The Birth of the PC

Guest: Margaret O’Mara, Professor of History, University of Washington If you’ve thought about it at all, you probably think your computer mouse first appeared on the early Apple computers around 1983. Few realize that Apple kind of stole the idea. The mouse actually debuted fifteen years earlier at a famous 1968 demo in San Francisco — along with several other key pieces of what became the personal computer. If the PC was born in the 1980s, then that event in San Francisco in 1968 was its ultrasound.