History of Computers

  • Laser Printer Invented at Xerox PARC

    Physicist Gary Starkweather realizes in 1967 that exposing a copy machine’s light-sensitive drum to a paper original isn’t the only way to create an image. A computer could write it with a laser instead. In 1971 he created it and a new era in computer printing and generated billions of dollars in revenue for Xerox.
  • Intel Introduces the First Microprocessor.

    The first advertisement was for the Intel 404 and it appeared in Electronic News. This item was developed for a Japanese calculator maker, Busicom. This 404 could perform up to 90,000 operations per second in four-bit chunks and had 2250 transistors. The architecture was led by Ted Hoff while the design was led by Federico Faggin.
  • IBM introduces its Personal Computer (PC)

    The first IBM PC, formerly known as the IBM Model 5150, was based on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system. The IBM PC was widely copied and led to the creation of a vast “ecosystem” of software, peripherals, and other commodities for use with the platform.
  • Originally called the Special Effects Computer Group at Lucasfilm it is now called Pixar!

    This group then created segments of films that were computer-animated. An example of a film was Young Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Steve Jobs an Apple Computer cofounder purchased the Group from Lucasfilm for 10 million dollars. After a few years Pixar made many successful animated film. In 2006 it was purchase by Disney.
  • Photoshop is Released

    John and Thomas Knoll created this image editing program and the most popular software program published by Adobe Systems. It was created in 1987, and was used at Industrial Light and Magic. It was released as a product on February 19, 1990.
  • Powerbook Series of Laptops are Introduced

    Apples Macintosh Portable had little success in the marketplace and that lead to a redesign in the line of portable Apple computers. A build in trackball, internal floppy disk, and palm rests were included in the three PowerBooks. There was a PowerBook 100 which was the entry level machine and a PowerBook 140 that has more power and memory. The Powerbook 170 was a high-end model that had features such as an active matrix display, a floating point unit and a faster processor.
  • Windows XP Released

    Based on Windows NT kernal, XP was considered more stable than previous versions of the operating system. Persisted much longer than Microsoft planned it and by 2014 95% of the world’s ATMs ran XP
  • The Nintendo Wii is Released

    Not only does Nintendo introduce new games but it introduces new ways to interact with game systems. Advanced gesture recognition was combined into gaming by the Wii Remote. These advances allow you to incorporate a wide variety of movements into the game. It has sold over a hundred million units worldwide. Some games that were included were Wii Fit, Wii Bowling, Wii Tennis and many more! With this technology, it allowed the games to include a wide variety of movements.
  • Getting an iPad

    My first electronic device that I had to myself that I could access the Internet and social media, do my school work and play games on.
  • Apple Watch

    2015: Recently in 2015 the Apple Watch was released. The apple watch was basically a computer build into a watch. This Apple watch is super exciting and I was super interested in it when it came out. A few of my friends had gotten one and showed me everything that it could do. It could send texts and was compatible with Mac Books and iPhones.