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In the early 1960s, when computers were hulking mainframes that took up entire rooms, engineers were already toying with the then - extravagantnotion of building a computer intended for the sole use of one person.In the early 1970s, researches at Xerox's Polo Alto Research Center(Xerox PARC) had realized that the pace of improvement in the technology ofsemiconductors - the chips of silicon that are the building blocks ofpresent-day electronics - meant that sooner or later the PC would beextravagant no longer. They foresaw that computing power would someday beso cheap that engineers would be able to afford to devote a great deal ofit simply to making non-technical people more comfortable with these newinformation - handling tools. in their labs, they developed or refined muchof what constitutes PCs today, from "mouse" pointing devices to software"windows". Although the work at Xerox PARC was crucial, it was not the spark that took PCs out of the hands of experts and into the popular imagination. Thathappened inauspiciously in January 1975, when the magazine PopularElectronics put a new kit for hobbyists, called the Altair, on its cover.for the first time, anybody with $400 and a soldering iron could buy andassemble his own computer. The Altair inspired Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobsto build the first Apple computer, and a young college dropout named BillGates to write software for it. Meanwhile. the person who deserves thecredit for inventing the Altair, an engineer named Ed Roberts, left theindustry he had spawned to go to medical school. Now he is a doctor insmall town in central Georgia. To this day, researchers at Xerox and elsewhere pooh-pooh the Altair as too primitive to have made use of the technology they felt was needed to bringPCs to the masses. In a sense, they are right. The Altair incorporated oneof the first single-chip microprocessor - a semiconductor chip, thatcontained all the basic circuits needed to do calculations - called theIntel 8080. Although the 8080 was advanced for its time, it was far tooslow to support the mouse, windows, and elaborate software Xerox haddeveloped. Indeed, it wasn't until 1984, when Apple Computer's Macintoshburst onto the scene, that PCs were powerful enough to fulfill the originalvision of researchers. "The kind of computing that people are trying to dotoday is just what we made at PARC in the early 1970s," says Alan Kay, aformer Xerox researcher who jumped to Apple in the early 1980s. Researchers today are proceeding in the same spirit that motivated Kay and his Xerox PARC colleagues in the 1970s: to make information more accessible to ordinary people. But a look into today's research labs reveals verylittle that resembles what we think of now as a PC. For one thing,researchers seem eager to abandon the keyboard and monitor that are thePC's trademarks. Instead they are trying to devise PCs with interpretivepowers that are more humanlike - PCs that can hear you and see you, cantell when you're in a bad mood and know to ask questions when they don'tunderstand something. It is impossible to predict the invention that, like the Altair,crystallize new approaches in a way that captures people's imagination.From soldering irons to SparcStations, from MITS to Macintosh, personalcomputers have evolved from do-it-yourself kits for electronic hobbyistsinto machines that practically leap out of the box and set themselves up.What enabled them to get from there to here? Innovation and determination.