John Mauchly and Carl Helmers

Notes about this photo by Carl Helmers, January 2004

This photograph was taken August 28, 1976 after an evening banquet at the world's first personal computing trade show, held at an ancient and dilapidated 1920s era hotel in Atlantic City New Jersey before that city's casino gambling renaissance a couple of years later in the 1980s. [I found the date in my story about the banquet on page 16 of the November 1976 BYTE.]

The organizer of the Personal Computer Festival, one John Dilks, arranged to have me sit at the head table next to Dr. Mauchly, who co-invented the electronic digital computer with another University of Pennsylvania EE professor, J. Presper Eckert circa 1947. Their design, the Univac, became a company. [Mr. Dilks, when not an amateur show promoter, had a full time career as a phone company technician!]

During the banquet, I sat in the center of the head table, between John and his wife Kathleen[name?.] Kathleen had been involved with electronic computation from the start, was as excited about the idea of a personal computer as John, myself or any of the other attendees at that banquet.

We three had a wonderful hour long conversation over dinner about the excitement and prospect of the nascent personal computer ideas… There may have been as many as 100 other personal computer cognoscente from across North America and the world present at the various tables, holding similar dinner conversations about the nascent field.

The Univac computer firm became conomically marginalized as one of what the computer press of the time called the "Seven Dwarves" of the mainframe computer world after IBM became the dominant the mainframe computer supplier in the early 1960's with superior marketing and comparable products. But as Dr. Mauchly told me over dinner, he left Univac a few years after it was founded, before IBM came along.

A Note about Carl Helmers, BYTE & Personal Computers in August 1976

I was then only a little over a year into my 1975-1980 time as co-owner, co-founder, first editor and guiding spirit of the world's first successful personal computing magazine, BYTE. At that time before the later IBM PC design began to dominate the market in the early 1980's, one major way to get a personal computer was to read the IC documentation, purchase “wire wrap” sockets and integrated circuits, then hand wire the connections of the computer oneself with a "wire wrap" tool, as I first did circa 1974 using the Intel 8008 microprocessor (introduced in 1972) and various integrated circuit support parts.

Other would-be personal computer owners with more funds than I purchased minicomputer systems from the likes of DEC or Data General. After BYTE started, one could also purchase one of the half dozen or so "S-100" bus designs [sans software] inspired by the MITS Inc. "Altair" design that was published in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, a print magazine of the time.

Such S-100 Bus designs were implementations of the example system design found in an Intel applications manual for the 8080 microprocessor… with particular numbered signal lines assigned to the same pin numbers of a 100 pin “backplane” circuit board connector socket. If I correctly recall, this assignment came right from the Intel manual's example diagram, though I no longer have any of the manuals to verify this.

An S-100 bus computer itself had no built in display or keyboard – or even any kind of random access mass storage. Such essential details were left to the purchaser to figure out that he or she needed them, and how to purchase or build circuit cards to provide these details. Complete integrated computer systems had to wait a few more years to appear on the market.

Bill Gates' [and Microsoft's] first software product was a paper tape BASIC interpreter for the Altair / S-100 bus machines using a hard copy / paper tape Teletype machine as a user terminal and punched paper tape storage system, sans operating system! As had been the case for years in minicomputers, one first loaded the Basic interpreter in from paper tape, then went ahead loading the BASIC program line by line or by reading a previously punched tape. After working with the program for a while in memory, one saved it by punching it to a new paper tape file! Out of such crude beginnings, major commercial enterprises of today grew!

All the major players of the nascent pre-IBM personal computer world were at that first homegrown trade show: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniac [Apple,] Dr. Harry Garland [a Stanford University EE professor and founder of a late 1970's 8080 based graphics oriented computer manufacturer called Cromemco,] Bill Gates and his paper tape BASIC interpreter, Jim Warren [a founder of the West Coast Computer Faire] in San Francisco the next year and the many now-forgotten pioneering hardware and software entrepreneurs of the 1975 to 1981 era…

If I recall correctly, John Dilks had a second Atlantic City NJ Personal Computer Festival a year later, then a final Personal Computer Festival in Philadelphia PA a year or so later after the advent of casino gambling changed Atlanatic City forever. After that, Jim Warren's The West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco [closer to many of the manufacturers] successfully took over the PC trade show niche.

by Carl Helmers, last updated August 2, 2006