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Hewlett-Packard is founded
Hewlett and Packard founded their company in a Palo Alto, California garage. They created their first product called the, HP 200A Audio Oscillator. It soon became a popular test equipment for engineers. Fun fact is that Walt Disney actually order 8 of them to test their recording equipment and speaker systems. Which was used in theaters showing the movie "Fantasia" in 1940. -
Complex Number Calculator was completed (CNC)
Bell Telephone Laboratories completed the calculator in 1939 which was originally designed by scientist George Stibitz. The in 1940, Stibitz demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College. He preformed calculations on the CNC using a Teletype terminal connected to New York over these special telephone lines. This was the first example of remote access computing. -
The Manchester Mark I completed
The Manchester Mark I which was built in 1949, with more than 1,300 vacuum tubes and occupied an area of a medium room. It was built by a team led by engineers Fredrick Williams and Tom Kilburn. It was a prototype for Ferranti's first computer called the Ferranti Mark 1. -
Grimsdale and Webb build early transistorized computer
Richard Grimsdale and Douglas Webb demonstrated a prototype of the "Manchester TC" which was a transistorized computer on November 16, 953. The machine used 92 point-contact transistors and 550 diodes. -
IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator introduced
The 650 which was IBM's first mass-produced computer, with the company selling 450 in the first year. Spinning at 2,500 rpm, the 650's magnetic data storage drum allowed faster access to any stored information than any other drum-based machines. It was very popular in universities, where a generation of students first had leaned to program.