Sphere: A Pioneering Early Microcomputer, Rediscovered

A new book made possible by CHM research reveals the untold story of Utah’s Sphere Corporation, makers of one of the original desktop all-in-one PCs.

Dick Mason of Escondido, California, with his Sphere in 1976. Photo: Gene Michals / From the Dan Rios Papers, California State University San Marcos Special Collections, University Library.

IT WAS DECEMBER 1975, and the future was being manufactured inside an old hamburger joint. This was the headquarters of Sphere Corporation, located within the squat former home of Wally’s Burger Bar in the sleepy suburb of Bountiful, Utah, just up the highway from Salt Lake City.

Founder Mike Wise must have looked around and seen everything happening exactly as he’d imagined, and maybe even better than that. In a matter of months, the twenty-five-year-old had transformed himself from laid-off minicomputer engineer into the leader of a company shipping out some of the first personal computers ever to be built. He was surrounded by associates who had signed on to his vision of bringing real computing power to individuals.

The company had crammed fifteen or so employees into the small building. They toiled between cinderblock walls at secondhand desks, designing and manufacturing the Sphere microcomputer. Their product was nothing like, say, MITS’s Altair, which had emerged just a few months before. The Sphere system was an integrated desktop all-in-one, with screen and keyboard. No blinkenlights, and no terminal required. A Sphere computer turned on to a blinking cursor and had built in commands. Soon, most computers would be like this. That was its genius. And in 1975, if you could afford a good color television, you could probably buy a Sphere.

A couple hundred computers had already gone out the door, with many more to come.

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Why has no one heard of Sphere Corporation? Founded in spring 1975, Sphere quickly brought to market what might plausibly be called the first “modern” microcomputer. My new reported book about Sphere, Go Computer Now! How Sphere Corporation Invented the Modern Microcomputer—Then Disappeared, details the full story of this effort for the first time.

There are two challenges in seeing the innovation that Sphere brought to computing. The first is that its machines were plainly artifacts of their time, and arguably not very elegant ones, making it difficult to perceive them as avant-garde.

More significantly, though, the very characteristics that did make the Sphere special at the moment of its introduction are the ones that seem most banal from any later perspective. Pushing a letter on a keyboard makes that letter appear on the screen? You can move the cursor around using arrows keys? The machine has built-in functions that can be used without elaborate installation procedures? You can share software programs with other users and expect them to work? Yawn. These are not exciting things; they are obvious and universal features of computers.

But these features were not, in fact, obvious or universal in 1975, and that is what I mean in calling the Sphere a “modern microcomputer” and locating it at the beginning of that line of understanding.

Yet Sphere was out of business and into receivership just two years later, in 1977. If the product was so important, what happened to the company? And why did Mike and his machine sink so rapidly and permanently into obscurity?

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My own journey with Sphere began on a summer day a few years ago when I came upon a pile of circuit boards and sheet metal on the sidewalk near my home in San Francisco. Discarded, deconstructed, and stuck askew between two broken chairs and an old CD tower were the dust-encrusted remains of a rather old computer of some sort.

The date on the boards—1975, the very dawn of the microcomputing era—got my attention. If this chaos of chips, cabling, and dangerously dangling CRT display was indeed a computer from that year, it predated all of the Apple, Radio Shack, and Commodore home computers and arrived years before IBM’s PC. I dragged it home, puzzled that its name—Sphere—should be so unfamiliar to me. What began as a casual search for parts and information became a years-long effort to reconstruct the story of a significant computer, company, and community that seemed undeservedly lost to time.

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Sphere founder Mike Wise, 1975. Photo: Byte magazine, courtesy of Informa TechTarget.

Though many were involved throughout the company’s short lifespan, Sphere was one person’s vision. Mike Wise was a big and tall young man, looming literally large in the office when he wasn’t evangelizing Sphere out on the road. He wore shirtsleeves on most days. He was constantly hiking up his pants, which tended to slip down over his large frame.

Mike spent years as a student at Brigham Young University in its early Computer Science department, then worked for a while designing complex software systems for minicomputers. He’d come up in the insular and relatively small technology industry the hard way, with the large and expensive computers employed by big corporations.

This was a different background than that of better-known microcomputer wunderkinds. Bill Gates was a whiz kid at Harvard, while Steve Jobs was working on arcade hardware at Atari and his friend Steve Wozniak was building calculators at Hewlett-Packard and dreaming up cheap circuit board computers on the side. Ed Roberts over in Albuquerque was the head of MITS and its electronics kit designer.

Mike Wise, by contrast, had already accumulated a fair bit of expertise in commercial and institutional computing. All of these young technologists were excited about the possibilities offered by the latest microcomputer technology, but for Mike, computers were not a clever hobby or an engaging toy; they were a means to ends.

His early start and his strong opinions led Mike to found Sphere. Mike was intense, a fountain of ideas running well ahead of what was possible to build. He was a technical savant, a showman, and a salesman; he was generous with his team, but less interested in the balance sheet and operational consistency. He wanted to build the things he felt sure had just become possible, make the technology accessible to anyone, and provide it at low cost.

Mike and a few cofounders formed a team. Accounting, sales, and design worked in the front part of the former burger bar. Manufacturing occupied the larger back area. Solder smoke formed the lightest of hazes throughout the office, and the smell of searing hot lead and rosin wafted through the air as the clang of computer production mixed with clicking calculators and phone calls. It was a tight space, where piles of sealed cardboard cartons were stacked up against the big aluminum roll-up door on one end wall. Handmade shelving against the long wall was stuffed with parts, products, and kits in various stages of completion.

Sphere factory in Bountiful, Utah. Photo: Doug Hancey.

These workers were making a personal computer available for consumer purchase—something almost no one had ever seen or used before. Even those with experience using computers at this time mostly interacted with expensive mainframe or minicomputer systems that occupied a closet or even a whole room, and were generally designed with multiple users in mind. Those systems were controlled via punched cards or loud teletypewriters, and more recently, using “dumb” video terminals.

The Sphere was nothing like this. Self-contained and relatively affordable—systems started at just $650 at introduction—Sphere’s computers were intended to be used by a single person at home or at an office desk. They were built around Motorola’s just released M6800 eight-bit microprocessor technology and included a substantial quantity (four kilobytes) of the new “dynamic” memory plus an innovative memory-mapped video system. The variations on the Sphere coming out of the production space melded together the output of an industrial machine shop with computing advances then seen only by a rarefied few.

An all-in-one machine, a Sphere occupied a jaunty sheet-metal cabinet painted a light cream color, sporting a front-sloping darker beige section with a built-in keyboard. The bulk of the unit hid a small video monitor and a set of circuit boards. The front display panel was raked slightly back from the keyboard for better viewing. Lacking a logo or labeling, the only real concession to style was a smoked acrylic panel affixed across the entire front of the machine, obscuring in darkness the edges of the video monitor. Text on the screen appeared to float in the depths of the panel.

Sphere systems included a built-in cursor-controlled editor and a mini-assembler. Photo: Ben Zotto

At the end of 1975, Mike Wise’s company already felt like a success despite its newness. Already hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of orders had poured into Bountiful. The phone was ringing with calls from impatient customers; they often sounded like giddy children in their anticipation.

The company seemed to be flying high but, as Christmas 1975 approached, Sphere was already struggling. The first signs of trouble came when early customers encountered a litany of aggravations with Sphere’s kits and systems. Some were oversights in documentation or parts kitting that could be easily mitigated; other challenges emerged from the production design of the system itself. Then, without absorbing outside capital investment, it was difficult to both grow the company’s capacity while also delivering on orders.

By March 1976, Mike would be gone from the company he’d created. Sphere itself would vanish a year later, leaving behind puzzled customers and unexpected legacies.

***

History is written by the victors and the loudmouths. Sphere was neither. Winners are remembered for their achievements. But in Silicon Valley, failure has also long been a form of success. A company that doesn’t make it can still be held up as a kind of achievement, a currency of experience that its founders and employees can parlay into their next, often bigger venture.

In Utah, especially in the 1970s, that Silicon Valley ethos didn’t exist. Most people who lived there belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church. The values of the faith—community, self-sufficiency, integrity, and humility—permeated life and work in Utah generally and at Sphere Corporation specifically. People were taught to avoid boasting.

Utah had little computer industry to speak of at that time—and no grand community of what were then called homebrewers or, later, hackers. Sphere was just a collection of people living outside of Salt Lake City who were trying to change the world. When that didn’t happen, most quietly moved on to new work. Sphere’s story was left to others to tell, and they didn’t.

By the time reporters began publishing the first long histories of the early microcomputing era in the mid-1980s, Sphere barely merited a footnote. Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine’s seminal book, Fire in the Valley, mentions Sphere just a handful of times, in passing.

In fact, the company sold over a thousand systems—far more than, say, Apple’s original Apple-1—and they were used for everything from running medical offices to playing graphical chess to controlling industrial processes. A much-lauded early example of an entirely computer-controlled home incorporated a Sphere as its nerve center.

The Sphere computer made Forrest Gump–like cameo appearances at some important historic junctions: Steve Wozniak witnessed a demo of the system in 1975, then went home and completed the design for his Apple-1. The Sphere executive team was invited to Texas in early 1976 to talk about a deal to build computers for Tandy’s Radio Shack division, bringing with them technical plans and market strategies to share. When the TRS-80 was introduced over a year later, the executives who had visited from Sphere saw in it the “Micro-Sphere” that they had pitched to Tandy brass.

Promotional photo for the unrealized Sphere 500 system. Photo: Computer History Museum.

The influence of the Sphere computers and the community that formed around them did not vanish with the company. People who cut their teeth on the systems went on to become developers of important computer games and word processors. The first microcomputer software publisher, Programma International, got its start selling those Sphere programs on cassette tape.

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Reconstructing a series of untold stories from a half-century ago required not just extensive new research and interviews. It also demanded access to archives, to excavate the yellowing but safely preserved primary sources that reflect contemporaneous views into this exciting time.

The Computer History Museum was a crucial part of the research for my book. While you may not find a Sphere currently on display among the exhibits in Mountain View, the CHM’s collections are vast and extend well beyond what a visitor might encounter. These archives form an unheralded backbone of the computing history world and are made accessible to interested researchers.

The CHM’s Sphere collection includes not just hardware, but also folders and boxes of relevant paperwork and also some software. The core of this was donated by a user newsletter editor back in 1983, and ranks among the CHM’s earliest microcomputer-era acquisitions.

Key to developing a comprehensive picture of a company’s history is looking beyond the public output—its computers, its documentation and advertising—to the more ephemeral materials that highlight how the organization thought about its own goals and efforts. Notices to distributors, correspondence with customers, and other limited-circulation bits and pieces of the era frequently remain outside the reach of “internet research,” and I’m immensely grateful to CHM’s exceptional archivists and curators for helping me locate and spend valuable time with these materials. This included connecting to resources held elsewhere.

My book, Go Computer Now! How Sphere Corporation Invented the Modern Microcomputer—Then Disappeared, would not have been nearly as rich and detailed a narrative without the Computer History Museum. And my hope is that, in return, the story sheds new light on important events from the brief and enthusiastic crucible in which the personal computer industry was forged, and contributes to our understanding of key figures and events of the time.

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This post includes material adapted from Go Computer Now! How Sphere Corporation Invented the Modern Microcomputer—Then Disappeared by Ben Zotto. The book was published in 2026; for more information or to purchase a copy please visit https://gocomputernow.com. Ben can be reached at [email protected].