Our Gizmodo ’79 celebration may have ended last week, but there’s room for a final post, written by famed retiree and mosquito wrangler Bill Gates. It’s no joke: Gates read the series then sent this in:

I read those 1979 stories all last week, and it put me in a nostalgic mood, so wanted to offer my own memory to add to the collection.

In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees, most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides indisputable proof that your average computer geek from the late 1970s was not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion. We started the year by moving from Albuquerque back to Bellevue, just across the lake from Seattle. By the end of the year we’d doubled in size to 28 employees. Even though we were doing pretty well, I was still kind of terrified by the rapid pace of hiring and worried that the bottom could fall out at any time.

What made me feel a little more confident was that 1979 was the year we began to sense that BASIC was right on the verge of becoming the standard language for microcomputers. We knew this could be the catalyst that would unlock the potential of the PC to democratize computing and create the right conditions for an explosion in programs and applications that would lead to really rapid growth of the PC market.

By the middle of 1979, BASIC was running on more than 200,000 Z-80 and 8080 machines and we were just releasing a new version for the 8086 16-bit microprocessor. As the numbers grew, we were starting to think beyond programming languages, too, and about the possibility of creating applications that would have real mass appeal to consumers. That led to the creation of the Consumer Products Division in 1979. One of our first consumer products was called Microsoft Adventure, which was a home version of the first mainframe adventure game. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of, say, Halo, but it was pretty interesting for its time.

Back in the 1970s, there was a publication called the International Computer Programs Directory that handed out what was known as the ICP Million Dollar Award for applications that had more than $1 million in annual sales. In the late 1970s the list included more than 100 different products, but they were all for mainframes. In April, the 8080 version of BASIC became the first software product built to run on microprocessors to win an ICP Million Dollar Award. That was a pretty good sign that a significant shift was underway.

Today, I would be surprised if the number of million-dollar applications isn’t in the millions itself, and they range from apps and games created by a single developer working at home that you can download to your cell phone to massive solutions built by huge development teams that run the operations of huge corporations.

More important, of course, is the fact that more than a billion people around the world use computers and digital technology as an integral part of their day-to-day lives. That’s something that really started to take shape in 1979.

Thanks for the memories, Bill—please keep us posted on that new beer keg of yours!

Microsoft Adventure shot found on YOIS

Even back then, there were computers for people who couldn’t afford the more expensive stuff. Take this Tandy, which costs little more than a upgraded Netbook today. From Core Memory, photographed by Mark Richards and written by John Alderman.

TRS-80 Model 1 (and Model 100)
Year created: 1977
Creator: Tandy Corporation
Cost: $399 ($599 with monitor)
Memory: 4KB ROM
Processor: Z-80

Despite Apple’s marketing message of personal empowerment and freedom, they weren’t giving away those Apple IIs. A computer—especially one with a price tag of $1,300 or more—was beyond the comfort range of most people in the country, and few parents considered such a thing necessary to child development. As far as business went, it would be a while before a “killer app”—a must-have application—would be developed for machines available at an affordable price.

The TRS-80 was in part an antidote to this. If parents were convinced of a computer’s necessity, but their pocketbooks couldn’t support an Apple, then $399, or even $99, was worth considering. For a business that wanted to experiment with computing, that was a reasonable asking price.

The system was developed by the Tandy buyer Don French and Homebrew Computer Club leader Steve Leininger, who was quoted by Creative Computing magazine at the time as saying he had rejected a company plan to sell a computer kit because “too many people can’t solder.” This was an interesting admission from the company that owned Radio Shack, famous at that time for selling electronics parts to hobbyists. Nevertheless, the TRS-80 was actually rather sophisticated. Four kilobytes of RAM were matched with 4K of ROM holding Radio Shack’s proprietary version of BASIC. The silver-and-black color scheme—even more than a beige box—evoked a kind of futuristic proletarian chic. Like other, similar systems, the TRS-80 used a cassette tape player as a storage device.

The early portable TRS-80 Model 100, designed by Kyocera and released in 1983, was evidence that, by that time, beige was winning the color war. Rugged and able to start up immediately, the Model 100 as utilitarian and much-beloved by traveling reporters.

Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum’s collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!

The above photographs were taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum’s Senior Curator Dag Spicer.

Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Gizmodo ’79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.