Few people have heard of it, yet John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 was the first commercially available personal computer.
Texas Instruments CC-40 - A Flawed Gem
By James Grahame
I’ve always had a soft spot for tiny computers and the TI Compact Computer 40 was a gem – it
demonstrated the advantage of blending TI’s home computer and pocket calculator
expertise. Unfortunately, it offered no external program storage, since it was
intended to work with a miniscule wafertape drive which turned out to be too
unreliable for real-world use.
CC-40 was built around a single-line 31-character LCD display, and included a version of TI BASIC that was largely compatible with the 99/4A. The base configuration offered 6K memory, but it could be expanded to 18K.
I suspect this system could have made a huge in the engineering and scientific markets. It was small enough to carry around, and powerful enough to run specialized programs.
A brief Compact Computer 40 writeup (99er.net)
