Man recreates first "personal computer"

A man has recreated the Kenbak-1, albeit without the super cool case that the original sported.

A brief description of the original:

The Kenbak-1 is considered by many to be the world's first "Personal Computer." The Computer History Museum granted it this designation when they were still located in Boston in 1986. More specifically, the machine represents the first commercially available Von Neumann (stored program) computing device intended and priced for personal use.
John V. Blankenbaker designed the Kenbak-1 and marketed in the pages of Scientific American in 1971. The machine's name was taken from the middle of John's last name.
The Kenbak-1 was designed in 1970 and pre-dated microprocessors. The Intel 4004 (the worlds first microprocessor) was introduced in 1971. Instead of being microprocessor based the Kenbak-1 was built almost entirely from TTL components.
Unlike many earlier machines and calculating engines, the Kenbak-1 was a true stored-program computer that offered 256 bytes of memory, a wide variety of operations and a speed equivalent to nearly 1MHz.
Approximately 40 of these machines were built and sold before they were discontinued. The world just wasn't quite ready for personal computing and the Kenbak-1 lacked some critical capabilities (such as expandability and I/O) that were needed to foster the revolution. 14 are currently known to exist with few more likely to be discovered. <>

via: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=1259



Apparently this recreation/simulation was done by use of an arduino development board.

Video Description:

Here I (silently) program the Kenbakuino with a simple program which just adds 1 to the displayed number, in an infinite loop. It's too fast to really see, the LEDs are a blur, so I use one of my extensions to slow it down. Note that when entering the program, sometimes I choose to use the CLR button to reset the number to 000 before entering a new value, other times I modify what's already there.

Via: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/03/arduino-powered-modder-recreates-first-pc