Significant Computer History Inventions in the 1970's

By elc
  • Period: to

    1970's

  • Canon Pocketronic Electronic Calculator

    Canon Pocketronic Electronic Calculator
    Cannon | Texas Instruments
    The Canon Pocketronic was the first handheld battery-powered printing electronic calculator. It was one of the earliest calculators to use Large Scale Integrated (LSI) Circuits to provide logic. It had no display, and all of the calculations were printed on thermal paper tape.

  • Intel 4004 microprocessor

    Intel 4004 microprocessor
    Intel Corporation | Marcian "Ted" Hoff, Stanley Mazor, Federico Faggin (Aided by Masatoshi Shima) The 4004 was the first commercially produced microprocessor in a long line of Intel CPUs, and the first significant example of large-scale integration. It showcased a CPU architecture based on data stored on RAM (random-access memory) and could be integrated into a single chip, which reduced cost and improved speed. This project originated from a chip order for calculators by Busicom Corp.

  • Cray-1

    Cray-1
    Cray Research | Seymour Cray
    Cray-1 was the world's fastest supercomputer from 1976 to 1982. This was the first Cray design to use integrated circuits and was built as a 64-bit system. Cray's design had fast vector processing and all-around scalar performance so when the machine switched modes, it would still be performant. The use of registers dramatically improved workloads. It used "chaining", which allowed programmers to "chain together" several instructions to get higher performance.

  • Altair 8800

    Altair 8800
    Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS)
    The Altair 8800 was the first commercially successful personal computer and was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. The first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.

  • Apple II

    Apple II
    Apple Computer, Inc | Steve Wozniak
    The Apple II was one of the first successful mass-produced microcomputer products that featured an 8-bit microprocessor and displayed colored graphics. The Apple logo was even redesigned to have a spectrum of colors due to the monitor. It was Apple's first launch of a personal computer and was marketed towards consumer households. The Apple II Series continued until November 1993 with the Apple IIe as the last available production model.