Photos: Historic PCs
Image 1 of 10
At the Vintage Computer Festival, which played host to the Homebrew Computer Club’s 30th anniversary,
Chuck Colby’s company built and sold this portable, battery-powered computer running the Mac operating system in 1987, several years before Apple Computer produced its own laptop.
Initially called the WalkMac (until Sony objected to the name), this portable weighed about 14.5 pounds and cost about $3,000 to $4,500 in the late 1980s and ’90s. The Colby WalkMac included a simple, useful device that’s missing from today’s laptops: a handle.
The SWTPC 6800 was built by Southwest Technical Products. It cost $400 in kit form in 1976 and used a Motorola 6800 processor running at 1MHz.
The Compucolor II, introduced in 1977, featured a computer built into the chassis of a 13-inch television and is considered the first color personal computer. It used an Intel 8080A processor and accepted floppy disks throughrnthe door to the right of the screen.
This SBC6120 is a functional replica of the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer.
The Kenbak-1 is considered the first personal computer.
When introduced in 1971, the Kenbak-1 cost $750. Only about 40 were sold before the company shut down two years later.
The Kenbak-1, which did not use a microprocessor, was marketed through Scientific American magazine.
-
-
Account Information
Contact Bill Detwiler
- |
- See all of Bill's content