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by Popular Science
Not just for geeks anymore. Well, maybe you still needed to be
a little geeky. Before prebuilt, preprogrammed computers like
the Apple II and TRS-80 arrived, anyone who craved one of
these productivity tools needed kit-building and programming skills. Note the cassette data storage on the TRS-80, left.
We called them home computers, but the cognoscenti were fueling a business
revolution by sneaking them onto office desks. Among the early PCs on our cover were the Commodore PET, Apple II and TRS-80.
The computers came with between 8K and 60K of memory, about the amount required for a Palm Pilot add-on program today.