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Evolution of Computer Technology
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Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard was founded this day. Started up first in their garage, these borthers first inveted an audio oscillator. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator. This machine became very popular very quickly. Soon, the likes of Walt Disney was using this for his productions. -
Room-Sized Calculator
The harvard Mark-1 is completed. Built by Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, this was a room-sized, relay-based calculator. The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machine’s thousands of parts. -
The First "Bug"
On September 9th, Grace Hopper recorded the first actual computer "bug" — a moth stuck between the relays and logged at 15:45 hours on the Harvard Mark II. -
IBM Computer
IBM shipped its first electronic computer, the 701. During three years of production, IBM sold a total of 19 of these computer, Most of these were sold to; research laboratories, aircraft companies, and the federal government. -
First Programmable Computer
This was the year in which MIT researchers built the TX-0, which was the first programmable computer built with transistors. For easy replacement, the tranistorrs were put into vaccum bottles. -
Artificial Intelligence
On this day, the first industrial robot was created; UNIMATE. Beginning work at General Motors, this robot obeyed step-by-step commands loaded on a magnetic drum. WIth a 4,000-pound arm, it stacked hot metals plates. -
SuperComputer
Innovated and designed by Seymour Cray, this computer preformed over 3 million commands a second. Beating out their closest competitor, IBM, Seymour Cray had created the fastest computer ever in 1964. However, this computer remained the fastest in the world until the year of 1968. All in all, its speed came from 10 computers added together. -
First Email
The first e-mail is sent by Ray Tomlinson. While he was supposed to be working on a different project for the Bolt Research, Tomlinson was credited for the "@" sign as well. When asked to describe the contents of the first email, Tomlinson said it was “something like "QWERTYUIOP"” -
Advanced Robotic Arm
David Silver at MIT designed the Silver Arm, a robotic arm to do small-parts assembly using feedback from delicate touch and pressure sensors. The arm´s fine movements corresponded to those of human fingers. -
Portable Computer
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.
