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Altair 8000(1st PC)
This first personal computer sold for $297, or $395 with a case and coined the term “personal computer”. The machine came with 256 bytes of memory (expandable to 64 KB) and an open 100-line bus structure that evolved into the “S-100” standard widely used in hobbyist and personal computers of this era. -
IMSAI 8080
Some call the IMSAI the first clone of another computer system, in this case, of the MITS Altair 8800, a similar computer which was release just a few months earlier. It will even accept the same cards as the Altair, because of the S-100 bus design. The IMSAI was not the only computer to copy MITS' S-100 bus scheme, but it may have been the first. -
Apple I
Apple’s only “kit” computer (you had to add a keyboard, power supply, and enclosure to the assembled motherboard), around the 6502 processor. Shugart associates introduced the 5.25″ floppy drive; it would become a key component in the personal computing revolution. -
Apple II
The Apple II was one of the first computer with a color display, and it has the BASIC programming language built-in, so it is ready to run right out of the box.The most important feature of the Apple II was probably its eight expansion slots. No other computer had this kind of flexibility or expansion possibilities. The top of the computer isn't even attached, it lifts off with little effort allowing easy access to the system motherboard and expansion slots. -
Commodore PET 2001
Produced by Chuck Peddle the PET was named in part for the pet rock fad, which lasted about six months during 1975. Silly as it sounds, 1.5 million pet rocks were sold during that period for $4.00 each, making their creator a millionaire. Officially, P.E.T. stood for Personal Electronic Transactor.This is also one of the few computers with a built-in cassette drive -
TRS-80
The TRS-80 Model I was originally known as the TRS-80 Micro Computer System and retroactively given the Model I designation after later models were introduced.It remained in production until it was completely displaced by the TRS-80 Model III.The computer itself is in the keyboard, which retailed for US$399 with 4 KB of memory. The monitor only displays output from the computer, and the cassette recorder is used to save and load software from cassette tape.The full system sold for US$599. -
TI-99/4
TI’s first home computer as the TI-99/4, which shipped with a 13″ color monitor and sold for $1,150 when it debuted in October 1979. The computer had a calculator-style 41-key chiclet keyboard, no lowercase text (not unusual in the 1970s), and was the first personal computer with a 16-bit CPU and ran at a seemingly respectable 3 MHz while most home computers ran at 1-2 MHz. It was also the first home computer to use program cartridges. -
Osborne 1
The Osborne 1 was the the first portable computer.It was about the size of a suitcase, ran CP/M, included a pair of 5.25″ floppies, and had a tiny 5″ display. The innovative machine was bundled with about $1,500-2,000 worth of software, and the whole package sold for $1,899. -
Epson HX-20
The first laptop computer also arrived in 1981, the Epson HX-20 (a.k.a. Geneva). The HX-20 was about 8.5″ by 11″ and maybe 1.5-2″ thick and used a micro-cassette to store data. It displayed 4 lines of 20 characters on an LCD screen above the keyboard. -
IBM PC
This computer ran a 16-bit CPU on an 8-bit bus (the Intel 8088), had five expansion slots, included at least 16 KB of RAM, and had two full-height 5.25″ drive bays.Buyers could get a fairly loaded machine with a floppy controller, two floppy drives, a monochrome display adapter and 720 x 350 pixel green screen monitor, a color display adapter and CGA monitor, a parallel card, a dot matrix printer, and an operating system – with the choice of CP/M-86, the UCSD p-System, or PC-DOS ( MS-DOS). -
Apple Macintosh
The Macintosh was released in January of 1984, with 128K RAM of memory. It quickly became obvious that this was insufficient, so eight months later Apple released an updated version, un-officially referred to as the 'Fat Mac'. It has 512K RAM, four times as much.
Before the Macintosh, all computers were 'text-based' - you operated them by typing words onto the keyboard. The Macintosh is run by activating pictures (icons) on the screen with a small hand-operated device called a "mouse". -
Mac II
Apple introduced expansion slots to the Macintosh in the Mac II which Apple designed to support a then-mind-boggling 128 MB of RAM, IBM introduced Micro Channel Architecture with its PS/2 line, IBM and Microsoft co-released OS/2, and Windows reached version 1.01. We also saw the first fax cards that year, and Sun shipped the first RISC CPU. -
Mac Portable
Mac Portable had the same clock speed as the fastest prior Mac.It was introduced at the same time as the 25 MHz Mac IIci.At that time,many Mac users who needed a field computer were buying Compaq 286-based laptops with DOS 4.01 and sometimes Windows 2.1.It had a crystal clear 9.8″ 1-bit 640 x 400 pixel active matrix screen,a 16 MHz 68000 CPU, a front-mounted handle and the up-to-10-hour lead-acid battery. Options included an internal modem and a numeric keypad or a trackball. -
Mac IIfx
The IIfx was built on a 40 MHz motherboard and had the fastest clocked CPU that Apple used until the Quadra 840av of 1993. NuBus cards still ran on a 10 MHz bus, which is one reason Apple announced its first accelerated video card, the 8•24GC, along with the IIfx. Regular video cards were simply overshadowed by the rest of the system. -
Performa 5200
The 75 MHz Performa 5200 was the first PowerPC Mac with an integrated monitor.Apple based the motherboard on the Quadra 605 with its 25 MHz bus and 32-bit memory, even though the 603 is a 64-bit chip. Apple also used an 8-bit IDE controller for the hard drive. This is the kind of thinking that had crippled the LC with a 32-bit CPU on a 16-bit bus in 1990. -
Performa 6200
The 75 MHz Power Macintosh 6200 was one of the first Macs to use the PowerPC 603 processor. Although the CPU was superior to the older 601, the computer architecture kept performance of the 6200 – and it’s built-in monitor twin, the 5200 – comparable to the 66 MHz Power Mac 6100. -
Power Mac G3
It is a third-generation Power Mac. It has a new motherboard with a faster system bus than earlier models, a third-generation PowerPC CPU, uses a completely different type of memory, has a different way of upgrading the CPU, and includes a personality card slot. The Power Mac G3 comes in desktop and minitower configurations and replaces the 7300, 8600, and 9600. -
iMac
The iMac had a 233 MHz PowerPC 750 (the same G3 CPU used in the Beige Power Mac G3), 32 MB of RAM, a 4 GB hard drive, a 24x CD-ROM, ethernet, stereo speakers, and an integral 15″ multiscan monitor,No separate monitor, no rat’s nest of cables, and no external drives needed.It was later redesigned in 1999 gaining USB and Firewire. -
Lombard
The Lombard was the first PowerBook with USB.It had only one drive bay (incompatible with the previous one), only one PC Card slot, and no ADB port. The keyboard also looks different, made of a translucent brown (Apple calls it bronze) plastic. This was the last PowerBook with built-in SCSI support and the first with New World ROMs. -
Power Mac G5
The Power Mac G5 was introduced on the same day Intel officially unveiled the 3.2 GHz Pentium 4. In terms of increased clock speed, that means Intel had a 6.7% speed bump the same day that Apple announced a 40% improvement in clock speed (from 1.42 GHz to 2.0 GHz), allowing it to call the Power Mac G5 the world’s fastest personal computer at the time. -
Power Mac G5 Dual
A new Power Mac featuring a dual-core 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5 processor, 512 MB RAM, 250 GB hard drive, Nvidia GeForce 6600 LE video card with 256 MB video RAM, three PCI Express expansion slots, 16x SuperDrive with double-layer support, FireWire 800 port, two FireWire 400 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 1.1 ports, optical and digital audio input and output, and 802.11g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 support. Price is US$2,499 -
iMac "Core Duo"
the first iMac computer with an Intel procesor. It features 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo T2500 processor, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive, 128 MB ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card, dual-layer DVD+/-RW drive, Mac OS X 10.4.4, 20-inch wide-screen LCD, AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth 2, iSight camera, USB, FireWire, audio, Ethernet. Price is US$1699.
