The first personal computer spawned revolutions in machine capability, gaming and entertainment, productivity, connectivity, the Internet and smartphones.

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the personal computer, and the relevance of this event to our modern technologically driven society cannot be overstated.

In 1975, the January and February issues of Popular Electronics magazine hit newsstands announcing an affordable computer kit catered to the individual. While large expensive mainframe computers have existed since the mid-1940s, they were complicated, electricity-hungry and incredibly expensive.

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For those reasons, computer ownership historically tended to be the exclusive domain of large organizations and companies.

Tech people had always lusted over the idea of owning a computer; the break-through that finally made personal ownership possible was a general-purpose microprocessor chip created by Intel in 1971, with newer variants containing significant improvements arriving in both 1972 and 1974.

While there were attempts at building a general-purpose computer around Intel’s chips as early as 1973 (in Canada yet! Read Inventing the PC: The MCM/70 Story by Zbigniew Stachniak), the machine that arguably sparked the pc revolution — was the Altair 8800 of 1975.

Arguably rough around the edges, the Altair hit newsstand headlines at exactly the right moment when society was eager to embrace it.

The Altair was a computer “kit” and it had to be assembled. Fingers crossed that it worked; there were no guarantees. In its basic configuration, there was no display or keyboard. To enter a single number, a person flipped eight binary switches on the front panel.

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The Altair spat out results of computations in the........

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