World’s First

Personnel Computer

The Kenbak 1
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.

The slot on the front panel was presumably intended to

account for these deficiencies later in the machines life by
providing a card reader of some sorts but with the limited
interest, that was never to be.

C.T.I. Educational products purchased the Kenbak-1 from

John Blankenbaker and renamed the device to the CTI
5050.
This sheet (the Kenbak Coding
Sheet) tells just about all there is to
know about the Kenbak-1.

There were three programming

registers, A (location 000), B (001),
and X (002) which were assigned
locations in the memory. The X
register was for memory indexing
but could be used in any way you
liked. The program counter was P
and it was memory location 003. The
lights displayed the contents of
location 200. Input was made to 377.

Operations that could be performed

on A, B, and X were Addition,
Subtraction, Load, Store, Logical Or,
Logical And, Load Negative. The
addressing modes were Immediate,
Memory, Indirect, Indexed, and
Indirect/Indexed. One could do
things like subtract the contents of
A from A which yielded Clear A.
As can be seen above the Kenbak-1 doesn't have a CPU. The two can-shaped circuits in the
upper left near the fan are the shift register memory.

This particular Kenbak -1 is in remarkably good shape for its age. There is almost no
noticeable damage to the case or front panel. Many of the switches had become unglued
from the inner part of the front panel and needed to be reattached to allow full operation.
According to the previous owner the machine worked before I got it.
At the moment the machine almost works but there is a disconnect between what is stored
in memory and what is retrieved. This could be a failure on either operation or it could be a
failure of the memory itself. There is a pattern to the failure which should be a clue.

The real issue, though, is whether or not I want to alter a pristine example of the Kenbak-1 in
order to make it fully functional. At the moment, at least, I'm leaning towards leaving the
machine as-is.

The first time I powered up the Kenbak-1 was at The Vintage Computer Festival 7.0. I have
since had a little time to play with the machine, as can be seen in the pictures above and
below. I've since re-attached the switches and cleaned the machine up a bit.

The Kenbak-1 was my display at The Vintage Computer Festival 8.0 and it came in second
place in its class. Don't let the fact that there were only two of us in the class fool you - it
was up against some stiff competition!
The machine does look good when it's running, though!
I also have
copies of a
complete set
of Kenbak-1
documentati
on in my
collection
including
instructions,
a coding
course and
schematics.
The following images are close up shots of the logic board for the
machine, both front and back. The component side images are
broken up into six zones while the underside of the board was
photographed as one shot.
This image shows an overview of the front of the Kenbak-1 logic
board.
An overview of the upper left of the Kenbak-1 logic board
An overview of the upper center of the Kenbak-1 logic board
An overview of the upper right of the Kenbak-1 logic board
An overview of the lower left of the Kenbak-1 logic board
An overview of the lower center of the Kenbak-1 logic board
An overview of the lower right of the Kenbak-1 logic board
An overview of the back of the Kenbak-1 logic board