Developer Michael Donald Wise Release date 1975 (1975) Discontinued 1977 | Manufacturer Sphere Corporation Introductory price 860 US$ (Kit:Sphere 1) Units sold 1,300 | |
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The Sphere I was a personal computer completed in 1975 by Michael Donald Wise of Sphere Corporation, of Bountiful, Utah. The Sphere I featured a Motorola 6800 CPU, onboard ROM, a big Monitor, 4 KB of RAM, and a keyboard with a numeric keypad. Sphere I. The Sphere I was among the earliest microcomputers. Michael touted it as the first "true PC" because it had a keyboard, a number pad, a monitor, external storage, and did not run on a punch tape. When Byte Magazine did its annual history of the computer, it always included Sphere 1, showing that prior microcomputers lacked the user I/O interface built into the Sphere I.
The Sphere 1 also included a keyboard operated reset feature consisting of two keys wired in series that sent a reset signal to the CPU triggering a Hard reboot. Wise considered this to be the first keyboard activated reset - a predecessor to the now-common Control-Alt-Delete combination.