History and Development of DOS, The

Personal computers began appearing in the mid 1970's, initially as hobbyist toys that didn't even have keyboards or screens. The first real one, named Altair by a magazine editor's 12-year old daughter who liked a Star Trek episode that took place in that solar system, was built around a jazzed-up calculator chip, the Intel 8080. Produced as a do-it-yourself kit by a company called MITS, it came with 256 bytes of memory. Since it lacked a keyboard, you entered data by flipping switches on the front panel in binary sequence. Because it had no screen, you had to decode the patterns of blinking lights it produced. And it didn't let you store data permanently.