A little break from politics. Who manufactured one of the first personnel computers? Hint – it wasn’t IBM or Apple.
In the 70s and early 80s I worked at Tektronix as a manufacturing engineer in the CRT division. At the time Hiro Moriyasu developed the digital oscilloscope and the 4051 computer the best microprocessors were 8 bit which meant only 64K of memory could be addressed. As a result there was little or no memory for video. The solution was the Tektronix direct view storage tube. The CRT itself was a storage device. Early computer graphics was built around the DVST (direct view storage tube).
The Tektronix 4051 was the first desk top computer, although it was best if you had two desks since the 4051 nearly filled one of them. Programming was in TEK Basic and programs were stored on a tape drive. The cost in 1975 was $6,000 with 8K of memory.
If Tektronix had chosen to further develop the 4051 it might have been the IBM of today. I believe that one reason they didn’t was IBM was our largest customer for the DVST graphic displays.