Today, we carry more computing power on our smartphones than was available in these early models. The following brief history of computing is a timeline of how computers evolved from their humble beginnings to the machines of today that surf the Internet , play games and stream multimedia in addition to crunching numbers.
Early computers would use similar punch cards. The project, funded by the English government, is a failure. More than a century later, however, the world's first computer was actually built. He establishes a company that would ultimately become IBM. The central concept of the modern computer was based on his ideas.
Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, attempts to build the first computer without gears, cams, belts or shafts. This marks the first time a computer is able to store information on its main memory. Considered the grandfather of digital computers, it fills a foot by foot room and has 18, vacuum tubes.
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We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear. Yes, cloning has been around that long! Both used the Intel CPU. That was also the year that Electric Pencil , the first word processing program, and Adventure , the first text adventure for microcomputers, were released. Shugart introduced the 5.
Software took center stage in when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston produced VisiCalc , the first electronic spreadsheet. The Wang makes it a successful computer company, too. Wang sold the primarily through Value Added Resellers, who added special software to solve specific customer problems. The first commercially advertised US computer based on a microprocessor the Intel , the Scelbi has 4 KB of internal memory and a cassette tape interface, as well as Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces.
Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. In , Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market. The Alto is a groundbreaking computer with wide influence on the computer industry. It was based on a graphical user interface using windows, icons, and a mouse, and worked together with other Altos over a local area network. It could also share files and print out documents on an advanced Xerox laser printer.
For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders. Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor.
The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications. Southwest Technical Products is founded by Daniel Meyer as DEMCO in the s to provide a source for kit versions of projects published in electronics hobbyist magazines. Of the dozens of different SWTP kits available, the proved the most popular.
Tailored for online transaction processing, the Tandem is one of the first commercial fault-tolerant computers. The banking industry rushed to adopt the machine, built to run during repair or expansion. The Video Display Module VDM marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers.
Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March , the visual display module enabled the use of personal computers for interactive games. The fastest machine of its day, The Cray-1's speed comes partly from its shape, a "C," which reduces the length of wires and thus the time signals need to travel across them. High packaging density of integrated circuits and a novel Freon cooling system also contributed to its speed.
Typical applications included US national defense work, including the design and simulation of nuclear weapons, and weather forecasting. Intel and Zilog introduced new microprocessors. Five times faster than its predecessor, the , the Intel could address four times as many bytes for a total of 64 kilobytes.
The Zilog Z could run any program written for the and included twice as many built-in machine instructions. Designed by Sunnyvale, California native Steve Wozniak, and marketed by his friend Steve Jobs, the Apple-1 is a single-board computer for hobbyists.
With an order for 50 assembled systems from Mountain View, California computer store The Byte Shop in hand, the pair started a new company, naming it Apple Computer, Inc. In all, about of the boards were sold before Apple announced the follow-on Apple II a year later as a ready-to-use computer for consumers, a model which sold in the millions for nearly two decades.
When connected to a color television set, the Apple II produced brilliant color graphics for the time. Millions of Apple IIs were sold between and , making it one of the longest-lived lines of personal computers.
Apple gave away thousands of Apple IIs to school, giving a new generation their first access to personal computers. The TRS proved popular with schools, as well as for home use. The TRS line of computers later included color, portable, and handheld versions before being discontinued in the early s. The first of several personal computers released in , the PET comes fully assembled with either 4 or 8 KB of memory, a built-in cassette tape drive, and a membrane keyboard.
The PET was popular with schools and for use as a home computer. After the success of the PET, Commodore remained a major player in the personal computer market into the s. The success of the VAX family of computers transformed DEC into the second-largest computer company in the world, as VAX systems became the de facto standard computing system for industry, the sciences, engineering, and research. Shortly after delivery of the Atari VCS game console, Atari designs two microcomputers with game capabilities: the Model and Model The served primarily as a game console, while the was more of a home computer.
Atari's 8-bit computers were influential in the arts, especially in the emerging DemoScene culture of the s and '90s. The Motorola microprocessor exhibited a processing speed far greater than its contemporaries.
This high performance processor found its place in powerful work stations intended for graphics-intensive programs common in engineering. Intended to be a less expensive alternative to the PET, the VIC was highly successful, becoming the first computer to sell more than a million units. Commodore even used Star Trek television star William Shatner in advertisements. About 50, were sold in Britain, primarily to hobbyists, and initially there was a long waiting list for the system.
The machine was expandable, with ports for cassette storage, serial interface and rudimentary networking. The DN is based on the Motorola microprocessor, high-resolution display and built-in networking - the three basic features of all workstations. Apollo and its main competitor, Sun Microsystems, optimized their machines to run the computer-intensive graphics programs common in engineering and scientific applications.
Apollo was a leading innovator in the workstation field for more than a decade, and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in IBM's brand recognition, along with a massive marketing campaign, ignites the fast growth of the personal computer market with the announcement of its own personal computer PC.
It featured a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, a modem, and two 5. Thousands of software titles were released over the lifespan of the C64 and by the time it was discontinued in , it had sold more than 22 million units. It is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest selling single computer of all time. Franklin was able to undercut Apple's pricing even while offering some features not available on the original. Sun Microsystems grows out of this prototype. Sun helped cement the model of a workstation having an Ethernet interface as well as high-resolution graphics and the UNIX operating system.
Lisa is the first commercial personal computer with a graphical user interface GUI. It was thus an important milestone in computing as soon Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh would soon adopt the GUI as their user interface, making it the new paradigm for personal computing.
The success of the Portable inspired many other early IBM-compatible computers. Compaq's success launched a market for IBM-compatible computers that by had achieved an percent share of the personal computer market. The Macintosh was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface and was based on the Motorola microprocessor. The PC Jr.
While the PC Jr. It also included more memory and accommodated high-density 1. By the early s, Dell became one of the leading computer retailers. It developed a very loyal following while add-on components allowed it to be upgraded easily. The inside of the Amiga case is engraved with the signatures of the Amiga designers, including Jay Miner as well as the paw print of his dog Mitchy.
At 4 million operations per second and 4 kilobytes of memory, the gave PCs as much speed and power as older mainframes and minicomputers. The chip brought with it the introduction of a bit architecture, a significant improvement over the bit architecture of previous microprocessors. It had two operating modes, one that mirrored the segmented memory of older x86 chips, allowing full backward compatibility, and one that took full advantage of its more advanced technology.
It performed 2 million instructions per second, but other RISC-based computers worked significantly faster. Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corporation moves artificial intelligence a step forward when he develops the controversial concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine CM The machine used up to 65, one-bit 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 altered by reprogramming rather than rewiring. 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.
One of Britain's leading computer companies, Acorn continued the Archimedes line, which grew to nearly twenty different models, into the s. The computer he created, an all-black cube was an important innovation. This object-oriented multitasking operating system was groundbreaking in its ability to foster rapid development of software applications. VTech, founded in Hong Kong, had been a manufacturer of Pong-like games and educational toys when they introduce the Laser computer.
The RISC microprocessor had a bit integer arithmetic and logic unit the part of the CPU that performs operations such as addition and subtraction , a bit floating-point unit, and a clock rate of 33 MHz. The chips remained similar in structure to their predecessors, the chips. In , Charles Babbage conceptualized and began developing the Difference Engine , which is considered the first automatic computing machine that could approximate polynomials.
The Difference Engine was capable of computing several sets of numbers and making hard copies of the results. Babbage received some help with the development of the Difference Engine from Ada Lovelace , considered to be the first computer programmer for her work. Unfortunately, because of funding, Babbage was never able to complete a full-scale functional version of this machine. In June , the London Science Museum completed the Difference Engine No 2 for the bicentennial year of Babbage's birth and later completed the printing mechanism in In , Charles Babbage proposed the first general mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine.
It is the first general-purpose computer concept that could be used for many things and not only one particular computation. Unfortunately, because of funding issues, this computer was also never built while Charles Babbage was alive.
In , Henry Babbage, Charles Babbage's youngest son, was able to complete a portion of this machine and perform basic calculations. In , Herman Hollerith developed a method for machines to record and store information on punch cards for the US census.
Hollerith's machine was approximately ten times faster than manual tabulations and saved the census office millions of dollars. Hollerith would later form the company we know today as IBM. The Z1 was created by German Konrad Zuse in his parents' living room between and It is considered to be the first electromechanical binary programmable computer and the first functional modern computer. The Turing machine was first proposed by Alan Turing in and became the foundation for theories about computing and computers.
The machine was a device that printed symbols on paper tape in a manner that emulated a person following a series of logical instructions. Without these fundamentals, we wouldn't have the computers we use today. The Colossus was the first electric programmable computer, developed by Tommy Flowers , and was first demonstrated in December The Colossus was created to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages.
The ABC was an electrical computer that used more than vacuum tubes for digital computation, including binary math and Boolean logic, and had no CPU was not programmable. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly was invalid. In the decision, Larson named Atanasoff the sole inventor.
Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in and was not completed until It occupied about 1, square feet and used about 18, vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons.
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