The Birth of the PC

The first computers were totally different than what we use in our days. The first computers were slow and very big and instructions were read of magnetic disks and they would often fill a special room, cooled, inside a building. Processing power or computer in 1970 was way more reduced compared to a modern office computer. In our days, we have computers and terminals with high speed and processing capacities and these machines are extremely useful when lots of people will access the same piece of information, such as a group working on a database.

The very first microprocessor which was developed for several functions was the Intel 8080, first released on the market in the year 1974. This processor had nearly 6000 components all graved on a silicon chip. Like every computer processor, this one also used a binary system for calculus. In 1981, engineers from HP have developed the super chip conceived to handle binary numbers at 32 bits. The super chip had no more than 6 square millimeters and it gathered 450000 components.

Another method for measuring processing power is the speed of a clock: the time in which the central processing unit will take one step in a processing operation. The Intel 8080 had a clock speed of 2 MHz which is very slow compared to modern day processors. Personal computers that people use today can be divided into two different categories: on one side, we have the PC (which was initially known as the IBM PC) and on the other side, we have the Apple MAC, which people also call the Macintosh. But before these two categories were established, there was a whole series of systems, including computers for domestic use. One of the most popular computers that people would use at the office was the Commodore 8032, which had only 32 kb of random access memory. For this reason, all programs and applications had to be extremely simple, in order to have some free memory to store information. Some programs would occupy about half of the computer free space, so people were very acquainted with the following error: "You are running low in computer memory".