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Before the Apple-1, a Utah Company Sold the Computer You Use Today
In 1975, Mike Wise’s Sphere put a screen, keyboard and cursor in one box. By March 1976 he was out of his own company.
You type a letter on a keyboard, and the symbol appears on your screen. You touch an arrow key, and a blinking cursor moves across the text. You turn on a computer, and a prompt waits for your instruction.
Every person sitting at a desk takes this sequence for granted. In 1975, it was not the standard. Early microcomputers arrived as bare circuit boards or metal boxes covered in switches and lights. Loading instructions meant flipping front-panel toggles. Reading output meant wiring a teletype or watching diodes.
Mike Wise saw a different path. In spring 1975, Wise was twenty-five years old. He had studied computer science at Brigham Young University and worked designing software for minicomputers until he was laid off. In Bountiful, Utah, near Salt Lake City, Wise decided to build his own microcomputer company. He founded Sphere Corporation.
The microcomputer Wise set out to build was based on Motorola’s 6800 microprocessor, with 4K of dynamic memory and memory-mapped video. In the integrated version, Sphere housed a screen and a keyboard together in one…
