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The First
The First computer-It occupied about 1,800 square feet and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons. -
Elsie
Grey Walter developed wheeled automatons in order to experiment with goal-seeking behavior. His best known robot, Elsie, used photoelectric cells to seek moderate light while avoiding both strong light and darkness—which made it peculiarly attracted to women’s stockings. -
Squee: The Robot Squirrel
Squee: The Robot Squirrel uses two light sensors and two contact switches to hunt for ”nuts” (actually, tennis balls) and drag them to its nest. Squee was described as “75% reliable,” but it worked well only in a very dark room. Squee was conceived by computer pioneer Edmund Berkeley, who earlier wrote the hugely popular book Giant Brains or Machines That Think (1949). -
LISP Coding
The programming language LISP is invented in 1958 by John McCarthy at MIT. A key feature of LISP was that data and programs were simply lists in parentheses, allowing a program to treat another program – or itself – as data. -
UNIMATE
UNIMATE, the first mass-produced industrial robot, begins work at General Motors. Obeying step-by-step commands stored on a magnetic drum, the 4,000-pound robot arm sequenced and stacked hot pieces of die-cast metal. -
The Rancho Arm
The Rancho Arm´s six joints gave it the flexibility of a human arm. Acquired by Stanford University in 1963, it holds a place among the first artificial robotic arms to be controlled by a computer. -
DENDRAL artificial intelligence program
DENDRAL was an artificial intelligence program designed to apply the accumulated expertise of specialists to problem solving. Its area of specialization was chemistry and physics. It applied a battery of "if-then" rules to identify the molecular structure of organic compounds, in some cases more accurately than experts.Joshua Lederberg and Carl Djerassi creates DENDRAL -
The Orm
Developed at Stanford University, the Orm robot (Norwegian for "snake") was an unusual air-powered robotic arm. It moved by inflating one or more of its 28 rubber bladders that were sandwiched between seven metal disks. -
The Tentacle Arm
Marvin Minsky develops the Tentacle Arm robot, which moves like an octopus. It has twelve joints designed to reach around obstacles. -
Victor Scheinman´s Stanford Arm
Victor Scheinman´s Stanford Arm robot makes a breakthrough as the first successful electrically powered, computer-controlled robot arm. By 1974, the Stanford Arm could assemble a Ford Model T water pump, guiding itself with optical and contact sensors. -
Shakey the robot
SRI International´s Shakey robot becomes the first mobile robot controlled by artificial intelligence. Equipped with sensing devices and driven by a problem-solving program called STRIPS, the robot found its way around the halls of SRI by applying information about its environment to a route. -
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. Speak & Spell used linear predictive coding to formulate a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample based on previous input. -
The Fred Robot
Nolan Bushnell founded Androbot with former Atari engineers to make playful robots. The “Friendly Robotic Educational Device” (FRED), designed for 6-15 year-olds, never made it to market. -
IBM 7535
Based on a Japanese robot, IBM’s 7535 was controlled by an IBM PC and programmed in IBM’s AML (“A Manufacturing Language”). It could manipulate objects weighing up to 13 pounds. -
Denning Sentry Bot
Boston-based Denning designed the Sentry robot as a security guard patrolling for up to 14 hours at 3 mph. It radioed an alert about anything unusual in a 150-foot radius. The product, and the company, did not succeed. -
Nintendo releases the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the U.S.
Renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) when it was released in North America, the NES started to reverse the fortunes of the American game industry. The system launched with eighteen available titles, and was largely responsible for turning Mario the Plumber into one of the most enduring characters in the history of video games. -
C++
The C++ programming language emerges as the dominant object-oriented language in the computer industry when Bjarne Stroustrup publishes the book The C++ Programming Language. -
Compaq Introduces the Deskpro 386 system
The 386 chip brought with it the introduction of a 32-bit architecture, a significant improvement over the 16-bit architecture of previous microprocessors. It had two operating modes, one that mirrored the segmented memory of older x86 chips, allowing full backward compatibility, and one that took full advantage of its more advanced technology. -
The Connection Machine
The machine used up to 65,536 one-bit 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 altered by reprogramming rather than rewiring. The machine´s system of connections and switches let processors broadcast information and requests for help to other processors in a simulation of brain-like associative recall. -
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs unveils the NeXT Cube
Steve Jobs, forced out of Apple in 1985, founds a new company – NeXT. The computer he created, an all-black cube was an important innovation. The NeXT had three Motorola microprocessors and 8 MB of RAM. Its base price was $6,500. Some of its other innovations were the inclusion of a magneto-optical (MO) disk drive, a digital signal processor and the NeXTSTEP programming environment (later released as OPENSTEP). -
PowerBook series of laptops is introduced
Apple's Macintosh Portable meets with little success in the marketplace and leads to a complete redesign of Apple's line of portable computers. All three PowerBooks introduced featured a built-in trackball, internal floppy drive, and palm rests, which would eventually become typical of 1990s laptop design. -
Earth Simulator is world's fastest supercomputer
Developed by the Japanese government to create global climate models, the Earth Simulator is a massively parallel, vector-based system that costs nearly 60 billion yen (roughly $600 million at the time). A consortium of aerospace, energy, and marine science agencies undertook the project, and the system was built by NEC around their SX-6 architecture. To protect it from earthquakes, the building housing it was built using a seismic isolation system that used rubber supports. -
The Amazon Kindle is released
Many companies have attempted to release electronic reading systems dating back to the early 1990s. Online retailer Amazon released the Kindle, one of the first to gain a large following among consumers. The first Kindle featured wireless access to content via Amazon.com, along with an SD card slot allowing increased storage. -
China's Tianhe supercomputers are operational
With a peak speed of over a petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second), the Tianhe 1 (translation: Milky Way 1) is developed by the Chinese National University of Defense Technology using Intel Xeon processors combined with AMD graphic processing units (GPUs). The upgraded and faster Tianhe-1A used Intel Xeon CPUs as well, but switched to nVidia's Tesla GPUs and added more than 2,000 Fei-Tang (SPARC-based) processors. -
Sunway TaihuLight
Chinese supercomputer which, as of November 2016, is ranked number one in the TOP500 list as the fastest supercomputer in the world,[1][2] with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops.[3] This is nearly three times as fast as the previous holder of the record, the Tianhe-2, which ran at 34 petaflops.
