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Amdahl 470
Gene Amdahl, father of the IBM System/360, starts his own company, Amdahl Corporation, to compete with IBM in mainframe computer systems. The 470V/6 was the company’s first product and ran the same software as IBM System/370 computers but cost less and was smaller and faster. -
Pong
California entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell hires young engineer Al Alcorn to design a car-driving game, but when it becomes apparent that this is too ambitious for the time, he has Alcorn design a version of Ping Pong instead. The game was tested in bars in Grass Valley and Sunnyvale, California, where it proved very popular. -
IBM 3850 mass storage system
The IBM 3850 mass storage system is introduced. The largest 3850 storage system held 4,720 cartridges, stored 236 GB, and was 20 feet long. IBM claimed online magnetic disk storage was ten times more costly than the 3850. Released as an alternative to a manual tape reel library, the system used 4-inch long cylinders of magnetic tape that were retrieved and replaced by a robotic arm. Those cylinders were stored in hexagonal bins to reduce space. -
MOS 6502
Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor. The MOS 6502 was introduced at a conference in San Francisco at a cost of $25, far less than comparable processors from Intel and Motorola, -
Speak and Spell
Texas Instruments Inc. introduces Speak & Spell, a talking learning aid for children aged 7 and up. Its debut marked the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single integrated circuit.