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By 1977 pre-assembled systems such as the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 (later dubbed the "1977 Trinity" by Byte Magazine) [44] began the era of mass-market home computers; much less effort was required to obtain an operating computer, and applications such as games, word processing, and spreadsheets began to proliferate.
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals.
Computer science is more theoretical (Turing's essay is an example of computer science), whereas software engineering is focused on more practical concerns. However, prior to 1946, software as we now understand it – programs stored in the memory of stored-program digital computers – did not yet exist.
The first stored-program transistor computer was the ETL Mark III, developed by Japan's Electrotechnical Laboratory [50] [51] [52] from 1954 [53] to 1956. [51] However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of specialized applications.
Apple Computer: Applesoft II BASIC 1980 Apple III Microsoft BASIC: Microsoft Microsoft BASIC 1980–81 CBASIC: Gordon Eubanks: BASIC, Compiler Systems, Digital Research 1980 Smalltalk-80 Adele Goldberg at Xerox PARC: Smalltalk-76 1981 TI Extended BASIC: Texas Instruments: TI BASIC (TI 99/4A) 1981 BBC BASIC: Acorn Computers, Sophie Wilson: BASIC ...
The LEO I computer (Lyons Electronic Office) became operational in April 1951 [129] and ran the world's first regular routine office computer job. On 17 November 1951, the J. Lyons company began weekly operation of a bakery valuations job on the LEO – the first business application to go live on a stored-program computer. [i]
The BK-0010, the most widely produced Soviet home computer. A program to expand computer literacy in Soviet schools was one of the first initiatives announced by Mikhail Gorbachev after he came to power in 1985. [55] That year, the Elektronika BK-0010 was the first Soviet personal computer in common use in schools and as a consumer product. [56]
Moreover, the lack of any sort of immediate feedback was a key problem; the machines of the era used batch processing and took a long time to complete a run of a program. While Kurtz was visiting MIT , John McCarthy suggested that time-sharing offered a solution; a single machine could divide up its processing time among many users, giving them ...