-
Hewlett-Packard is Founded.
Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator. Walt Disney Pictures ordered eight of the 200B model to use as sound effects. -
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed.
After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in 1939, Atanasoff received funds to build the full-scale machine. The ABC was designed and built by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff. The ABC was very similar to the computer. -
England´s first commercial computer.
It was built to solve the problem of daily scheduling production. After the success of the first LEO, Lyons went into business manufacturing computers to meet the growing need for data processing systems. -
MIT researchers built the TX-0.
The TX-0 was the first general-purpose, programmable computer built with transistors. 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. -
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. -
The LINC (Laboratory Instrumentation Computer) offered the first real time laboratory data processing.
Research faculty came to a workshop at MIT to build their own machines, most of which they used in biomedical studies. DEC supplied components. -
The Kenbak-1, the first personal computer, advertised for $750.
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. -
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. -
Adam Osborne completed the first portable computer.
It 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. -
Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corp. moved artificial intelligence a step forward.
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.
