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Intel releases DRAM Chip
First commercially accessable dynamic ramdom access memory chip that was affordable and one of the first products from Intel. Design and produciton was led by Joel Karp and William Regitz. -
Commericalization of Floppy Disk
First invented by Alan Shugart and his team at IBM in the 60s, it was released commerically in 1971. Floppy disks made it possible to share and transport data easily between computers. This was a precursor to the our current version of USB sticks whereas at the time, the floppy disk could only hold about 365kB of data. This is extremely small compared to our current capacity of over 1TB. -
Creation of Ethernet
This allowed networks to be created and connect the standalone computer to various othe devices such as printers and even tranfer data. Initally, it was only able to tranmit data at a rate of 2.94Mbit/s whereas today it can reach over 400Gbit/s. This was created by Robert Metcalfe who was part of the Xerox research staff. -
Apple I Released
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack released the first computer with a single circuit board. It was also the first Apple product to be released to the public. -
Word processing software released
WordStar was created by Rob Barnaby in 1979 and was the first word processing software availble. It allowed the user to edit margins and use word wrap and was a precursor to our current version of Microsoft Word.