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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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