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LIGHT AMPLIFICATION BY STIMULATED EMISSION OF RADIATION (LASER)
Developed by Theodore Maiman
Allowed for more accurate measurements in medical and tech industries at the time. As technology advanced, lasers and transferring information via light has become an integral part of computers in both business and home. -
Period: to
1960s
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Card Random Access Memory
A data storage device invented by NCR which first appeared on the NCR-315 mainframe computer in 1962. A CRAM cartridge contained 256 3x14 inch cards with a PET film magnetic recording surface, with each cartridge storing up to 5.5 MB. -
BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code)
Designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, the computer language program emphasized ease of use so that computers became more accessible to people outside the science and mathematics fields. This would open the door to computers becoming more accessible to the public and gain a bigger demographic of users. -
IBM 1360 Photo-Digital Storage System
The PDSS, developed by IBM, was an online archival storage system for large data centers, the first system to be able to hold up to a terabyte in data. The data was stored on index card sized pieces of stiff photographic film that were individually retrieved and read, and could be updated by copying data, with changes, to a new card.
While only six were ever made, the PDSS was an important step in expanding the memory and data storage that computers could access and handle. -
Dynamic Random Access Memory patented
Developed by Dr. Robert Dennard at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. DRAM is a type of random-access semiconductor memory that stores each bit of data in a memory cell consisting of a tiny capacitor and a transistor. DRAM used fewer transistors that SRAM, making it smaller and easier and cheaper to produce.
