Showing posts with label BASIC. Show all posts
Computer History 1975
The January edition of Popular
Electronics featured the Altair 8800 computer kit, based on Intel´s 8080
microprocessor, on its cover. Within weeks of the computer´s debut,
customers inundated the manufacturing company, MITS, with orders. Bill
Gates and Paul Allen licensed BASIC as the software language for the
Altair. Ed Roberts invented the 8800 — which sold for $297, or $395
with a case — and coined the term "personal computer." The machine came
with 256 bytes of memory (expandable to 64K) and an open 100-line bus
structure that evolved into the S-100 standard. In 1977, MITS sold out
to Pertec, which continued producing Altairs through 1978.
The visual display module (VDM)
prototype, designed in 1975 by Lee Felsenstein, marked the first
implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for
personal computers. Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque
in March 1976, the visual display module allowed use of personal
computers for interactive games.
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.
