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.
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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.
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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 :
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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 :
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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.
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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.
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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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