The swingin' seventies
 
In Washington, D.C., the Watergate burglars appeared before their judges. In New York (or some realm of the mind nearby), John Lennon and Yoko Ono formed a new country called Nutopia with no boundaries or laws and a national anthem of silence. Meanwhile, a new breed of computer developer was preparing to revolutionize the world; they could have starred in a soap opera that premiered in 1973: The Young and the Restless.

What happened to Ed Roberts?
 The man many consider the father of the personal computer, Ed Roberts, retired from the industry after a wrangle with Gates and Allen over the rights to BASIC. Today, he's a country doctor in the small town of Cochran, Georgia.
What happened to Gary Kildall?
Legend has it that in 1980, Kildall missed a crucial meeting with IBM about buying his operating system for their coming PC because he was out flying one of his planes. In reality, Kildall was only late for the meeting. But he still missed the boat by refusing IBM's offer of a $200,000 royalty-free license fee for CP/M. Bill Gates came up with a very similar OS called MS-DOS and sold it to IBM for $50,000. Kildall claimed Gates stole CP/M's best features and threatened to sue, but never did. On July 6, 1994, Kildall walked into a Monterey biker bar. He got into a brawl and consequently died of head injuries.
What happened to Digital Research?
CP/M died on the vine, but Digital Research continued to produce a variant of DOS until it was bought by Novell in 1991. Although it was a fine OS, DR-DOS never really competed in the Microsoft-dominated market.
1973
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) builds a computer using Engelbart's system of mouse, windows, icons, and menus; the system is a prototype of the Alto. Focused on research and development, Xerox has no plans to market the computer.

screen shot
Xerox PARC's Alto.

1974
Intel creates another zippy 8-bit processor, the 8080, capable of addressing a whopping 64K of RAM memory. That's about a thousandth the amount of RAM needed to run a Windows NT server.

The first personal computer kit is developed. Creator Ed Roberts names it the Altair, after the star where the Enterprise is going in that week's Star Trek rerun.

Digital Equipment Corporation employee (and soon-to-be Digital Research chairman) Gary Kildall develops a single-user operating system called control program/monitor (CP/M) and begins consulting with Intel. Adapted from Unix, CP/M becomes the model for Seattle Computer Products' 86-QDOS (which we'll hear of again in the 1980s).

Take me to '75-'77; I want to keep swinging with the seventies! next