Go Computer Now! How Sphere Corporation Invented the Modern Microcomputer—Then Disappeared

Go Computer Now! is the untold story of Sphere, the tiny Utah company that beat Apple and Commodore to market with an all-in-one desktop computer in 1975, before vanishing from history. Fifty years after it flourished and flamed out, technologist and author Ben Zotto brings Sphere back to life on the page: how it was founded by young visionary Mike Wise to make computing accessible, how it shipped a forward-looking but fragile desktop system to customers who'd seen nothing like it, then how the company came apart, leaving behind a small community of people who cherished their challenging machines. The book is set against the backdrop of the fledgling personal computer industry, a wild time in which Sphere was a more consequential player than has been previously reported. ---- Back in 1975, Bill Gates was a 19-year-old bumming Harvard computer time to build a BASIC language, and hackers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were still dreaming of hawking their first circuit board. The curtain was opening on the personal computer era, and a revolutionary idea was emerging from the small town of Bountiful, Utah. Mike Wise, a young engineer, along with a handful of his passionate associates designed and built a modular microcomputer. Instead of some Star Trek contraption, their Sphere looked like... a desktop computer, instantly recognizable to us today. It booted up to a blinking cursor, and it was affordable for an individual to own. There was nothing like it. When it worked. Wise had even bigger ambitions. He was grounded in IBM mainframes and DEC minicomputer technology, with an intuitive sense of what the brand new microprocessor chips could enable people to achieve in their homes and businesses. Radio Shack wanted a piece of Sphere's innovation. Apple's Wozniak was awed by it. But before Sphere could realize Wise's visions, the company unraveled, leaving behind almost no trace in the annals of computing history. Who was Mike Wise, and what happened to Sphere? Combining deep archival research with dozens of new interviews, and incorporating extensive (often never-before-seen) photography of the people, products, and places of Sphere, Go Computer Now! is a vivid story about seeing the future at a time when anyone with an idea and an advertisement could launch a factory to build it. A story about a company, a computer, and a community of pioneers at the dawn of the personal computing age.