It is widely assumed the personal computer revolution started with the appearance of the Apple in 1977. Not so. The computer revolution started some years earlier in 1975 when the American magazine, Popular Electronics, ran a cover story on the Altair 8800 personal computer available in kit for $US397.

The machine had been designed by a company in New Mexico headed by Edward Roberts. It represented a desperate attempt by Roberts to keep his company afloat with debts of $300,000.
Roberts predicted he would sell a modest 800 machines a year. The bank which held the paper on the loan thought this over-optimistic and set down 200 as the more likely figure.

When the issue of Popular Electronics hit the stand, both the magazine and the computer were an instant sell out and the Altair was back-ordered for over a year. No one knows exactly how many it sold but the figure would be in many tens of thousands.

It is difficult to get across the excitement caused by the Altair at the time.

Anyone who knew anything about computers – mainframe or otherwise – knew this was the start of a revolution. From all over the world orders streamed in for the Altair.

When, after a wait of a few months, you finally got the kit you soldered it together with tender, loving care. You tested it and you had a computer.

A very limited computer.

A computer with no permanent memory so you had to enter the program in by hand using switches every time you used it.

Despite this, the Altair 8800 was a real computer and you could own it and program it yourself. Magic.

The first personal computer was a limited machine mainly because it totally lacked a Basic interpreter.

The origins of Microsoft

Paul Allen, a young programmer, saw this issue of the magazine and rushed over to see his friend Bill Gates who was then an undergraduate at Harvard and, at the time, engaged in the studious pursuit of playing poker.

Bill Gates was a consummate hacker. He was once caught in an elegant piece of hackery on a major company's computer and was forced to give up computing totally for one year. For a 15-year-old hacker this was a cruel and unusual punishment.

The two of them decided they could write a Basic interpreter and Bill Gates telephoned Edward Roberts. Stretching the truth somewhat, he said they already had such an interpreter. Roberts, with the cynicism of middle-age, told him to bring it along when it was ready. Six weeks later, as the aircraft landed in Albuquerque, New Mexico the final part of the program was written.

The program worked and the Altair became programmable in Basic. As a result, Paul Allen became the software director for Altair.

Bill Gates dropped cut of Harvard, became a full-time software writer and turned the name of the Traf-O-Mat company into the more appropriate Microsoft. One of its first offerings was Microsoft Basic. Sales of this program are now pushing towards the two million mark.

Over the years, Bill Gates has gradually improved Microsoft Basic. The current version is called GW. The GW stands – I kid thee not – for "gee whiz". This may give the incorrect impression that Microsoft products are from hackers' heaven. Not at all.

Microsoft products are professionally and elegantly written programs, each of which, in its own field, is either pre-eminent or close to it.

From the very beginning of the personal computer revolution Microsoft was a major force in the industry.

When Apple launched its computer, and gave the industry glamour, suitable Microsoft programs were quickly available.

When IBM launched its personal computer, and gave the industry respectability, it was Microsoft which produced the operating system MS-DOS.

When the Macintosh was launched, and gave the industry ease of use, it was Microsoft which produced many of the best programs.

And now, when we are looking to a future generation of computers using high speed processors and capacious memories, it is Microsoft which has set the standard with its new offering Windows.

All of this stems basically from the genius of one man, William Gates III – Bill Gates.

He is currently in Australia enjoying a short holiday on the Barrier Reef after speaking at last week's computer conference and manning the stand at PC 86 to explain the benefits of Windows. 

Bill Gates: an American Pioneer

Although he is only just into his 30s, Mr Gates is a pioneer of the world of personal computers and is one person whose work has had a unifying effect across the whole range of manufacturers' products.

Mr Gates looks like a university student, talks like a university professor. His dress is casual. He has a misleading air of vagueness about him.

Ask him a question and he pauses in absorbed concentration and then answers in a fluent flow of well constructed sentences. Bill Gates not only knows the computer answers. He can communicate them.

Asked about the future impact or CD technology — the term is interchangeable in computers with optical discs — on personal computers and data bases he split his answer into two parts. The first concerns information which needs updating infrequently.

Because of its low price and ease of manufacturing the CD disc will stand supreme when presenting reference type material. Because of low initial cost and ease of manufacture CD will revolutionise reference works and reference libraries.

He said: "The CD disc itself costs well under $US10 to press, and it can come down to under $2. You can put the Encyclopedia Brittanica on to a single disc more than four times. When you want to update, a single disc will all the volumes of the encyclopaedia and you will throw away the old one when you get the new one."

On information which needs updating frequently he said: "For information which is truly changing very rapidly over a period of time then you need to combine some other medium with CD discs.

"If you want everything absolutely up to date - for example stock exchange prices where the timing is crucial - I can see a combination of on-line and CD methods."

The two major manufacturers of CDs, Sony and Philips, have agreed on a single standard. To get the balance of technology and software correct Microsoft are closely involved with Sony and Philips and have just hosted a CD conference in Seattle to sort out directions for the future.

The new CD technology data bases will be infinitely easier to access and browse through than traditional on line databases.

"People who built those old-time share systems were really screwed up and they didn't think in terms of a mass market. They thought in terms of a smaller, very sophisticated market," Mr Gates said.

The rise of the CD

Talking of the impact CD discs will have on the market he said. "CD as a read-only technology is becoming fantastically inexpensive and it will have a great impact on the consumer market, on the mass consumer market."

These are discs in what is called the Worm mode - Write Once, Read Many Times. What about optical discs which can read/write.

"In terms of read/write storage there won't be any cheap read write storage for mass consumers except for floppy discs. But when you talk about office work stations, there is competition between magnetic storage and optical storage. At the low end there is a demand for 10 to 100 megabyte memories and at the higher end there is a demand for 100 megabytes to a gigabyte in memories. With a local area network with a file server you want at least 400 megabytes and I think optical will be cost effective at that level first.

"It is easy to under-estimate the degree to which magnetic disc technology can be improved through more density, vertical recording, thin film techniques. They can get the track densities up with thin film. There's a lot of room for improvement in that stuff. It is much more likely for optical memories to compete at the high end of the market than it is at the low end."

The future of display technology

Apart from developments in CD laser discs, another area of major interest is computer screens or monitors. They still are, in the main and in effect, converted tellies and the technology has hardly changed since computers came on the scene. The new shell program, Windows, developed by Microsoft, screams out for a high resolution colour screen and for a superfast processor. The high speed processor is already here. What of the high resolution screen?

"Let us take the situation pre-Windows. The initial screen resolution - pretty much the standard resolution on the vast majority of personal computers - was 640 by 200. That was really it for a long time although some people used Hercules which was 720 by 350. Now IBM has 640 by 350 which is the totally accepted standard for now and the immediate future and so our software packages, and everybody else's software packages work with and take advantage of these new standards."

If the standards do improve, then any program written using the Windows shell will automatically fit the new format. "Applications written to Windows are independent of the screen. The application itself just talks to Windows. The Windows application can support new higher resolution displays, just by changing the screen driver."

There is another alternative. "If a really great, flat screen display with a liquid crystal display or electroluminescence you would see a drastic shift away from cathode ray tube based systems."

Computing on a smaller scale

Portable computers have been launched with a roll of drums and a fanfare of trumpets. But they have not made much impact on the market. What does he see as the future of lap computers?

"There are two types of portable computers. There is the utility device like the Tandy 100 that has built in what you need. Those are doing quite well. It is a growth market. They are very price effective and I'm a big believer in them," Mr Gates said.

"Then there is the machine that takes the full function of the desk top and puts it into a portable. The computer is premium priced because everything is CMOS and everything is harder to do and there are some small compatibility problems.

"The manufacturers try to work out a standard which is hard because IBM is not making a portable. How many people really want to do full power desk top computing while they are sitting on a plane? I'd rather use my Tandy Model 200 to get my words in and then be able to transfer them to my desk machine later. The market demand is not there."

One of the problems he - and many other market observers - see lies with the screen on the portable computers.

He said: "The problem is still the display. Liquid Crystal Display is getting to be higher and higher resolution. They have duty cycling problems and aspect ratio problems but they are getting there.

"The so called active maths LCD will, I think, break through, Meanwhile, they are down the price of electro luminescence - a lot of people believe in it.  Gas plasma -  I haven't heard too many people recently who are big on it - and than every once in a while I hear about some other strange thing and I've never had time to dig into those. Nobody every walked up to me with a demo.

"Data General either has released, or is about to release, the DG 2 with an electroluminescent display. That's my favourite of the shrunken desk top machines." And Mr Gates sees it not being used as a portable as much as a small desk top machine.

Bill Gates thinks logically, speaks logically. Random thoughts are, for him, not acceptable. When I discussed with him an article written in an English newspaper about the future of Japanese programming he disagreed violently with the author's viewpoint. "That is the most random thing I have ever heard."

With William Gates III, "random" is not a term of approval.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald on March 17, 1986