A closer look
The world's first commercially available personal computer didn't even have a microprocessor inside it. Released in 1971, years before Apple was a glint in Steve Jobs' eye, John Blankenbaker's Kenbak-1 was a masterpiece of doing it the hard way. He wired together dozens of discrete TTL logic chips to create a machine with 256 bytes of memory. You programmed it by painfully flipping switches on the front panel and reading the output via blinking lights. It was an absolute commercial flop, selling only about 40 units, but it accidentally launched the PC revolution.
