and Radio Electronics. Soon both these magazines were putting out a call for an article on building a personal computer (Triumph; Freiberger and Swaine 27-29; Shurkin 307). This wouldnt have been possible a few years before, and it was a series of incredible advances in electronics that made it possible.In the early 1970s calculators were very popular. They had recently become much easier to manufacture due to the advent of the integrated circuit and large-scale integration (technology that put the equivalent of 100 transistors on a single chip). This same technology made the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor ever built, and the 8008 processor chips possible (Freiberger and Swaine 29). With this development in the manufacture of calculators Ed Roberts, founder of Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS), decided to turn all of his companies efforts toward manufacturing calculators (Freiberger and Swaine 31-32). This decision was very poorly timed, though. In 1974 two major developments in the semiconductor industry materialized. One was the trend of semiconductor companies to begin developing their own consumer products, and the other was the refinement of the early microprocessors (Freiberger and Swaine 32-33; Shurkin 309). The first development killed Roberts, and the second one saved him.Ed Roberts is considered by many to be the founder of the personal computer. In 1974 many semiconductor companies, such as Texas Instruments, started making their own calculators and selling them to the public. Since companies like TI didnt have to buy the parts for their calculators from other manufacturers they could sell their product for much less than MITS could. By early 1974 MITS was going broke (Freiberger and Swaine 32, Triumph). This was the same time that Les Solomon, editor of Popular Electronics was in desperate need of an article on a personal computer kit. At this point Roberts made a critical decision, he decided he would bu...
