If you ask a random person on the street who made the first PC, they’ll probably say Steve Jobs. Or maybe Bill Gates. If they’re a real nerd, they might mention the Altair 8800 or those guys in the Homebrew Computer Club. Honestly, they’re all kinda wrong.
The story of the personal computer isn't some straight line that starts in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976. It’s way messier than that. You’ve got Italian engineers hiding prototypes in back rooms, a guy in New Jersey building a machine with no processor at all, and a peace activist in the 1950s who thought "giant brains" should help kids with their homework.
Depending on how you define "PC," the answer changes. And that’s what makes this history so fascinating.
The 1971 Underdog: John Blankenbaker’s Kenbak-1
Most historians who actually get paid to care about this stuff—like the folks at the Computer History Museum—point to a machine called the Kenbak-1.
John Blankenbaker released it in early 1971. That’s five years before the Apple I even existed.
Here’s the weird part: it didn’t even have a microprocessor. Intel hadn't really gotten the 4004 (the first commercial CPU) out the door when Blankenbaker was designing this thing. Instead, he used a bunch of standard logic chips. It had 256 bytes of memory. Not megabytes. Not kilobytes. Bytes.
You programmed it by flipping switches on the front. No screen. No keyboard. Just a row of lights that blinked back at you. It cost $750 at the time, which is roughly $5,800 today. He only sold about 40 of them before his company went under. It was a total commercial flop, but it was the first time someone sold a functional, programmable computer meant for a single person to use at home.
The "Supercalculator" That Went to the Moon
Before the Kenbak, there was the Olivetti Programma 101.
Launched at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, this Italian masterpiece looked more like a chunky typewriter than a modern MacBook. But NASA bought a bunch of them to help calculate the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Is it a PC? Well, it sat on a desk. It was programmable. It used magnetic cards to store data—basically the ancestor of the floppy disk. Engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto and his tiny team of four people basically had to invent "personal" computing because, back then, computers were the size of refrigerators and cost as much as a house.
The P101 cost $3,200. Still expensive, but for a business or a lab in 1965, it was a revolution. It proved that a computer could be an "object" you lived with, rather than a monster you visited in a climate-controlled room.
The Machine That Actually Started the Fire: Altair 8800
If we’re talking about what actually triggered the "revolution," we have to talk about Ed Roberts.
In January 1975, Popular Electronics put a blue box on its cover: the MITS Altair 8800. This is the machine that Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw and thought, "We need to write software for this." They moved to Albuquerque and started a little company called Micro-Soft.
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The Altair was a kit. You bought it for $397 and soldered it together yourself. It was the first "microcomputer" to use the Intel 8080 chip, which was powerful enough to actually do something useful. Roberts expected to sell maybe 800 units. He ended up with thousands of orders in weeks.
This was the spark. It’s why people often credit Roberts or MITS with "making" the first PC—not because they were the absolute first to ever do it, but because they were the first to make it a movement.
Why Simon and the "Giant Brains" Matter
Let’s go back even further. Like, 1950 further.
Edmund Berkeley published a book called Giant Brains, or Machines That Think in 1949. People thought he was nuts. He then introduced Simon, a relay-based machine that could only handle numbers from 0 to 3. It had 32 bits of memory.
It was basically a toy, but Berkeley sold the plans for it in Radio-Electronics magazine. He wanted everyone to have a computer in their home to manage finances and recall facts. In 1950! He saw the future decades before anyone else, even if his machine was too primitive to actually realize it.
The "First PC" Hierarchy: A Quick Guide
Since "first" is a loaded word, here is how the experts usually break it down:
- The First Commercial PC (General Consensus): Kenbak-1 (1971).
- The First Microprocessor PC: Micral N (1973). A French machine that was the first to use a "computer on a chip."
- The First Desktop PC (The "All-in-One"): Olivetti Programma 101 (1965).
- The First "Modern" Prototype: Xerox Alto (1973). It had a mouse, windows, and icons. It just cost like $40,000 and was never sold to the public.
- The First Massive Success: Apple II / Commodore PET / TRS-80 (1977). The "1977 Trinity" that made PCs look like consumer appliances.
What You Should Actually Do With This Info
If you’re a collector, a student of history, or just someone who wants to win a bar trivia night, stop looking for one name. The "first PC" wasn't a single invention; it was a slow realization that computers didn't have to be for governments.
Next Steps for the Curious:
- Check out the Computer History Museum’s digital archives. They have the original brochures for the Kenbak-1 and the Altair. It’s wild to see how they marketed these things to people who had never seen a computer before.
- Look up the "Micral N." It’s the unsung hero of the story. Because it was made in France and sold for industrial use, Americans usually ignore it, but it’s technically the first "commercial" computer to use a microprocessor.
- Find an emulator. You can actually find web-based emulators for the Kenbak-1. Try to program it. It’ll make you realize just how spoiled we are with modern keyboards and screens. Basically, you’ll be flipping virtual switches to add 2 + 2.
The reality is that John Blankenbaker made the first "PC" you could buy, but Ed Roberts made the first one people actually wanted. History isn't just about who did it first—it's about who made it stick.