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David Packard and Bill Hewlett founded their business in a garage in California. Their first product was HP 200A Audio Oscillator which became a popular test computer with engineers.
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Project Whirlwind started during WWII and the object of it was to create a flight simulator.
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First Generation computers were big and slow. They could only solve one problem at a time, and they had to be manually rewired to be reset for another problem. UNIVAC was released in 1951 and was mass produced for business use.
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ENIAC was built by John Mauchly and J. Presper
Eckert and it improved the speed of computers by 1,000 times. -
vacuum tubes are for storing data and programs. they were expensive to operate and got extremely hot from all the electricity and usually malfunctioned.
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Williams tube was best for random access memory. Sir Frederick Williams modified a cathode-ray tube to put marks of electrical charge on the computer screen as 1s and 0s.
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Jack Kilby created the first integrated circuit to prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material.
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These computers were smaller, more powerful, and more efficient than the first generation of computers. Magnetic hard drives and programming languages were invented during this generation.
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Jean Hoerni's Planar process protects transistors with a layer of oxide. This improves the product by allowing printing directly on the silicon surface,and it enabled Robert Noyce's invention of the monolithic integrated circuit.
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Fairchild Camera and Instrumental Corp. invented the resistor-transistor product, a set/reset and the first integrated circuit avalable as a "flip-flop" coin.
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Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. produced the first accipted gold-doped (NPN) transistor.
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Tandy Radio Shack is founded.
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Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. built the first standard metal oxide semiconductor product, an eight-bit arithmetic unit and accumulator. In the chip, engineers treat the semiconductor material to produce either of two varieties of transistors, called n-type or p-type.
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Integrated circuits use many transistors and electronic circuits on a single silicon chip, making computers even more reliable.
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Commodore Business Machines (CBM) is founded.Jack Tramiel founded it after he emigrated to the US after WWII where he began repairing typewriters.Then he founded Commodore International which also began making mechanical and electronic calculators.Despite being the largest single supplier of computers in the world his companies still had money problems.
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John van Geen improved the acoustically coupled modem. His receiver reliably detected bits of data despite background noise heard over long-distance phone lines. Inventors developed the acoustically coupled modem to connect computers to the telephone network.
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Evans & Sutherland is formed.They founded a company to develop a special graphics computer known as a frame buffer. This device was used for capturing video.
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Victor Scheinman´s Stanford Arm made a breakthrough as the first successful electrically powered, computer-controlled robot arm.
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Citizens and Southern National Bank installed the country´s first automatic teller machine.
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The Kenbak-1 was the first personal computer. It was designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-scale and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory.
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the microprocessor was invented as a general purpose processor on a chip. there was explosive growth; digital watches, pocket calculators, personal computers, cars, copy machines, and television sets. integrated circuits were smaller and faster. micro computer series such as IBM and APPLE were developed, so were portable computers. there were great developments in communication. different types of secondary memory with high storage capability and fast access was developed.
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Intel´s 8008 microprocessor was released. For the first time, a microprocessor could handle both uppercase and lowercase letters, all 10 numerals, punctuation marks, and a lot of other symbols.
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The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center designed the Alto — the first work station with a built-in mouse for input. The Alto stored several files at the same time in windows, offered menus and icons, and could link to a local area network.
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Hard disks allow fast, random access to large amounts of data. IBM announced its most successful mainframe hard disk (Direct Access Storage Device (DASD)” in June of 1980. The 3380 came in six models initially (later growing to many more). The base model stored 2.5 GB of data.
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Magnetic tape allows for inexpensive storage of information and is a big part of the computer revolution. Announced in March 1984, IBM’s new 3480 cartridge tape system replaced the traditional reels of magnetic tape in the computer center. IBM withdrew the system in 1989 but the new format caught on with other computer makers who began making 3480-compatible storage systems for several years after that.
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Video Toaster was introduced by NewTek. The Video Toaster was a video editing and production system for the Amiga line of computers and included custom hardware and special software.
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The Mosaic web browser was released. Mosaic was the first commercial software that allowed graphical access to content on the internet. it waas designed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois’s National Center. By 1994, Mosaic was available for several other operating systems.
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Nobody knows what computers will exactly be like in the future but they have many ideas. The fifth generation of computers will be based on artificial intelligence.
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Artifical intelligence gives computers some human characteistics and allows computers to think, reason and learn.
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Intelligent robots that could ‘see’ their environment through visual input and could be programmed to carry out certain tasks and should be able to decide for itself how the task should be accomplished, based on the observations it made of its environment
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Intelligent systems that could control the route of a missile and defence-systems that could fend off attacks.
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The greatest advances are in games, a computer called Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion in a game of chess.
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Humans communicate with computers in the language they use on a daily basis
