Archive for 1970
Computer History 1968
Data General Corp., started by a group of
engineers that had left Digital Equipment Corp., introduced the Nova,
with 32 kilobytes of memory, for $8,000.In the photograph, Ed deCastro, president and founder of Data General, sits with a Nova minicomputer. The simple architecture of the Nova instruction set inspired Steve Wozniak´s Apple I board eight years later.
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Computer History,
Computer History 1966
The
Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contracted with
the University of Illinois to build a large parallel processing
computer, the ILLIAC IV, which did not operate until 1972 at NASA´s Ames
Research Center. The first large-scale array computer, the ILLIAC IV
achieved a computation speed of 200 million instructions per second,
about 300 million operations per second, and 1 billion bits per second
of I/O transfer via a unique combination of parallel architecture and
the overlapping or "pipe-lining" structure of its 64 processing
elements.This photograph shows one of the ILLIAC´s 13 Burroughs disks, the debugging computer, the central unit, and the processing unit cabinet with a processing element.
Computer History 1965
Digital
Equipment Corp. introduced the PDP-8, the first commercially successful
minicomputer. The PDP-8 sold for $18,000, one-fifth the price of a
small IBM 360 mainframe. The speed, small size, and reasonable cost
enabled the PDP-8 to go into thousands of manufacturing plants, small
businesses, and scientific laboratories.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
IBM,
Computer History 1964
IBM
announced the System/360, a family of six mutually compatible computers
and 40 peripherals that could work together. The initial investment of
$5 billion was quickly returned as orders for the system climbed to
1,000 per month within two years. At the time IBM released the
System/360, the company was making a transition from discrete
transistors to integrated circuits, and its major source of revenue
moved from punched-card equipment to electronic computer systems.
Computer History 1962
The LINC (Laboratory Instrumentation
Computer) offered the first real time laboratory data processing.
Designed by Wesley Clark at Lincoln Laboratories, Digital Equipment
Corp. later commercialized it as the LINC-8.Research faculty came to a workshop at MIT to build their own machines, most of which they used in biomedical studies. DEC supplied components.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1961
According to Datamation magazine, IBM had
an 81.2-percent share of the computer market in 1961, the year in which
it introduced the 1400 Series. The 1401 mainframe, the first in the
series, replaced the vacuum tube with smaller, more reliable transistors
and used a magnetic core memory.Demand called for more than 12,000 of the 1401 computers, and the machine´s success made a strong case for using general-purpose computers rather than specialized systems.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
IBM,
Computer History 1960
The precursor to the minicomputer, DEC´s
PDP-1 sold for $120,000. One of 50 built, the average PDP-1 included
with a cathode ray tube graphic display, needed no air conditioning and
required only one operator. It´s large scope intrigued early hackers at
MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar!, for it.
The SpaceWar! creators then used the game as a standard demonstration on
all 50 computers.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1959
IBM´s
7000 series mainframes were the company´s first transistorized
computers. At the top of the line of computers — all of which emerged
significantly faster and more dependable than vacuum tube machines — sat
the 7030, also known as the "Stretch." Nine of the computers, which
featured a 64-bit word and other innovations, were sold to national
laboratories and other scientific users. L. R. Johnson first used the
term "architecture" in describing the Stretch.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
IBM,
Computer History 1958
SAGE — Semi-Automatic Ground Environment —
linked hundreds of radar stations in the United States and Canada in
the first large-scale computer communications network. An operator
directed actions by touching a light gun to the screen.The air defense system operated on the AN/FSQ-7 computer (known as Whirlwind II during its development at MIT) as its central computer. Each computer used a full megawatt of power to drive its 55,000 vacuum tubes, 175,000 diodes and 13,000 transistors.
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Computer History 1956
MIT researchers built the TX-0, the first
general-purpose, programmable computer built with transistors. For
easy replacement, designers placed each transistor circuit inside a
"bottle," similar to a vacuum tube. Constructed at MIT´s Lincoln
Laboratory, the TX-0 moved to the MIT Research Laboratory of
Electronics, where it hosted some early imaginative tests of
programming, including a Western movie shown on TV, 3-D tic-tac-toe, and
a maze in which mouse found martinis and became increasingly
inebriated.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
MIT,
Computer History 1954
The
IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator established itself as the first
mass-produced computer, with the company selling 450 in one year.
Spinning at 12,500 rpm, the 650´s magnetic data-storage drum allowed
much faster access to stored material than drum memory machines.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
IBM,
Computer History 1953
IBM
shipped its first electronic computer, the 701. During three years of
production, IBM sold 19 machines to research laboratories, aircraft
companies, and the federal government.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
IBM,
Computer History 1952
John
von Neumann´s IAS computer became operational at the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. Contract obliged the builders to
share their designs with other research institutes. This resulted in a
number of clones: the MANIAC at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the
ILLIAC at the University of Illinois, the Johnniac at Rand Corp., the
SILLIAC in Australia, and others.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1951
MIT´s
Whirlwind debuted on Edward R. Murrow´s "See It Now" television series.
Project director Jay Forrester described the computer as a "reliable
operating system," running 35 hours a week at 90-percent utility using
an electrostatic tube memory.Start of project: 1945
Completed:1951
England´s first commercial computer, the
Lyons Electronic Office, solved clerical problems. The president of
Lyons Tea Co. had the computer, modeled after the EDSAC, built to solve
the problem of daily scheduling production and delivery of cakes to the
Lyons tea shops. After the success of the first LEO, Lyons went into
business manufacturing computers to meet the growing need for data
processing systems.Tag :
Computer History,
IBM,
Computer History 1950
Engineering
Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first
commercially produced computer; the company´s first customer was the
U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest
magnetic storage devices. Drums registered information as magnetic
pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder. Read/write heads both
recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as many as
4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as
five-thousandths of a second.
The National Bureau of Standards
constructed the SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer) in
Washington as a laboratory for testing components and systems for
setting computer standards. The SEAC was the first computer to use
all-diode logic, a technology more reliable than vacuum tubes, and the
first stored-program computer completed in the United States. Magnetic
tape in the external storage units (shown on the right of this photo)
stored programming information, coded subroutines, numerical data, and
output.
The National Bureau of Standards
completed its SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) at the
Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles. Rather than testing
components like its companion, the SEAC, the SWAC had an objective of
computing using already-developed technology.
Alan Turing´s philosophy directed design of Britain´s Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory. "We
are trying to build a machine to do all kinds of different things
simply by programming rather than by the addition of extra apparatus," Turing said at a symposium on large-scale digital calculating machinery in 1947 in Cambridge, Mass.Tag :
Computer History,
Computer History 1949
Maurice
Wilkes assembled the EDSAC, the first practical stored-program
computer, at Cambridge University. His ideas grew out of the Moore
School lectures he had attended three years earlier.For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes established a library of short programs called subroutines stored on punched paper tapes.
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Computer History,
Computer History 1948
IBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic
Calculator computed scientific data in public display near the company´s
Manhattan headquarters. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC
produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the
1969 Apollo flight to the moon. Speed - 50 multiplications per second
Input/output: cards, punched tape
Memory type: punched tape, vacuum tubes, relays
Technology: 20,000 relays, 12,500 vacuum tubes
Floor space: 25 feet by 40 feet
Project leader: Wallace Eckert
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
IBM,
Computer History 1946
In February, the public got its first
glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper
Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.Tag :
Computer History,
Computer History 1945
John von Neumann wrote "First Draft of a
Report on the EDVAC" in which he outlined the architecture of a
stored-program computer. Electronic storage of programming information
and data eliminated the need for the more clumsy methods of programming,
such as punched paper tape — a concept that has characterized
mainstream computer development since 1945. Hungarian-born von Neumann
demonstrated prodigious expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics,
meteorology, game theory, statistics, and the use of mechanical devices
for computation. After the war, he concentrated on the development of
Princeton´s Institute for Advanced Studies computer and its copies
around the world.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1944
Harvard Mark-1 is completed. Conceived by
Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the
Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized, relay-based calculator. The machine had
a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machine’s thousands of
component parts. The Mark-1 was used to produce mathematical tables but
was soon superseded by stored program computers.
The
first Colossus is operational at Bletchley Park. Designed by British
engineer Tommy Flowers, the Colossus was designed to break the complex
Lorenz ciphers used by the Nazis during WWII. A total of ten Colossi
were delivered to Bletchley, each using 1,500 vacuum tubes and a series
of pulleys transported continuous rolls of punched paper tape containing
possible solutions to a particular code. Colossus reduced the time to
break Lorenz messages from weeks to hours. The machine’s existence was
not made public until the 1970s.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
IBM,
Computer History 1943
Project Whirlwind begins. During World
War II, the U.S. Navy approached the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) about building a flight simulator to train bomber
crews. The team first built a large analog computer, but found it
inaccurate and inflexible. After designers saw a demonstration of the
ENIAC computer, they decided on building a digital computer. By the time
the Whirlwind was completed in 1951, the Navy had lost interest in the
project, though the U.S. Air Force would eventually support the project
which would influence the design of the SAGE program.
The
Relay Interpolator is completed. The U.S. Army asked Bell Labs to
design a machine to assist in testing its M-9 Gun Director. Bell Labs
mathematician George Stibitz recommended using a relay-based calculator
for the project. The result was the Relay Interpolator, later called the
Bell Labs Model II. The Relay Interpolator used 440 relays and since it
was programmable by paper tape, it was used for other applications
following the war.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
MIT,
Computer History 1942
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is
completed. After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype
in 1939, Atanasoff received funds to build the full-scale machine.
Built at Iowa State College (now University), the ABC was designed and
built by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff
Berry between 1939 and 1942. The ABC was at the center of a patent
dispute relating to the invention of the computer, which was resolved in
1973 when it was shown that ENIAC co-designer John Mauchly had come to
examine the ABC shortly after it became functional.The legal result was a landmark: Atanasoff was declared the originator of several basic computer ideas, but the computer as a concept was declared un-patentable and thus was freely open to all. This result has been referred to as the "dis-invention of the computer." A full-scale reconstruction of the ABC was completed in 1997 and proved that the ABC machine functioned as Atanasoff had claimed.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1941
Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 computer. The Z3 was an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere. Using 2,300 relays, the Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length. The original Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid of Berlin in late 1943. However, Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in the 1960s which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
The first Bombe is completed. Based
partly on the design of the Polish “Bomba,” a mechanical means of
decrypting Nazi military communications during World War II, the British Bombe
design was greatly influenced by the work of computer pioneer Alan
Turing and others. Many bombes were built. Together they dramatically
improved the intelligence gathering and processing capabilities of
Allied forces. [Computers]
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1940
The Complex Number Calculator (CNC) is
completed. In 1939, Bell Telephone Laboratories completed this
calculator, designed by researcher George Stibitz. In 1940, Stibitz
demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held
at Dartmouth College. Stibitz stunned the group by performing
calculations remotely on the CNC (located in New York City) using a
Teletype connected via special telephone lines. This is considered to be
the first demonstration of remote access computing.Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1939
Hewlett-Packard is Founded. David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. Walt Disney Pictures ordered eight of the 200B model to use as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie “Fantasia.”
(Fig - David Packard and Bill Hewlett in their Palo Alto, California Garage)
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,