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Stan Veit's History of the Personal Computer
The ultimate insider’s view of the "golden age" of personal computing
For all the readers of the magazine Computer Shopper, you will immediately recognize the author as the one-time editor of the publication. For those readers, this book will be no surprise, both its look and feel and its writing style are similar to the magazine. The cover of the book is completely yellow. The title is written in tacky red colored font and there is a black and white picture of an Apple II computer gracing the cover.
Having said all that, I still think Stan’s book is worth the read. The book is written as a memoir of a man who knew first hand nearly every early PC company that created what is today one of the largest industries in the world. But, don’t look for any familiar names among the companies contained in this text. Like the vast majority of the Doo Wop singers of the 1950s and 1960s, only the old timers remember the names of the early PC companies.
Before there was Apple and IBM, there were several major PC companies with names like Altair with its MITS computer. There was Imsai with its Megabyte Micro, Processor Technology with its Sol, and South West Technical Products (SWTPC) with its SWITS 6800. These were the forerunners. Next came Cromemco, Ohio Scientific, Vector Graphics, Polymorphic, Morrow Designs, Atari, Tandy, Apple Commodore, Texas Instruments, Osborne and finally, IBM.
Veit’s book covers the period from 1976 to 1981 with the introduction of the IBM PC. The book is a series of character sketches of the men who formed these companies and the technology they employed. Most of the early PCs were kits that were sold to hobbyist who built the kit, added the necessary peripherals needed to make the machine a functioning unit, and wrote the programs in Microsoft Basic to run on the machines.
The typical early PC was a motherboard that the hobbyist soldered all the components onto. He would program the computer via a set of toggle switches on the front panel. He would then save the program he had created on a audio cassette. The really avant garde of the group would find a refurbished teletypewriter unit with a keyboard, printer, and a paper tape reader and punch. This described the early hobbyist computers.
Apple, Commodore, and Tandy made the next major change to the computer by offering a completely assembled PC with a television monitor and, in the beginning, a tape cassette for loading and storing programs. The tape cassette eventually gave way to the 5 1/4-in. floppy disk drive and soon the PC revolution was well on its way to becoming a real business.
If you curious about the "golden age" of personal computer, Stan Veit’s book will be a real treat. His anecdotes about some of the characters of the industry are worth the read alone. Stan recounts a meeting with the two founders of Apple. "When Wozniak came over I was a little more impressed with him than Jobs. He brought a computer board with jumper wires all over and parts hanging off all over the board. This was to be the Apple II! After Woz hooked his haywire rig up to the living room TV, he turned it on, and there on the screen I saw a crude Breakout game in full color! Now I was really amazed…"
Stan continues the conversation. "After a few minutes, Woz turned it off and said, ‘I am still working on it; everything heats up after a while!"
You’re going to enjoy Stan’s walk down memory lane.
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