the graphical user interface*
Programming language timeline*
Hardware description language*
Hardware abstraction layer*
Computer architecture- how computers are designed
*
Computers in fiction*
Fifth generation computer systems project*
Quantum computing*
Curta calculator*
Pirates of Silicon Valley *
Triumph of the Nerds*
Stephen White's excellent Computer history site (the above article is a modified version of his work, used with
Permission)
*
Digital Deli, edited by Steve Ditlea, full text of the classic computer book*
Yahoo Computers and History*
IEEE computer history timeline*
Links to all things Commodore*
A homebrew computer club site*
Computer History Museum*
Pictures and information on old computers*
ITPartshopper: a database of suppliers for obsolete computer parts*
History of Computers (1989-2004) in PC World excerpts*
How It Works - The Computer, 1971 and 1979 editions, by David Carey, illustrated by B. H. Robinson*
PC History Stan Veit's classic work on the history of Pre-IBM personal computers.
*
WWW-VL: Internet History
