The first computers, built around the end of the Second World War, were large machines that could have taken up most of this sanctuary. But, over a period of 30 - 40 years, they shrunk in size and grew in power.
A man by the name of Douglas Engelbart, a former Navy Radar Technician, established research center at Standford Research Institute in 1964. By 1968 he, according to authors Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman had "already made two startlingly originial breakthroughs in the embryonic art of personal computing - the mouse and windows."
But Engelbart failed, for a wide variety of reasons, to gain crediblity for his discoveries and the commercial success for the personal computer would not start until 20 years later with the introduction of the MacIntosh computer by a company called Apple Computers.