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Hewlett-Packard
David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. One of their major consumers was Walt Disney Pictures, who ordered eight of the 200B model to use as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie “Fantasia.” -
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From Past to Present
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Complex Number Calculator
In 1939, Bell Telephone Laboratories invnted the Complex Number Calcultor (CNC). It was designed by researcher George Stibitz. In 1940, Stibitz demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College. This is considered to be the first demonstration of remote access computing -
ENIAC
The ENIAC was fist released, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries. It took three years to complete. It had a speed of 5,000 operations per second and contined a plug board and switches. -
ERA 1101
Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer. The company´s first customer was the U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. Read/write heads both recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second -
NEAC
Japan´s NEC built the country´s first electronic computer, the NEAC 1101. -
PDP-8
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. -
Alto
Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center designed the Alto, which was 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. -
Tandy Radio Shack's First Desktop
In the first month after its release, Tandy Radio Shack´s first desktop computer, the TRS-80,, sold 10,000 units, well more than the company´s projected sales of 3,000 units for one year. Priced at $599.95, the machine included a Z80 based microprocessor, a video display, 4 kilobytes of memory, BASIC, cassette storage, and easy-to-understand manuals that assumed no prior knowledge on the part of the consumer. -
First Potble Computer
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 had a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives. -
i860 RSC/coprocessor Chip
Intel released the 80486 microprocessor and the i860 RISC/coprocessor chip, in 1989. Each contained more than 1 million transistors. The RISC microprocessor had a 32-bit integer arithmetic and logic unit, a 64-bit floating-point unit, and a clock rate of 33 MHz. -
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web was creted by Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, at the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva. He developed HyperText Markup Language. HTML, as it is commonly known, allowed the Internet to expand into the World Wide Web, using specifications he developed such as URL. -
Netscape- Birthday Year
Netscape Communications Corporation is founded. Netscape was originally founded as Mosaic Communications Corporation in April of 1994 by Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark and others. Its name was soon changed to Netscape and it delivered its first browser in October of 1994. On the day of Netscape's initial public offering in August of 1995, it’s share price went from $28 to $54 in the first few minutes of trading, valuing the company at $2 billion. -
PowerMac G4
Apple releases the PowerMac G4. It's powered by the PowerPC G4 chip from Motorola. It was available in 400 MHz an 500 MHz. -
BlackBerry
RIM released the first BlackBerry smartphone. -
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is released, which was a huge deal because tis became Microsoft Internet Explorer's biggest competitor since Netscape Navigator. -
Wii
Nintendo releases the Wii. -
Winos 7
Microsoft releases Windows 7. -
Outlook.com
Microsoft announces in February that it will be moving away from Hotmail brand and begin moving over 300 million users to the new Outlook.com e-mail service.