Showing posts with label Computer History. Show all posts
Computer History 1988
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who left
Apple to form his own company, unveiled the NeXT. The computer he
created failed but was recognized as an important innovation. At a base
price of $6,500, the NeXT ran too slowly to be popular.The significance of the NeXT rested in its place as the first personal computer to incorporate a drive for an optical storage disk, a built-in digital signal processor that allowed voice recognition, and object-oriented languages to simplify programming. The NeXT offered Motorola 68030 microprocessors, 8 megabytes of RAM, and a 256-megabyte read/write optical disk storage.
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Computer History,
Computer History 1987
IBM introduced its PS/2 machines, which
made the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drive and video graphics array standard
for IBM computers. The first IBMs to include Intel´s 80386 chip, the
company had shipped more than 1 million units by the end of the year.
IBM released a new operating system, OS/2, at the same time, allowing
the use of a mouse with IBMs for the first time.Tag :
Computer History,
Computer History 1986
Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corp.
moved artificial intelligence a step forward when he developed the
controversial concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine.
The machine used up to 65,536 processors and could complete several
billion operations per second. Each processor had its own small memory
linked with others through a flexible network that users could alter by
reprogramming rather than rewiring.The machine´s system of connections and switches let processors broadcast information and requests for help to other processors in a simulation of brainlike associative recall. Using this system, the machine could work faster than any other at the time on a problem that could be parceled out among the many processors.
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Computer History,
Computer History 1985
The Amiga 1000 is released. Commodore’s
Amiga 1000 sold for $1,295 dollars (without monitor) and had audio and
video capabilities beyond those found in most other personal computers.
It developed a very loyal following and add-on components allowed it to
be upgraded easily. The inside of the case is engraved with the
signatures of the Amiga designers, including Jay Miner as well as the
paw print of his dog Mitchy.Tag :
Computer History,
Computer History 1984
Apple
Computer launched the Macintosh, the first successful mouse-driven
computer with a graphic user interface, with a single $1.5 million
commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl. Based on the Motorola 68000
microprocessor, the Macintosh included many of the Lisa´s features at a
much more affordable price: $2,500.Apple´s commercial played on the theme of George Orwell´s "1984" and featured the destruction of Big Brother with the power of personal computing found in a Macintosh. Applications that came as part of the package included MacPaint, which made use of the mouse, and MacWrite, which demonstrated WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processing.
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Computer History,
Computer History 1983
Apple introduced its Lisa. The first
personal computer with a graphical user interface, its development was
central in the move to such systems for personal computers. The Lisa´s
sloth and high price ($10,000) led to its ultimate failure.The Lisa ran on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor and came equipped with 1 megabyte of RAM, a 12-inch black-and-white monitor, dual 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives and a 5 megabyte Profile hard drive. The Xerox Star — which included a system called Smalltalk that involved a mouse, windows, and pop-up menus — inspired the Lisa´s designers.
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Computer History,
Computer History 1982
Commodore introduces the Commodore 64.
The C64, as it was better known, sold for $595, came with 64KB of RAM
and featured impressive graphics. Thousands of software titles were
released over the lifespan of the C64. By the time the C64 was
discontinued in 1993, it had sold more than 22 million units and is
recognized by the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest
selling single computer model of all time.Tag :
Computer History,
Computer History 1981
IBM introduced its PC, igniting a fast
growth of the personal computer market. The first PC ran on a 4.77 MHz
Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft´s MS-DOS operating system.
Adam Osborne completed the first portable
computer, the Osborne I, which weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795. The
price made the machine especially attractive, as it included software
worth about $1,500. The machine featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes
of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives.
In April 1981, Byte Magazine Editor in Chief Chris Morgan mentioned the Osborne I in an article on "Future Trends in Personal Computing." He wrote: "I recently had an opportunity to see the Osborne I in action. I was impressed with it´s compactness: it will fit under an airplane seat. (Adam Osborne is currently seeking approval from the FAA to operate the unit on board a plane.) One quibble: the screen may be too small for some people´s taste."
Adam Osborne completed the first portable
computer, the Osborne I, which weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795. The
price made the machine especially attractive, as it included software
worth about $1,500. The machine featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes
of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives.In April 1981, Byte Magazine Editor in Chief Chris Morgan mentioned the Osborne I in an article on "Future Trends in Personal Computing." He wrote: "I recently had an opportunity to see the Osborne I in action. I was impressed with it´s compactness: it will fit under an airplane seat. (Adam Osborne is currently seeking approval from the FAA to operate the unit on board a plane.) One quibble: the screen may be too small for some people´s taste."
Computer History 1979
Atari introduces the Model 400 and 800
Computer. Shortly after delivery of the Atari VCS game console, Atari
designed two microcomputers with game capabilities: the Model 400 and
Model 800. The two machines were built with the idea that the 400 would
serve primarily as a game console while the 800 would be more of a home
computer. Both sold well, though they had technical and marketing
problems, and faced strong competition from the Apple II, Commodore PET,
and TRS-80 computers.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1978
The VAX 11/780 from Digital Equipment
Corp. featured the ability to address up to 4.3 gigabytes of virtual
memory, providing hundreds of times the capacity of most minicomputers.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1976
Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I, a
single-board computer. With specifications in hand and an order for 100
machines at $500 each from the Byte Shop, he and Steve Jobs got their
start in business. In this photograph of the Apple I board, the upper
two rows are a video terminal and the lower two rows are the computer.
The 6502 microprocessor in the white package sits on the lower right.
About 200 of the machines sold before the company announced the Apple II
as a complete computer.
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 1974
Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center designed the Alto — the first work station with a
built-in mouse for input. The Alto stored several files simultaneously
in windows, offered menus and icons, and could link to a local area
network. Although Xerox never sold the Alto commercially, it gave a
number of them to universities. Engineers later incorporated its
features into work stations and personal computers.Tag :
Computer History,
Intel,
Computer History 1973
The TV Typewriter, designed by Don
Lancaster, provided the first display of alphanumeric information on an
ordinary television set. It used $120 worth of electronics components,
as outlined in the September 1973 issue of Radio Electronics. The
original design included two memory boards and could generate and store
512 characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A 90-minute cassette tape
provided supplementary storage for about 100 pages of text.Tag :
Computer History,
Intel,
Computer History 1972
Hewlett-Packard announced the HP-35 as "a fast, extremely accurate electronic slide rule"
with a solid-state memory similar to that of a computer. The HP-35
distinguished itself from its competitors by its ability to perform a
broad variety of logarithmic and trigonometric functions, to store more
intermediate solutions for later use, and to accept and display entries
in a form similar to standard scientific notation.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Computer History 1971
The Kenbak-1, the first personal
computer, advertised for $750 in Scientific American. Designed by John
V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-scale and small-scale integrated
circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for
output from its 256-byte memory. In 1973, after selling only 40
machines, Kenbak Corp. closed its doors.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
Others,
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.
Source: - www.computerhistory.org
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Computer History,
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,