History of Computers
by You couldn’t always just come home and go on a computer. You couldn’t always do that because there were no computers and once the computers first came out they were for commercial use only. When the computers finally came to house-hold use they were simple and basic. There were no computers games or entertainment. The computer has developed a lot since they were first made.
A 8 inch floppy disk along side of a 3.5 in. floppy.
A 5.25 inch floppy.
A cool Lego flash drive.
Computers have come a long way from mainframes and an abacus. Now you can just use a flash drive to save your files, but before you had to carry around a big old 8 inch floppy disk. Without the founders of the major computer companies, computers
would not be how they are today. Therefore computers have come very far to get to where they are now.
A timeline of important dates relating to computers:
- 1936 – Konrad Zuse – Z1 Computer
- 1942 – John Atanasoff & Clifford Berry – ABC Computer
- 1944 – Howard Aiken & Grace Hopper – Harvard Mark I Computer
- 1946 – John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly – ENIAC 1 Computer
- 1948 – Frederic Williams & Tom Kilburn – Manchester Baby Computer & The Williams Tube
- 1947/48 – John Bardeen, Walter Brattain & Wiliam Shockley – The Transistor
- 1951 – John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly – UNIVAC Computer
- 1953 – International Business Machines – IBM 701 EDPM Computers
- 1954 – John Backus & IBM – FORTRAN Computer Programming Language
- 1955 – Stanford Research Institute, Bank of America, and General Electric ERMA and MICR
- 1958 – Jack Kilby & Robert Noyce – The Integrated Circuit
- 1962 – Steve Russell & MIT – Spacewar Computer Game
- 1964 – Douglas Engelbart – Computer Mouse & Windows
- 1969 – ARPAnet
- 1970 – Intel 1103 Computer Memory
- 1971 – Alan Shugart &IBM – The “Floppy” Disk
- 1973 – Robert Metcalfe & Xerox – The Ethernet Computer Networking
- 1974/75 – Scelbi & Mark-8 Altair & IBM 5100 Computers
- 1976/77 – Apple I, II & TRS-80 & Commodore Pet Computers
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Post CommentAndy-N
On March 10, 2008 at 4:28 am
Nice article.
I remember a great interview I heard with Steve Jobs. His explanation of how they developed the PC was fascinating. And the crude methods they used to test it.
Judy Sheldon
On March 20, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Where would we be without the computer? We’ve gotten used to them now.