Sphere I

By admin , 15 December 2015
Sphere I
Description

The Sphere I was a personal computer completed in 1975 by Michael Donald Wise of Sphere Corporation, of Bountiful, Utah. The Sphere I featured a Motorola 6800 CPU, onboard ROM, Monitor, 4 KB of RAM, and a keyboard with a numeric keypad. Sphere I. The Sphere I was among the earliest microcomputers. 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. 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 I.

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. Wise considered this to be the first keyboard activated reset - a predecessor to the now-common Control-Alt-Delete combination.

Year First Manufactured
1975

Contact Us

  • Contact: Aaron C. Sylvan,
    Board Chair
  • Address: IT History Society
    534 Third Avenue
    Suite 1248
    Brooklyn, NY 11215
  • Email:      info@ithistory.org