Newt's World
Newt's World
Gingrich 360
Episode 1022: Greatest American Inventions — The Personal Computer
5 minutes Posted Aug 3, 2026 at 9:00 am.
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Show notes

For thirty years, a computer was something only governments and corporations could own—an entire room of machinery. Newt tells how that changed in 1975, when a $439 kit computer on the cover of Popular Electronics inspired a Harvard student named Bill Gates and an HP engineer named Steve Wozniak to imagine something radical: a computer anyone could own. From Microsoft's garage-built software to Apple's Apple II to IBM's industry-legitimizing PC, this episode traces how outsiders—not the institutions running the computer industry—saw what was coming and put computing power directly into ordinary people's hands.

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