Engineers Who Helped Make Computing Personal

The mouse and interactive computing. At the Stanford Research Institute Engelbart's team built the oN-Line System, and in a 1968 San Francisco demonstration he showed a mouse, windows of text, hypertext links, shared editing and video calls, all at once. He conceived the mouse and holds its patent; Bill English built it. Few of his systems sold, but the people he influenced built the personal computer. He died in 2013.

Building the mouse. English, Engelbart's chief engineer, turned his sketch into the first working mouse in 1964, a wooden box with two wheels, and engineered the cameras, links and screens that made the 1968 demonstration possible. He moved to Xerox PARC in 1971, where his team replaced the wheels with a rolling ball, the design used by most mice for the next thirty years. He died in 2020.

The microprocessor architecture. When the Japanese calculator maker Busicom asked Intel in 1969 for a set of custom chips, Hoff proposed instead a general-purpose processor that software could adapt to any task, and worked out its architecture with Stan Mazor. That became the 4004 of 1971, the first commercial single-chip microprocessor, and the principle of one cheap programmable chip underlies every personal computer since.

Making the microprocessor real. Faggin had developed silicon-gate chip technology at Fairchild, and at Intel he led the logic and circuit design that turned Hoff's 4004 architecture into working silicon in 1971, with Busicom's Masatoshi Shima; he etched his initials on the chip. He went on to lead the 8008 and 8080, co-founded Zilog, whose Z80 powered many early home computers, and later co-founded Synaptics, the maker of laptop touchpads.

The Dynabook idea and overlapping windows. In 1972 Kay described the Dynabook, a book-sized computer for children, years before such hardware was possible. At Xerox PARC his Learning Research Group built Smalltalk, an object-oriented language whose graphical environment on the Alto introduced overlapping windows and pop-up menus. Much of what Apple and later Microsoft shipped drew on that work. He received the Turing Award in 2003.

Smalltalk-80. Goldberg joined Kay's group at PARC in 1973, ran its experiments teaching children to program and co-developed Smalltalk with Dan Ingalls and others. She led the work that released Smalltalk-80 beyond Xerox and co-wrote the books that defined it, and in 1979 she was among those who demonstrated the Alto to Steve Jobs's visiting team. She later co-founded ParcPlace to sell Smalltalk tools.

The Alto. Thacker designed the hardware of the Xerox Alto in 1973, a computer meant for one person with a bitmapped portrait screen, a mouse and a network connection, and he contributed to Ethernet alongside it. About two thousand were built for research rather than sale, but the Alto showed what a personal workstation could be. He later worked on the Tablet PC at Microsoft and received the Turing Award in 2009. He died in 2017.

Why Alto. Lampson's 1972 memo made the case for giving every researcher a computer of their own, and he designed much of the Alto's system software. With Charles Simonyi he built Bravo, the first editor to show text on screen as it would print, and he worked on the software for PARC's laser printers and networks. His principles of system design are still taught. He received the Turing Award in 1992.

WYSIWYG word processing. A Hungarian-born programmer, Simonyi wrote Bravo with Butler Lampson at PARC in 1974, the editor that first showed formatted text on screen exactly as it would print. Recruited to Microsoft in 1981, he carried the idea into Multiplan and Microsoft Word, leading their development and bringing PARC's approach to millions of ordinary office computers.

CP/M and the BIOS. Kildall wrote CP/M in 1974 to run a floppy disk drive on an Intel-based machine, and split out the small hardware-specific part into a separate layer he called the BIOS. That meant one operating system, and the programs written for it, could run on hundreds of different makers' computers, the first real software market for microcomputers. His company, Digital Research, missed the IBM PC deal, and MS-DOS borrowed CP/M's design. He died in 1994.

Cut, copy and paste. Tesler disliked software that switched between modes, where the same key did different things. At PARC in 1975 he and Tim Mott built Gypsy, an editor tested on non-programmers that introduced cut, copy and paste and selecting text by dragging the mouse. He took those ideas to Apple, working on the Lisa, the Macintosh and the Newton. He died in 2020.

The Altair 8800. Roberts ran MITS, a small Albuquerque electronics firm, and designed the Altair 8800 around Intel's 8080, selling it as a kit for under 400 dollars from January 1975. Its magazine cover appearance set off the hobbyist computer boom, its expansion bus became the S-100 standard, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first BASIC for it. He later retrained as a country doctor in Georgia and died in 2010.

The 6502. Peddle left Motorola in 1974 with several colleagues, among them Bill Mensch, and at MOS Technology they designed the 6502, a processor sold in 1975 for 25 dollars when rivals cost several times as much. That price made cheap home computers possible: the 6502 ran the Apple II, the Commodore PET that Peddle himself designed, the BBC Micro and the Nintendo Entertainment System. He died in 2019.

The Sol-20 and the Osborne 1. Felsenstein moderated the Homebrew Computer Club, where hobbyists including Steve Wozniak swapped designs, and he believed computers should be open and repairable by their owners. He designed the Sol-20 of 1976, one of the first computers with a built-in keyboard and video output, and the Osborne 1 of 1981, the first commercially successful portable computer, which came bundled with its software.

The Apple I and Apple II. Wozniak designed the Apple I in 1976 and the Apple II of 1977 largely on his own, the latter a complete machine in a plastic case with colour graphics, sound and expansion slots, built with remarkably few chips. His Disk II floppy controller of 1978 did with a handful of parts what rivals needed whole boards for. Steve Jobs handled the business; the engineering was Wozniak's.

Graphics and sound chips. Miner designed the TIA chip that drew the picture and made the sound on the Atari 2600 console of 1977, then the graphics chips of the Atari 400 and 800 home computers. At Amiga he led the custom chipset of the Commodore Amiga of 1985, whose dedicated chips for graphics, sound and memory access gave a home computer animation and multitasking that rival machines could not match. He died in 1994.

VisiCalc. As a Harvard Business School student Bricklin imagined an electronic blackboard where changing one number recalculated every figure that depended on it. He designed VisiCalc with Bob Frankston, and when it went on sale for the Apple II in 1979 businesses bought the computer just to run it, the first program to sell hardware. Software could not easily be patented then, so the idea spread freely to Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel.

VisiCalc. Frankston, an MIT-trained programmer, wrote most of VisiCalc's code, squeezing a working spreadsheet into the 32 kilobytes of an Apple II, and co-founded Software Arts with Dan Bricklin to develop it. Getting a responsive recalculating grid onto such limited hardware was the engineering feat that turned Bricklin's idea into the program that made personal computers a business tool.

The Macintosh project. An interface specialist who had written Apple's manuals, Raskin started the Macintosh project in 1979 with the aim of an inexpensive computer that anyone could use without training, and recruited much of its early team, including Burrell Smith. Steve Jobs took the project over and changed its direction, and Raskin left in 1982, but the idea of the computer as an easy appliance was his. He died in 2005.

BBC BASIC and the ARM instruction set. At Acorn in Cambridge Wilson wrote BBC BASIC for the BBC Micro of 1981, a fast, structured language that taught a generation of British schoolchildren to program. From 1983 she designed the instruction set of the ARM processor with Steve Furber, a simple and power-efficient design whose descendants now run nearly every mobile phone. She works on chip design at Broadcom.

The BBC Micro and the ARM chip. Furber designed much of the BBC Micro's hardware at Acorn, a robust machine with plenty of ports that became the standard computer in British classrooms. He then led the hardware design of the first ARM processor, which worked first time in 1985, built to Sophie Wilson's instruction set by a very small team. As a professor at Manchester he went on to build SpiNNaker, a computer modelled on the brain.

The IBM PC's expansion bus. An IBM engineer, Dean worked on the original IBM PC of 1981 and with Dennis Moeller developed the expansion bus later known as ISA, which let other companies' printers, modems and graphics cards plug into the machine. He holds three of the nine patents on the original PC. That open slot design is a large part of why the PC became a standard that any maker could build to.

The ZX Spectrum. At Sinclair Research Altwasser designed the hardware of the ZX Spectrum of 1982, using a single custom chip to generate colour graphics cheaply, while Steve Vickers wrote most of its built-in software. Sold for little more than a hundred pounds, it put a colour computer into hundreds of thousands of British homes and started a generation of bedroom programmers and games companies.

QuickDraw, MacPaint and HyperCard. Atkinson wrote QuickDraw, the graphics code that drew windows, menus and overlapping regions fast enough on the modest hardware of the Lisa and Macintosh, along with much of their menu and window behaviour. MacPaint, bundled with the first Mac in 1984, showed ordinary people what a mouse was for, and his HyperCard of 1987 let non-programmers build linked, clickable stacks years before the web. He died in 2025.