[QUOTE][QUOTENAME]<font color=FF9900>Mr Mercury</font> wrote: [/QUOTENAME]ZX Spectrum

The real beginning of home computing all started with the ZX Spectrum. Introduced by Sir Clive Sinclair in 1982, it proved to be a huge hit in the home.
[/QUOTE]

Sorry British.

Apple 1977, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had already done that. They had a 5.25 drive by 1978.

Scoreboard: United States

Built in 1977, the Apple ][ was based on Wozniak's Apple I design, but with several additions. The first was the design of a plastic case--a rarity at the time--which was painted beige. The second was the ability to display color graphics--a holy grail in the industry. The Apple ][ also included a larger ROM, more expandable RAM (4K to start), and 8 expansion slots. It had integer BASIC hard-coded on the ROM for easier programming, and included two game paddles and a demo cassette for $1,298. In early 1978 Apple also released a disk drive for the machine, one of the most inexpensive available. The Apple ][ remained on the Apple product list until 1980. It was also repackaged in a black case and sold to educational markets by Bell & Howell.

Apple president Mike Markkula was one Apple II user that was dissatisfied with cassette tape storage. He had a favorite checkbook program, but it took two minutes to read in the program from the tape, and another two minutes to read in the check files.[1] Consequently, at the executive board meeting held in December 1977 he made a list of company goals. At the top of the list was "floppy disk". Although Wozniak didn't know much about how floppy disks worked, he had once looked through a manual from Shugart (a Silicon Valley disk drive manufacturer):

As an experiment Woz had [earlier] conceived a circuit that would do much of what the Shugart manual said was needed to control a disk drive. Woz didn't know how computers actually controlled drives, but his method had seemed to him particularly simple and clever. When Markkula challenged him to put a disk drive on the Apple, he recalled that circuit and began considering its feasibility. He looked at the way other computer companies--including IBM--controlled drives. He also began to examine disk drives--particularly North Star's. After reading the North Star manual, Woz knew that his circuit would do what theirs did and more. He knew he really had a clever design.[2]

Other issues that Wozniak had to deal with involved a way to properly time the reading and writing of information to the disk. IBM used a complex hardware-based circuit to achieve this synchronization. Wozniak, after studying how IBM's drive worked, realized that if the data was written to the disk in a different fashion, all that circuitry was unneeded. Many floppy disks sold at that time were "hard sectored", meaning that they had a hole punched in the disk near the center ring. This hole was used by the disk drive hardware to identify what section of the disk was passing under the read/write head at any particular time. Wozniak's technique would allow the drive to do self-synchronization ("soft sectoring"), not have to deal with that little timing hole, and save on hardware.

Wozniak asked Randy Wigginton for help in writing some software to control the disk drive. During their week of Christmas vacation in 1977 they worked day and night creating a rudimentary disk operating system, working hard to get the drive ready to demonstrate at the Consumer Electronics Show in the first week of 1978. Their system was to allow entry of single letter commands to read files from fixed locations on the disk. However, even this simple system was not working when Wozniak and Wigginton left for the show.

When they got to Las Vegas they helped to set up the booth, and then returned to working on the disk drive. They stayed up all night, and by six in the morning they had a functioning demonstration disk. Randy suggested making a copy of the