1947
-Three scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen demonstrate their new invention of the point-contact transistor amplifier.

1970
-Gilbert Hyatt files a patent application entitled "Single Chip Integrated Circuit Computer Architecture", the first basic patent on the microprocessor.
-Information Sciences contacts Bill Gates and Paul Allen, offering them PDP-10 computer time in exchange for their programming expertise.

1974
-Scelbi sells its last Scelbi-8H, discontinuing hardware to concentrate on software.
-Popular Electronics publishes an article by MITS announcing the Altair 8800 computer for US$439 in kit form. It uses the Intel 8080 processor. The Altair pictured on the cover of the magazine is actually a mock-up, as an actual computer was not available.
-Les Solomon, publisher of Popular Electronics, receives Altair number 0001.

1975
-Paul Terrell opens the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California, one of the first computer stores in the US.
-IMSAI hires Ed Faber as Director of Sales.
-Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh begin work on a complete computer, 8080-based with a keyboard and color video display capabilities built-in.

1976
-Bill Gates drops out of Harvard.
-Michael Shrayer completes writing Electric Pencil, the first popular word-processing program for microcomputers.
-Shugart announces its 5.25 inch "minifloppy" disk drive for US$390.
-Dick Wilcox demonstrates his Alpha Micro, a multi-user CPU board, at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
-Don French and Steve Leininger are given official blessings to develop a microcomputer for Radio Shack.
-Steve Wozniak and Randy Wigginton demonstrate the first prototype Apple II at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting.

1977
-At an executive board meeting at Apple Computer, president Mike Markkula lists the floppy disk drive as the company's top goal.
-Microsoft wins a legal battle with Pertec, on ownership of the BASIC Gates and Allen wrote and licensed to MITS.

1978
-Epson announces the MX-80 dot matrix printer, which established a new standard in high performance with low price for printers.
-Atari announces the Atari 400 and 800 personal computers, using the 6502 microprocessor. The Atari 800 was code-named "Colleen".

1979
-The first Comdex show is held in Las Vegas.
-A group of Apple Computer engineers is given a demo of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center's Alto computer system, in exchange for Xerox buying 100,000 Apple Computer shares for US$1 million.
-Sears begins selling Atari home computers.

1980
-The archetypical fantasy adventure game, Zork, is brought from a mainframe at M.I.T. into the world of microcomputers by Infocom, which was founded for the purpose.
-IBM delivers the first PC prototype to Microsoft, so they can begin developing BASIC and the machine's operating system.
-Apple Computer becomes a publicly held company, selling 4.6 million shares at US$22 per share. More than 40 Apple employees and investors become instant millionaires.
-Seattle Computer Products renames QDOS to 86-DOS, releasing it as version 0.3. Microsoft then bought non-exclusive rights to market 86-DOS.

pcbiography.net

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