Lately I have been thinking about the early days of personal computers. I was curious about the timeline of when the various computers were introduced. I had a fairly good idea about most of the early makes but there was one that I didn’t know much about when it was first introduced. It was a line of computers made by a company called Ohio Scientific, originally Ohio Scientific Instruments. The reason that I was interested was that it was the computer that was sold by the company that I went to work for when I got out of the Army.
I looked Ohio Scientific up on Wikipedia and one of the references at the end of the article led me to a book called A History of the Personal Computer: The People and the Technology. Someone, hopefully with permission of the copyright holder, had converted each chapter to PDF and made it available on the web.
It has proven to be a gold mine of details about the early days of personal computing. I will be commenting on it as I read it with personal experiences that occurred contemporaneously with events described in the book. I recommend the book to anyone that is interested in the history of computers through 2001 when the book was published.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.