The Sphere 1 was a personal computer completed in 1975 by Michael Donald Wise and Monroe Tyler of Sphere Corporation, of
Bountiful, Utah
Bountiful is Davis city. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 42,552, a three percent increase over the 2000 figure of 41,301. The city grew rapidly during the suburb growth of the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s and was Davis County's l ...
.
The Sphere 1 featured a
Motorola 6800
The 6800 ("''sixty-eight hundred''") is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the Motorola 6800 family, M6800 Microcomputer System (latter dubbed ''68xx' ...
CPU, onboard
ROM
Rom, or ROM may refer to:
Biomechanics and medicine
* Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient
* Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac
* ...
, a full-sized
CRT monitor
A cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, which emit electron beams that are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen. The images may represent electrical waveforms ( oscilloscope), pictu ...
, 4 KB of
RAM
Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to:
Animals
* A male sheep
* Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish
People
* Ram (given name)
* Ram (surname)
* Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director
* RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch
* ...
, and a
keyboard
Keyboard may refer to:
Text input
* Keyboard, part of a typewriter
* Computer keyboard
** Keyboard layout, the software control of computer keyboards and their mapping
** Keyboard technology, computer keyboard hardware and firmware
Music
* Musi ...
with a
numeric keypad
A numeric keypad, number pad, numpad, or ten key,
is the palm-sized, usually-17-key section of a standard computer keyboard, usually on the far right. It provides calculator-style efficiency for entering numbers. The idea of a 10-key nu ...
.
The Sphere 1 was among the earliest complete all-in-one microcomputers that could be plugged in, turned on, and was fully functional. Michael touted it as the first "true PC" because it had a keyboard, a number pad, a monitor, external storage, and did not run on a
punch tape
Five- and eight-hole punched paper tape
Paper tape reader on the Harwell computer with a small piece of five-hole tape connected in a circle – creating a physical program loop
Punched tape or perforated paper tape is a form of data storage ...
. In this respect, it is pre-dated by the 1973
MCM/70
The MCM/70 was a pioneering microcomputer first built in 1973 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and released the next year. This makes it one of the first microcomputers in the world, the second to be shipped in completed form, and the first portable co ...
, among others, but the Sphere included a full-sized display that these generally lacked. When
''BYTE'' Magazine did its annual history of the computer, it always included Sphere 1, showing that prior microcomputers lacked the user I/O interface built into the Sphere 1.
The Sphere 1 also included a keyboard-operated reset feature consisting of two keys wired in series that sent a reset signal to the CPU triggering a
hard reboot
In computing, rebooting is the process by which a running computer system is restarted, either intentionally or unintentionally. Reboots can be either a cold reboot (alternatively known as a hard reboot) in which the power to the system is physi ...
. Wise considered this to be the first keyboard activated reset a predecessor to the now-common
Control-Alt-Delete
Control-Alt-Delete (often abbreviated to Ctrl+Alt+Del, also known as the "three-finger salute" or "Security Keys") is a computer keyboard command on IBM PC compatible computers, invoked by pressing the Delete key while holding the Control and ...
combination.
Vintage Sphere Computer at the "Bugbook Historical Microcomputer Museum"
2013-03-10
It is not clear how many systems were sold; production models were sent to computer stores, but the company disappeared shortly thereafter.
References
External links
Sphere 1 Vintage Computer - Buy First "True" PC 1975
* (PDF's
Newsletters, Schematics, User manual
Personal computers
Computer-related introductions in 1975
68xx-based computers
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