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Personal Computer Origins: The Datapoint 2200
The innovative desktop terminal that paved the way for the first personal computers
In 1948, Manchester Baby, the first electronic programmable stored-program computer, had a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) display that allowed users to peer directly into its 32-bit word memory. There is a famous photo of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, collectively the creators of the Unix operating system and the C programming language, with the latter sitting at a Model 33 connected to a DEC PDP-11 Minicomputer. However, Pyle and Poor had compensated for this by including lots of registers, more than many much more expensive contemporary minicomputers, in order to reduce the frequency with which the Datapoint machine would need to access memory.
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