Puzzle video game
Puzzle video games make up a unique genre of video games that emphasize puzzle solving. The types of puzzles can test many problem-solving skills including logic, pattern recognition, sequence solving, word completion; the player may have unlimited time or infinite attempts to solve a puzzle, or there may be a time limit, or simpler puzzles may be made difficult by having to complete them in real time, as in Tetris. The genre is broad, but it involves some level of abstraction and may make use of colors, numbers, physics, or complex rules. Unlike many video games, puzzle video games do make use of "lives" that challenge a player by limiting the number of tries. In puzzle video games, players try for a high score or to progress to the next level by getting to a certain place or achieving some criteria. Puzzle games focus on logical and conceptual challenges the possibility of a zero sum game is present, although the games add time-pressure or other action-elements. Although many action games and adventure games involve puzzles such as obtaining inaccessible objects, a true puzzle game focuses on puzzle solving as the primary gameplay activity.
Games involve shapes, colors, or symbols, the player must directly or indirectly manipulate them into a specific pattern. Rather than presenting a random collection of puzzles to solve, puzzle games offer a series of related puzzles that are a variation on a single theme; this theme could involve logic, or understanding a process. These games have a simple set of rules, where players manipulate game pieces on a grid, network or other interaction space. Players must unravel clues in order to achieve some victory condition, which will allow them to advance to the next level. Completing each puzzle will lead to a more difficult challenge, although some games avoid exhausting the player by offering easier levels between more difficult ones. In adventure games, some stages require solving puzzles as a way to advance the story. There is a large variety of puzzle game types; some feed to the player a random assortment of blocks or pieces that they must organize in the correct manner, such as Tetris and Lumines.
Others present a preset game board or pieces and challenge the player to solve the puzzle by achieving a goal. Puzzle games are easy to develop and adapt, being implemented on dedicated arcade units, home video game consoles, personal digital assistants, mobile phones. An action puzzle or arcade puzzle requires that the player manipulates game pieces in a real-time environment on a single screen and with a time limit, to solve the puzzle or clear the level; this is a broad term, used to describe several subsets of puzzle game. Firstly, it includes falling-block puzzles such as Tetris and KLAX, it includes games with characters moving through an environment, controlled either directly or indirectly. This can cross-over with other action genres: a platform game which requires a novel mechanic to complete levels might be a "puzzle platformer", such as manipulating time in Braid, it includes other action games that require timing and accuracy with pattern-matching or logic skills, such as the first-person Portal and The Talos Principle.
Other notable action puzzle games include Team Ico's Ico, a linear, story driven game with puzzles based around traversing puzzle environments while protecting a helpless companion. Made by Team Ico is Shadow of the Colossus, a game in which the player solves puzzles that involve finding and exploiting the weaknesses of giant beasts in combat. Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is another example of an action puzzle game, the primary objective being to seek out and solve physics-based puzzles which offer helpful upgrades for defeating the final boss. A hidden object game is a genre of puzzle video game in which the player must find items from a list that are hidden within a picture. Hidden object games are a popular trend in casual gaming, are comparatively inexpensive to buy. Time-limited trial versions of these games are available for download. An early hidden object game was Alice: An Interactive Museum. Computer Gaming World reported in 1993 that "one disadvantage of searching through screen after screen for'switches' is that after a while one develops a case of'clickitus' of the fingers as one punches that mouse button like a chicken pecking at a farmyard".
Other early incarnations are the video game adaptations of the I Spy books published by Scholastic Corporation since 1997. Publishers of hidden object games include Sandlot Games, Big Fish Games, Awem Studio, SpinTop Games, Codeminion. Examples of hidden object game series include Awakening, Antique Road Trip, Dream Chronicles, Mortimer Beckett, Mystery Trackers, Hidden Expedition and Mystery Case Files. A reveal the picture game is a type of puzzle game that features piece-by-piece revealing of a photo or picture. A free online example is PicTAPr. A physics game is a type of puzzle video game wherein the player must use the game's physics to complete each puzzle. Physics games use realistic physics to make games more challenging; the genre is popular in online flash games and mobile games. Educators have used these games to demonstrate principles of physics. Popular physics games include The Incredible Machine, World of Goo, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Portal, Portal 2, Monster Strike and The Talos Principle.
In tile-matching video games, the player manipulates tiles in o
Amiga
The Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model was part of a wave of 16- and 32-bit computers that featured 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, improved graphics and audio over 8-bit systems; this wave included the Atari ST—released the same year—Apple's Macintosh, the Apple IIGS. Based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, the Amiga differed from its contemporaries through the inclusion of custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites and a blitter, a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaOS; the Amiga 1000 was released in July 1985, but a series of production problems kept it from becoming available until early 1986. The best selling model, the Amiga 500, was introduced in 1987 and became one of the leading home computers of the late 1980s and early 1990s with four to six million sold; the A3000, introduced in 1990, started the second generation of Amiga systems, followed by the A500+, the A600 in March 1992.
As the third generation, the A1200 and the A4000 were released in late 1992. The platform became popular for gaming and programming demos, it found a prominent role in the desktop video, video production, show control business, leading to video editing systems such as the Video Toaster. The Amiga's native ability to play back multiple digital sound samples made it a popular platform for early tracker music software; the powerful processor and ability to access several megabytes of memory enabled the development of several 3D rendering packages, including LightWave 3D, Aladdin4D, TurboSilver and Traces, a predecessor to Blender. Although early Commodore advertisements attempt to cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine when outfitted with the Amiga Sidecar PC compatibility add-on, the Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer, with a wide range of games and creative software. Poor marketing and the failure of the models to repeat the technological advances of the first systems meant that the Amiga lost its market share to competing platforms, such as the fourth generation game consoles and the dropping prices of IBM PC compatibles which gained 256-color VGA graphics in 1987.
Commodore went bankrupt in April 1994 after the Amiga CD32 model failed in the marketplace. Since the demise of Commodore, various groups have marketed successors to the original Amiga line, including Genesi, Eyetech, ACube Systems Srl and A-EON Technology. AmigaOS has influenced replacements and compatible systems such as MorphOS, AmigaOS 4 and AROS. "The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that nobody—including Commodore's marketing department—could articulate what it was all about. Today, it's obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a game machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics and video. Nine years vendors are still struggling to make systems that work like 1985 Amigas." Jay Miner joined Atari in the 1970s to develop custom integrated circuits, led development of the Atari 2600's TIA. As soon as its development was complete, the team began developing a much more sophisticated set of chips, CTIA, ANTIC and POKEY, that formed the basis of the Atari 8-bit family.
With the 8-bit line's launch in 1979, the team once again started looking at a next generation chipset. Nolan Bushnell had sold the company to Warner Communications in 1978, the new management was much more interested in the existing lines than development of new products that might cut into their sales. Miner wanted to start work with the new Motorola 68000, but management was only interested in another 6502 based system. Miner left the company, for a time, the industry. In 1979, Larry Kaplan founded Activision. In 1982, Kaplan was approached by a number of investors. Kaplan hired Miner to run the hardware side of the newly formed company, "Hi-Toro"; the system was code-named "Lorraine" in keeping with Miner's policy of giving systems female names, in this case the company president's wife, Lorraine Morse. When Kaplan left the company late in 1982, Miner was promoted to head engineer and the company relaunched as Amiga Corporation. A breadboard prototype was completed by late 1983, shown at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show.
At the time, the operating system was not ready, so the machine was demonstrated with the Boing Ball demo. A further developed version of the system was demonstrated at the June 1984 CES and shown to many companies in hopes of garnering further funding, but found little interest in a market, in the final stages of the North American video game crash of 1983. In March, Atari expressed a tepid interest in Lorraine for its potential use in a games console or home computer tentatively known as the 1850XLD, but the talks were progressing and Amiga was running out of money. A temporary arrangement in June led to a $500,000 loan from Atari to Amiga to keep the company going; the terms required the loan to be repaid at the end of the month, otherwise Amiga would forfeit the Lorraine design to Atari. During 1983, Atari lost over $1 million a week, due to the combined effects of the crash and the ongoing price war in the home computer market. By the end of the year, Warner was desperate to sell the company.
In January 1984, Jack Tramiel resigned from Commodore due to internal battles over the future direction of the company. A number of Commodore employees followed him to Tramiel Technology; this included a number of the senior technical staff, where they began development of a 68000-based machine of the
PC-9800 series
The PC-9800 series shortened to PC-98 or 98, is a lineup of Japanese 16-bit and 32-bit personal computers manufactured by NEC from 1982 through 2000. The platform established NEC's dominance in the Japanese personal computer market, by 1999, more than 18 million PC-98 units had been sold. NEC's Electronic Device Sales division launched the PC-8001 in 1979, it dominated 40% of the Japanese personal computer market in 1981; the vice president of NEC, Atsuyoshi Ōuchi thought "It is sure that we cannot deny contributions of Electronic Devices group as a parent of the personal computer. However, if personal computers are considered computers, Information Processing group should handle them in NEC. If personal computers are considered home electronics, we cannot deny a proposal from New Nippon Electric.". In April 1981, NEC decided to expand personal computer lines into three groups, New Nippon Electric did 8-bit home computers, Information Processing group did 16-bit business personal computers, Electronic Devices group did other personal computers.
In the Information Processing Small Systems division, Shunzō Hamada directed the project, Noboru Ozawa did the product planning. The development team planned the new personal computer as a small version of the business computer line which originated from the NEAC System 100 of 1973. Kazuya Watanabe, who directed the development of PC-8001, criticized that the personal computer must have Microsoft BASIC, provided peripheral devices compatible with previous NEC PCs, disclosed specifications of its expansion slot. In September 1981, Hamada requested Ascii's Kazuhiko Nishi to rewrite the N88-BASIC for the Intel 8086 processor. Nishi responded. Three months Nishi rejected his request because Microsoft was busy for developing GW-BASIC. Hamada wavered between two choices. While they were visiting software companies to collect and research applications for PC-8001 and PC-8801, they discovered that the consumer market wanted a 16-bit machine compatible with both PCs. Hamada decided to adopt two plans for different markets.
In April 1982, the small business personal computer became the NEC System 20 model 15 which used a proprietary 16-bit microprocessor. The machine was introduced as a new model of traditional business computers, so it wasn't notable. In February 1982, the software development team started the reverse engineering of N88-BASIC and the design of N88-BASIC. After the schedule estimation finished in the end of March 1982, the development of PC-9801, named N-10 Project, had started; the prototype of PC-9801 was completed in the end of July 1982. The code of N88-BASIC was written from scratch, but Nishi pointed the bytecode matched Microsoft's, it was unclear. Nishi proposed to Hamada that NEC must have purchased the same amount of Microsoft's product corresponded to the license fee, N88-BASIC must show copyright notification of both Microsoft and NEC. Hamada approved it; the team considered third-part developers were important for spreading the market. They provided technical information for independent companies without a fee.
In the Information Processing group, the Terminal Units division launched a personal computer series N5200 in 1981, branded as the personal terminal. It used a µPD7220 display controller, its architecture was similar to PC-98, but it ran a proprietary operating system named PTOS. The series was considered as an intelligent terminal or a workstation, it was distinguished with personal computer lines. For this market, Fujitsu released the FACOM 9450 in 1981, IBM Japan released the Multistation 5550 in 1983; the first model, the PC-9801, was launched in October 1982, employed an 8086 CPU. It ran at a clock speed of 5 MHz, with two µPD7220 display controllers, shipped with 128 KB of RAM, expandable to 640 KB, its 8-color display had a maximum resolution of 640×400 pixels. When the PC-9801 was launched in 1982, it was priced at 298,000 yen; this model required an expensive 8-inch floppy disk drive or smaller capacity of 320 KB 5¼-inch floppy drive. The basic system only had the ability to display JIS X 0201 characters including numbers, English alphabets, half-width kana, so most users added an optional Kanji ROM board for using Japanese word processor.
Its successor, the PC-9801F employed an 8086-2 CPU, which could selectively run at a speed of either 5 or 8 MHz. The F2 model contained two 640 KB 5¼-inch 2DD floppy drives, JIS level 1 kanji font ROM, was priced at 398,000 yen, it received a positive reception from businesses. Fujitsu released the FM-16β in December 1984, it had an a 1.2 MB 5 1/4 - inch 2HD floppy drive. The FM-16β failed because it bundled the CP/M-86, not MS-DOS, was marketed by Fujitsu's Electronic Devices department instead of the Computers department, they modified their policies in mid-1985. In another opinion, Fujitsu bundled a business software package with the FM-11, it discouraged users from purchasing third-part softwares, forced a specific purpose of use; as a result, Fujitsu failed to expand their platform. Against the release of FM-16β, NEC introduced the PC-9801M2; this model couldn't read a 2DD floppy disk
Sega
Sega Games Co. Ltd. is a Japanese multinational video game developer and publisher headquartered in Tokyo. The company known as Sega Enterprises Ltd. and Sega Corporation, is a subsidiary of Sega Holdings Co. Ltd., part of Sega Sammy Holdings. Its international branches, Sega of America and Sega of Europe, are headquartered in Irvine and London. Sega's arcade division, once part of Sega Corporation, has existed as Sega Interactive Co. Ltd. a Sega Holdings subsidiary, since 2015. The company was founded by Martin Bromley as Nihon Goraku Bussan on June 3, 1960, which became known as Sega Enterprises, Ltd. after acquiring Rosen Enterprises, an importer of coin-operated games. Sega developed its first coin-operated game with Periscope in the late 1960s. In 1969, Sega was sold to Western Industries. Following a downturn in the arcade business in the early 1980s, Sega began to develop video game consoles, starting with the SG-1000 and Master System, but struggled against competitors such as the Nintendo Entertainment System.
In 1984, Sega executives David Rosen and Hayao Nakayama led a management buyout of the company with backing from CSK Corporation. Sega released its next console, the Sega Genesis, in 1988. Although it was a distant third in Japan, the Genesis found major success after the release of Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991 and outsold its main competitor, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, in the U. S; however in the decade, Sega suffered commercial failures such as the 32X, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast consoles. In 2001, Sega stopped manufacturing consoles to become a third-party developer and publisher, was acquired by Sammy Corporation in 2004. In the years since the acquisition, Sega has been more profitable, but has been criticized for prioritizing quantity of game releases over quality. Sega produces multi-million-selling game franchises including Sonic the Hedgehog, Total War, Yakuza, is the world's most prolific arcade game producer, it operates amusement arcades and produces other entertainment products, including Sega Toys.
Sega is a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings, a corporate conglomerate with over 60 individual subsidiaries. In 1940, American businessmen Martin Bromley, Irving Bromberg, James Humpert formed Standard Games in Honolulu, Hawaii, to provide coin-operated amusement machines to military bases, they saw that the increase in military personnel with the onset of World War II would create demand for entertainment at military bases. After the war, the founders sold Standard Games and established a new distributor, Service Games, named for the military focus. In 1951, the United States government outlawed slot machines in US territories, so in 1952 Bromley sent two employees, Richard Stewart and Ray LeMaire, to Tokyo to establish a new distributor; the company provided coin-operated slot machines to U. S. bases in Japan, by 1953 had changed its name to Service Games of Japan. The name Sega, an abbreviation of Service Games, was first used in 1954 on the Diamond Star Machine, a slot machine. On May 31, 1960, Service Games of Japan was dissolved.
On June 3, Bromley established two companies to take over its business activities: Nihon Goraku Bussan and Nihon Kikai Seizō. Kikai Seizō focused on manufacturing Sega machines, while Goraku Bussan served as a distributor and operator of coin-operated machines jukeboxes; the two companies merged in 1964. In 1954, David Rosen, an American officer in the United States Air Force stationed in Japan, launched a two-minute photo booth business in Tokyo; this company became Rosen Enterprises, in 1957 began importing coin-operated games to Japan. In 1965, Nihon Goraku Bussan acquired Rosen Enterprise to form Sega Enterprises, Ltd. Rosen was installed as the CEO and managing director. Shortly afterward, Sega stopped leasing to military bases and moved its focus from slot machines to become a publicly traded company of coin-operated amusement machines, its imports included Rock-Ola jukeboxes, pinball games by Williams, gun games by Midway Manufacturing. Because Sega imported second-hand machines that required maintenance, Sega began the transition from importer to manufacturer by constructing replacement guns and flippers for its imported games.
According to former Sega director Akira Nagai, this led to Sega developing their own games as well. The first electromechanical game Sega manufactured was the submarine simulator game Periscope, released worldwide in the late 1960s; the game sported light and sound effects considered innovative, was successful in Japan. It was placed in malls and department stores, it cost 25 cents per play in the United States. Sega was surprised by the success, for the next two years produced and exported between eight and ten games per year. Despite this, rampant piracy in the industry would lead to Sega stepping away from exporting its games. In order to advance the company, Rosen had a goal to take the company public, decided this would be easier to accomplish in the United States than in Japan. Rosen was advised that this would be easiest accomplished by Sega being acquired by a larger company. In 1969, Sega was sold to American conglomerate Gulf and Western Industries, although Rosen remained CEO following the sale.
Rosen continued to develop his relationship with Gulf and Western chairman Charles Bluhdorn, in 1974 Gulf and Western made Sega Enterprises, Ltd. a subsidiary of an American company renamed Sega Enterprises, Inc. Sega released Pong-Tron, its first video-based game, in 1973. Despite late competition from Taito's hit arcade game Space Invaders in 1978, Sega prospered from the arcade gam
Jawbreaker (Windows Mobile game)
Jawbreaker is a port of SameGame for the Pocket PC bundled with the Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 operating system for PDAs. The operating system, thus the game, was released on April 7, 2003; the game itself was developed by American studio oopdreams Inc.. Jawbreaker is listed as one of the "Core Applications" of the Windows Mobile software family, in a paper released by Microsoft. In Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows Mobile 6.0 it is called Bubble Breaker. The original non-bundled version of the game is available from the developer itself as Bubblets; the game-board consists of a screen of differently-colored balls arranged in a matrix. There are five different colors: red, green and purple; the player clicks on any two or more connecting similarly-colored balls to eliminate them from the matrix, earning an appropriate number of points in the process. The more balls eliminated; the scoring can be expressed in the formula "Y=X". X represents the number of balls grouped together, Y is the resulting score.
For example an elimination of 16 balls will result in 240 points. In the standard mode of the game, the game ends; the screen goes to the scoring screen, where statistics such as Average Score, Total Score and Games Played can be seen, along with a button that the player can press in order to start a new game. The Breaker Set option allows the player to choose between Greyscale Breakers; the first option sets the game balls' colors to the standard five colors. Choosing the latter changes the color palette and instead of differently-colored balls, the balls are adorned with various unique greyscale patterns allowing players with monochromatic Pocket PCs to play the game, as well as players who may be colorblind and have trouble differentiating the colored balls from one another; some of the patterns include colored balls, dark grey balls and a white ball with a dark dot in the middle. The player has four unique game styles to choose from, including Standard, described above; the other game styles are Continuous and MegaShift.
Continuous is one of the game styles available for Jawbreaker. This particular mode is similar to the standard mode, with one major difference. Whenever the player clears an entire column of balls, a new one arrives from the left side of the game board. New columns can be previewed in a small area at the bottom of the screen; as with the regular standard mode, the game ends when the player runs out of adjacent like-colored balls. MegaShift is another one of the game styles available for Jawbreaker; the major difference in this mode is the addition of a new column of balls whenever the player manages to clear an entire column of balls from the game board. Balls will always move to the right of the screen; the newly-appearing column of balls can be previewed at the bottom of the screen before they are brought on-board and they appear from the leftmost side of the game board. As with the other modes, the game ends. Shifter is one of the game styles available for Jawbreaker; this game mode is similar to the MegaShift mode in that balls will tend to gravitate towards the right part of the game board.
Unlike MegaShift mode however, the board has a finite number of balls and no new balls arrive to replenish the ones the player clicks off the game board. Windows Mobile 2003 was Jawbreaker's first inclusion into a packaged handheld operating system. Pocket PC operating systems prior to Windows Mobile 2003, ending with Pocket PC 2002 did not include the game, it has since been bundled with succeeding Windows Mobile releases, including Windows Mobile 2003 SE and Windows Mobile 5.0 & 6.0. Aside from being included in the Windows Mobile operating system, Jawbreaker is distributed by Oopdreams Software, Inc. under another name, Bubblets. Bubblets is almost-identical to Jawbreaker, with some slight semantic differences. Instead of balls, the player bursts bubbles, thus the name. Bubblets in this form is available for a much broader range of operating systems than the Jawbreaker version; the game is distributed as shareware for Pocket PC 2002/Windows Mobile 2003, Palm OS, the Handheld PC Pro platforms.
Bubblets is available for desktop PCs, with the official Windows version of Bubblets distributed as expiring shareware. As Bubblets, the game was a finalist for the Best Puzzle Game category of Pocket PC Magazine's Pocket PC Award Winners of 2001, won by another SameGame clone called PocketPop produced by PocketFun, it was given the People's Choice Award in the same event. The Palm OS version of the game Bubblet, was favorably reviewed by PDAStreet's Palm Boulevard. Geek.com was named a Geek.com pick. The game has been distributed as freeware for mobiles since June 2008; the mobile phone version called JawBreaker, was developed for those who did not have Jawbreaker-capable PDAs but had phones supporting Java ME. This iteration of the game could be run on mobile devices supporting Java ME CLDC 1.1/MIDP 2.0 with screen resolutions of 240×320 or 176×220. There is a JavaScript online version published as Google Gadget. Jawbreaker by Kurylo Dmytro Port to JavaScript on HTML Canvas Oopdreams Software, Inc. official website Google Gadget port to JavaScript
Personal computer
A personal computer is a multi-purpose computer whose size and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or technician. Unlike large costly minicomputer and mainframes, time-sharing by many people at the same time is not used with personal computers. Institutional or corporate computer owners in the 1960s had to write their own programs to do any useful work with the machines. While personal computer users may develop their own applications these systems run commercial software, free-of-charge software or free and open-source software, provided in ready-to-run form. Software for personal computers is developed and distributed independently from the hardware or operating system manufacturers. Many personal computer users no longer need to write their own programs to make any use of a personal computer, although end-user programming is still feasible; this contrasts with mobile systems, where software is only available through a manufacturer-supported channel, end-user program development may be discouraged by lack of support by the manufacturer.
Since the early 1990s, Microsoft operating systems and Intel hardware have dominated much of the personal computer market, first with MS-DOS and with Microsoft Windows. Alternatives to Microsoft's Windows operating systems occupy a minority share of the industry; these include free and open-source Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. Advanced Micro Devices provides the main alternative to Intel's processors; the advent of personal computers and the concurrent Digital Revolution have affected the lives of people in all countries. "PC" is an initialism for "personal computer". The IBM Personal Computer incorporated the designation in its model name, it is sometimes useful to distinguish personal computers of the "IBM Personal Computer" family from personal computers made by other manufacturers. For example, "PC" is used in contrast with "Mac", an Apple Macintosh computer.. Since none of these Apple products were mainframes or time-sharing systems, they were all "personal computers" and not "PC" computers.
The "brain" may one day come down to our level and help with our income-tax and book-keeping calculations. But this is speculation and there is no sign of it so far. In the history of computing, early experimental machines could be operated by a single attendant. For example, ENIAC which became operational in 1946 could be run by a single, albeit trained, person; this mode pre-dated the batch programming, or time-sharing modes with multiple users connected through terminals to mainframe computers. Computers intended for laboratory, instrumentation, or engineering purposes were built, could be operated by one person in an interactive fashion. Examples include such systems as the Bendix G15 and LGP-30of 1956, the Programma 101 introduced in 1964, the Soviet MIR series of computers developed from 1965 to 1969. By the early 1970s, people in academic or research institutions had the opportunity for single-person use of a computer system in interactive mode for extended durations, although these systems would still have been too expensive to be owned by a single person.
In what was to be called the Mother of All Demos, SRI researcher Douglas Engelbart in 1968 gave a preview of what would become the staples of daily working life in the 21st century: e-mail, word processing, video conferencing, the mouse. The demonstration required technical support staff and a mainframe time-sharing computer that were far too costly for individual business use at the time; the development of the microprocessor, with widespread commercial availability starting in the mid 1970's, made computers cheap enough for small businesses and individuals to own. Early personal computers—generally called microcomputers—were sold in a kit form and in limited volumes, were of interest to hobbyists and technicians. Minimal programming was done with toggle switches to enter instructions, output was provided by front panel lamps. Practical use required adding peripherals such as keyboards, computer displays, disk drives, printers. Micral N was the earliest commercial, non-kit microcomputer based on a microprocessor, the Intel 8008.
It was built starting in 1972, few hundred units were sold. This had been preceded by the Datapoint 2200 in 1970, for which the Intel 8008 had been commissioned, though not accepted for use; the CPU design implemented in the Datapoint 2200 became the basis for x86 architecture used in the original IBM PC and its descendants. In 1973, the IBM Los Gatos Scientific Center developed a portable computer prototype called SCAMP based on the IBM PALM processor with a Philips compact cassette drive, small CRT, full function keyboard. SCAMP emulated an IBM 1130 minicomputer in order to run APL/1130. In 1973, APL was available only on mainframe computers, most desktop sized microcomputers such as the Wang 2200 or HP 9800 offered only BASIC; because SCAMP was the first to emulate APL/1130 performance on a portable, single user computer, PC Magazine in 1983 designated SCAMP a "revolutionary concept" and "the world's first personal computer". This seminal, single user portable computer now resides in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.
C.. Successful demonstrations of the 1973 SCAMP prototype led to the IBM 5100 portable microcomputer launched in 1975 with the ability to be programmed in both APL and BASIC for engineers, analysts and other business problem-solvers. In the late 1960s such a machine would have been nearly as large as two desks and would have weigh
