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Herman Hollerith
His observation of a railroad conductor punching riders' tickets contributed a key idea to Hollerith's system. -
Hewlett-Packard is Founded
Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. Walt Disney Pictures ordered eight of the 200B model to use as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie “Fantasia.” -
Complex Number Calculator
This is considered to be the first demonstration of remote access computing. -
Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 Cmputer
The Z3 was an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere. -
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in 1939, Atanasoff received funds to build the full-scale machine. -
Harvard Mark-I in use, 1944
Conceived by Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized, relay-based calculator. The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machine’s thousands of component parts. -
AVIDAC
An inspiring summer school on computing at the University of Pennsylvania´s Moore School of Electrical Engineering stimulated construction of stored-program computers at universities and research institutions. -
IBM´s SSEC
IBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed scientific data in public display near the company´s Manhattan headquarters. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon. -
IBM 701
IBM shipped its first electronic computer, the 701. During three years of production, IBM sold 19 machines to research laboratories, aircraft companies, and the federal government. -
MIT researchers built the TX-0
the first general-purpose, programmable computer built with transistors. For easy replacement, designers placed each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube. -
SAGE — Semi-Automatic Ground Environment
Linked hundreds of radar stations in the United States and Canada in the first large-scale computer communications network. An operator directed actions by touching a light gun to the screen. -
IBM STRETCH
IBM´s 7000 series mainframes were the company´s first transistorized computers. At the top of the line of computers — all of which emerged significantly faster and more dependable than vacuum tube machines — sat the 7030, also known as the "Stretch. -
Precursor to the Minicomputer
One of 50 built, the average PDP-1 included with a cathode ray tube graphic display, needed no air conditioning and required only one operator. -
The LINC (Laboratory Instrumentation Computer)
The first real time laboratory data processing. Designed by Wesley Clark at Lincoln Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp. Research faculty came to a workshop at MIT to build their own machines, most of which they used in biomedical studies. -
Hewlett-Packard
The general purpose computer business with its HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational power formerly found only in much larger computers. -
In the photograph, Ed deCastro
Data General Corp., started by a group of engineers that had left Digital Equipment Corp., introduced the Nova, with 32 kilobytes of memory, for $8,000. -
Hewlett-Packard announced the HP-35
The HP-35 distinguished itself from its competitors by its ability to perform a broad variety of logarithmic and trigonometric functions, to store more intermediate solutions for later use, and to accept and display entries in a form similar to standard scientific notation. -
The TV Typewriter, designed by Don Lancaster
It used $120 worth of electronics components, as outlined in the September 1973 issue of Radio Electronics. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store 512 characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. -
Scelbi advertised its 8H computer
The first commercially advertised U.S. computer based on a microprocessor, Intel´s 8008. Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. -
MITS Altair
The January edition of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800 computer kit, based on Intel´s 8080 microprocessor, on its cover. Within weeks of the computer´s debut, customers inundated the manufacturing company, MITS, with orders. Bill Gates and Paul Allen licensed BASIC as the software language for the Altair. -
The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor)
The first of several personal computers released in 1977 — came fully assembled and was straightforward to operate, with either 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, two built-in cassette drives, and a membrane "chiclet" keyboard. -
Advertisment for Atari 400 and 800 computers
The two machines were built with the idea that the 400 would serve primarily as a game console while the 800 would be more of a home computer. Both sold well, though they had technical and marketing problems, and faced strong competition from the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 computers. -
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 featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives. -
Early Publicity still for the Commodore 64
The C64, as it was better known, sold for $595, came with 64KB of RAM and featured impressive graphics. Thousands of software titles were released over the lifespan of the C64. -
Amiga 1000 with Seiko Music Keyboard
The Amiga 1000 is released. Commodore’s Amiga 1000 sold for $1,295 dollars (without monitor) and had audio and video capabilities beyond those found in most other personal computers. -
IBM introduced its PS/2 machines
The first IBMs to include Intel´s 80386 chip, the company had shipped more than 1 million units by the end of the year. IBM released a new operating system, OS/2, at the same time, allowing the use of a mouse with IBMs for the first time. -
Netscape Communications Corporation is founded.
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.
