Unglamorous, the first desktop app was a product of two universal constants - people want to be paid and eat chicken. Necessity is the mother hen of invention.
An anonymous technician on an El Dorado, Arkansas chicken farm sends a data cassette from a Datapoint 2200 to Pillsbury headquarters. On it was not only payroll data but a full blown app written in machine code for the 1201 CPU later renamed 8008 by Intel Corp.
The first commercial UNIVAC (Serial #8) had also been used to print employee checks some twenty years earlier in the G.E., Louisville KY, Appliance Park.
The first 2200s were shipped in early 1971, and one of them went to a Pillsbury chicken-processing plant in El Dorado, Arkansas. Poor called a technician there to see how the machine was working out. Since normal telephone lines were not reliable enough for transmitting data, he asked what kind of connection the out-of-the-way plant was using to link its terminal to the mainframe, presumably at corporate headquarters in Minneapolis.
"None," replied the technician. He had read through the terminal's documentation and written a payroll program on the 2200 itself, using machine language. The only mainframe connection was the post office; data was periodically output onto cassettes and mailed to Minnesota. Other buyers were applying the Datapoint to accounting and process control; in fact, few of the machines were being used for the purpose they'd been designed for. Desktop computing had been born - brought into existence by resourceful users, not computer designers or marketers. *
A testament to the quality of early Datapoint documentation. The company was rigorously documented every feature and flow chart.
Early microcomputers like the Datapoint 2200 helped Joe and Jane computer user achieve the seemingly impossible just 20 years earlier. Empower ordinary users to solve difficult problems.
* 1994 Lamont Wood, The Man Who Invented the PC
