Why does no one remember Sphere?
Go Computer Now! — the story of a tiny Utah company that beat Apple and Commodore to market with an all-in-one desktop computer in 1975 before vanishing from history.
Buy the book — $39
Go Computer Now! — the story of a tiny Utah company that beat Apple and Commodore to market with an all-in-one desktop computer in 1975 before vanishing from history.
Buy the book — $39
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 recognizable 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 and Mike Wise, against the backdrop of the fast-changing beginnings of what we later called the personal computer industry. Vividly detailed yet 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 both a serious contribution to computing history and a fascinating tale of passionate people.
448 pages, hardcover with printed dustjacket. ISBN 979-8-99-871060-5. There is a Press Kit available for interested media.
Published April 2026
“Sphere might have been another Commodore — or even Apple. Instead, only Ben is here to tell its riveting tale.”
“Honestly, if there weren't a listing for Sphere on Wikipedia, I'd think this was a hoax.”
The Sphere was a real machine, and you can use one right now. The companion research site, sphere.computer, hosts an in-browser emulator of the original 1975 Sphere computer, alongside a gallery of original hardware, advertisements, and the deeper company archive used as source material for the book.
The author's newsletter with research outtakes, archive finds, and stories that didn't fit in the book. Occasional emails (about once a month), no spam.