Computing · 1977

Personal computer

A ready-to-use computer for home and office.

The 1977 trio of the Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80 came assembled with keyboards and displays. Millions of people could now own a computer, creating a mass software market.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Altair 8800 1975
DRAM 1970

What it led to 6

IBM PC 1981
Macintosh 1984
World Wide Web 1991
MP3 audio compression 1993
GPU (GeForce 256) 1999
Human Genome Project 2003

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6

Transistors per microprocessor Latest: 58.2B transistors (2021) Source: Our World in Data

Internet users in the United States Latest: 322M people (2024) Source: Our World in Data