Go Computer Now!
A new book telling the story of Sphere Corporation, its remarkable machine, and a community of pioneers at the dawn of personal computing.
A new book telling the story of Sphere Corporation, its remarkable machine, and a community of pioneers at the dawn of personal computing.
Back in 1975, Bill Gates was a 19-year-old bumming Harvard computer time to craft a BASIC language and hackers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were still dreaming of hawking their first circuit board. The curtain was opening on the personal computer era, and a revolutionary idea was emerging from the small town of Bountiful, Utah.
Mike Wise, a young engineer and technology visionary, along with a handful of his passionate associates had designed and built a modular microcomputer. Instead of some Star Trek contraption, the Sphere-1 looked like... a desktop computer, instantly recognizeable to us today. It booted up to a blinking cursor, and it was affordable for an individual to own. There was nothing like it. When it worked.
But Mike had even bigger ambitions. He was grounded in IBM mainframes and DEC minicomputer technology, with an intuitive sense of what the brand new microprocessor chips could enable people to achieve. But before Sphere could get there, the company unraveled, leaving behind almost no trace in the annals of computing history.
Who was Mike Wise, and what happened to Sphere? Go Computer Now! How Sphere Corporation Invented the Modern Microcomputer... Then Disappeared is the story of a computer, a company, and a community of pioneers at the dawn of the personal computing age.Ben Zotto has devoted years to reconstructing the forgotten story of Sphere. Go Computer Now! is the result of dozens of interviews with the people involved, plus hundreds of hours in archives and substantial technical analysis. This book tells the story of Sphere Corp and Mike Wise, against the backdrop of the fast-changing beginnings of what we later called the personal computer industry. Scrupulously accurate but written to appeal to a nontechnical, curious audience, the text is profusely illustrated with photography and archival material, and features extensive notes and an index. Go Computer Now! is intended to be both a serious contribution to computing history and a fascinating tale of passionate people.
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Ben Zotto is a historian and writer on technology and design. He is also an engineer and sometime type designer. Ben has maintained a research site for this project at https://sphere.computer. This is his second book.