Back before the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) hand built and peddled an Apple-I system to a local computer store in Mountain View, California, there was a man named John Blankenbaker working in his ...

When thinking of the first PCs, most of us might imagine something like the Apple I or the TRS-80. But even before that, there were a set of computers that often had no keyboard, or recognizable ...

One of only ten surviving Kenbak-1 personal computers from 1971 has sold at auction for €34,000 (US$36,500). Judged the "first commercially available personal computer" in 1987 by a panel at the ...

For those of us who are of a certain age or temperament, there’s a certain something about programming simple 8-bit computers in machine code using switches and pushbuttons. According to Wikipedia, ...

Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets, and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills. This digital device was released in 1971, ...

If you’re looking for a simple Ardunio project, why not replicate the first personal computer? After discovering the Arduino, [Mark] realized recreating really old computers would be a fun project. An ...

The world's first commercial personal computer (PC) has been put up auction in Germany. The PC called Kenbak-1 first went on sale in 1971, about five years before the launch of the highly popular ...

The Kenbak-1 apparently predates the Altair and is the earliest “personal” microcomputer in existence. To use it you flipped a bunch of switches and watched the lights. A PS3 this definitely wasn’t. A ...

John Blankenbaker is a computer engineer and consultant who lived in Brentwood, California, USA. Blankenbaker, who got some money in 1970, thought, "It's time to build a small computer that will ...