Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets, and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills. This digital device was released in 1971, ...

Back before the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) hand built and peddled an Apple-I system to a local computer store in Mountain View, California, there was a man named John Blankenbaker working in his ...

When thinking of the first PCs, most of us might imagine something like the Apple I or the TRS-80. But even before that, there were a set of computers that often had no keyboard, or recognizable ...

One of only ten surviving Kenbak-1 personal computers from 1971 has sold at auction for €34,000 (US$36,500). Judged the "first commercially available personal computer" in 1987 by a panel at the ...

John Blankenbaker is a computer engineer and consultant who lived in Brentwood, California, USA. Blankenbaker, who got some money in 1970, thought, "It's time to build a small computer that will ...

The world's first commercial personal computer (PC) has been put up auction in Germany. The PC called Kenbak-1 first went on sale in 1971, about five years before the launch of the highly popular ...

For those of us who are of a certain age or temperament, there’s a certain something about programming simple 8-bit computers in machine code using switches and pushbuttons. According to Wikipedia, ...

Ever heard of the KENBAK-1? Recognized as the first personal computer, created by John Blankenbaker and sold in 1971 in comparatively small numbers, it’s now a piece of history. But don’t let that ...

The Kenbak-1 apparently predates the Altair and is the earliest “personal” microcomputer in existence. To use it you flipped a bunch of switches and watched the lights. A PS3 this definitely wasn’t. A ...

Back before the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) hand built and peddled an Apple-I system to a local computer store in Mountain View, California, there was a man named ...

When the definitive history of the personal computer is written, familiar and historic names such as Olivetti, Apple, IBM, will all be given recognition for their innovations of the 1960s and 1970s.