Headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts, Digital Equipment Corporation, took over 8, square foot leased space in a nineteenth century mill that once produced blankets and uniforms for soldiers who fought in the Civil War. The mill is still in use today as an office park Clock Tower Place today. The is built on a 'building block' concept which allows it to be highly flexible for many different uses and could simultaneously control up to 63 tape drives—very useful for large databases of information.
For many business users, quick access to this huge storage capability outweighed its relatively slow processing speed. Customers included US military as well as industry. Its task was to detect incoming Soviet bombers and direct interceptor aircraft to destroy them. Operators directed actions by touching a light gun to the SAGE airspace display.
Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar! More than 50 PDP-1s were sold. It was sold exclusively in Japan, but could process alphabetic and Japanese kana characters.
Only about thirty NEACs were sold. It managed Japan's first on-line, real-time reservation system for Kinki Nippon Railways in The last one was decommissioned in At the top of the line was the Model , also known as "Stretch. The mainframe, the first in the series, replaces earlier vacuum tube technology with smaller, more reliable transistors.
By the mids, nearly half of all computers in the world were IBM s. Minuteman missiles use transistorized computers to continuously calculate their position in flight. The computer had to be rugged and fast, with advanced circuit design and reliable packaging able to withstand the forces of a missile launch.
When the Minuteman I was decommissioned, some universities received these computers for use by students. The US Navy Tactical Data System uses computers to integrate and display shipboard radar, sonar and communications data. This real-time information system began operating in the early s. System control was provided through the Atlas Supervisor, which some consider to be the first true operating system. The Control Data Corporation CDC performs up to 3 million instructions per second —three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM supercomputer.
The retained the distinction of being the fastest computer in the world until surpassed by its successor, the CDC , in Instead of designing a custom controller, two young engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation DEC -- Gordon Bell and Edson de Castro -- do something unusual: they develop a small, general purpose computer and program it to do the job.
A later version of that machine became the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. Because of its speed, small size, and reasonable cost, the PDP-8 was sold by the thousands to manufacturing plants, small businesses, and scientific laboratories around the world.
At the same press conference, IBM also announced 40 completely new peripherals for the new family. Operational by , it was not the first computerized reservation system, but it was well publicized and became very influential. It was the world's first commercial bit minicomputer and systems were sold. This printing programmable calculator was made from discrete transistors and an acoustic delay-line memory.
The Programma could do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, as well as calculate square roots. It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP's growing family of programmable test and measurement products. It interfaced with a wide number of standard laboratory instruments, allowing customers to computerize their instrument systems.
The A also marked HP's first use of integrated circuits in a commercial product. A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the lunar surface. Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes into the display and keyboard unit DSKY. The AGC was one of the earliest uses of integrated circuits, and used core memory, as well as read-only magnetic rope memory.
The astronauts were responsible for entering more than 10, commands into the AGC for each trip between Earth and the Moon. The Nova line of computers continued through the s, and influenced later systems like the Xerox Alto and Apple 1. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its byte memory.
In , after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors. Initially designed for internal use by HP employees, co-founder Bill Hewlett issues a challenge to his engineers in fit all of the features of their desktop scientific calculator into a package small enough for his shirt pocket.
They did. The HP helped HP become one of the most dominant companies in the handheld calculator market for more than two decades. The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel , appears in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the had transistors and could perform up to 90, operations per second in four-bit chunks.
Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture. Under the direction of engineer Dr. Based on the Intel microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. Designer Thi Truong developed the computer while Philippe Kahn wrote the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that did not require high performance, such as process control and highway toll collection.
In , Truong sold R2E to Bull. Designed by Don Lancaster, the TV Typewriter is an easy-to-build kit that can display alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A cassette tape interface provided supplementary storage for text. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the s. Wang was a successful calculator manufacturer, then a successful word processor company.
The Wang makes it a successful computer company, too. Wang sold the primarily through Value Added Resellers, who added special software to solve specific customer problems. The first commercially advertised US computer based on a microprocessor the Intel , the Scelbi has 4 KB of internal memory and a cassette tape interface, as well as Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces. Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications.
In , Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market. The Alto is a groundbreaking computer with wide influence on the computer industry.
It was based on a graphical user interface using windows, icons, and a mouse, and worked together with other Altos over a local area network. It could also share files and print out documents on an advanced Xerox laser printer. For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders.
Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor. The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications. Southwest Technical Products is founded by Daniel Meyer as DEMCO in the s to provide a source for kit versions of projects published in electronics hobbyist magazines. Of the dozens of different SWTP kits available, the proved the most popular. Tailored for online transaction processing, the Tandem is one of the first commercial fault-tolerant computers.
The banking industry rushed to adopt the machine, built to run during repair or expansion. The Video Display Module VDM marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers.
Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March , the visual display module enabled the use of personal computers for interactive games.
The fastest machine of its day, The Cray-1's speed comes partly from its shape, a "C," which reduces the length of wires and thus the time signals need to travel across them.
High packaging density of integrated circuits and a novel Freon cooling system also contributed to its speed. Typical applications included US national defense work, including the design and simulation of nuclear weapons, and weather forecasting. Nowadays, it would be unanimously considered the first true computer in history if it were not for Konrad Zuse , who decided in to reconstruct his Z3, which had been destroyed by a bombing in The replica was exhibited at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where it is found today.
Focused on making it work, Zuse was never aware that he had in his hands the first universal computing machine. It depends. The question remains today as open as this one: What makes a machine a computer?
Click Enter. Login Profile. Es En. Economy Humanities Science Technology. Digital World. Multimedia OpenMind books Authors. Featured author. Latest book. Work in the Age of Data. Start Who Invented the First Computer? Technology Visionaries. Computing Inventions Technology. Ventana al Conocimiento Knowledge Window. The TX-0 Transistorized Experimental computer is the first transistorized computer to be demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in In , the first desktop computer, the Programma , was unveiled to the public at the New York World's Fair.
It was invented by Pier Giorgio Perotto and manufactured by Olivetti. In , Hewlett Packard began marketing the HP A , considered to be the first mass-marketed desktop computer. Although it was never sold, the first workstation is considered to be the Xerox Alto , introduced in The computer was revolutionary for its time and included a fully functional computer, display, and mouse.
The computer operated like many computers today utilizing windows , menus , and icons as an interface to its operating system. Intel introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel , on November 15, Considered as the first microcomputer, it used the Intel processor and was the first commercial non-assembly computer.
In , Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced the Altair The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights. The IBM is the first portable computer, which was released in September The computer weighed pounds and had a five-inch CRT display, tape drive , 1.
The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be the Osborne I , which was released in April and developed by Adam Osborne. The Osborne I weighed The computer kit was developed by Steve Wozniak in and contained a 8-bit processor and 4 kb of memory, which was expandable to 8 or 48 kb using expansion cards.
Although the Apple I had a fully assembled circuit board, the kit required a power supply , display , keyboard , and case to be operational. Below is a picture of an Apple I from an advertisement by Apple. The computer was code-named Acorn. When was the first computer invented? Note Early inventions that lead up to the computer, such as the abacus , astrolabe, slide rule , clocks, calculator , and tablet machines, are not accounted for on this page.
When was the word "computer" first used? First mechanical computer or automatic computing engine concept. First general-purpose computer. He establishes a company that would ultimately become IBM. The central concept of the modern computer was based on his ideas. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, attempts to build the first computer without gears, cams, belts or shafts.
This marks the first time a computer is able to store information on its main memory. Considered the grandfather of digital computers, it fills a foot by foot room and has 18, vacuum tubes. They discovered how to make an electric switch with solid materials and no need for a vacuum. Thomas Johnson Watson Jr. Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in for his work.
This marks the evolution of the computer from a specialized machine for scientists and mathematicians to technology that is more accessible to the general public. Written in the C programming language, UNIX was portable across multiple platforms and became the operating system of choice among mainframes at large companies and government entities.
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