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Hewlett-Packard Founded
David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California.Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which became a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. Walt Disney Pictures ordered eight of the 200B model to use as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie “Fantasia.”
This pretty much started the life of computers successfully. -
Project Whirlwind
During World War II, the U.S. Navy approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about building a flight simulator to train bomber crews. The team first built a large analog computer, but later found it inaccurate and inflexible.
This started the ideas of new ways to improve these which would improve our military. -
Relay Interpolator (Bell Labs Model ll)
The Relay Interpolator is completed. The U.S. Army asked Bell Labs to design a machine to assist in testing its M-9 Gun Director. Bell Labs mathematician George Stibitz recommended using a relay-based calculator for the project. The result was the Relay Interpolator, later called the Bell Labs Model II. The Relay Interpolator used 440 relays and since it was programmable by paper tape, it was used for other applications following the war.
Helped improve our military technolgy wise. -
ERA 1101
Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer; the company´s first customer was the U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. Drums registered information as magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder. Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second.
Made communication between military branches easier. -
Lyons Electronic Office
England´s first commercial computer, the Lyons Electronic Office, solved clerical problems. The president of Lyons Tea Co. had the computer, modeled after the EDSAC, built to solve the problem of daily scheduling production and delivery of cakes to the Lyons tea shops. After the success of the first LEO, Lyons went into business manufacturing computers to meet the growing need for data processing systems
Helped small business owners keep organized as well as improve small business' in the future -
PDP-8
Digital Equipment Corp. introduced the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. The PDP-8 sold for $18,000, one-fifth the price of a small IBM 360 mainframe. The speed, small size, and reasonable cost enabled the PDP-8 to go into thousands of manufacturing plants, small businesses, and scientific laboratories.
This computer was just another upgrade which could help all industries in the future. -
Apollo Guidance Computer
The Apollo Guidance Computer made its debut orbiting the Earth on Apollo 7. A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the lunar surface. Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes and the appropriate syntactic category into the display and keyboard unit.
Made communications with our in space technologies better and more advanced. Influences more creative and faster models. -
HP-35
Hewlett-Packard announced the HP-35 as "a fast, extremely accurate electronic slide rule" with a solid-state memory similar to that of a computer. The HP-35 distinguished itself from its competitors by its ability to perform a broad variety of logarithmic and trigonometric functions, to store more intermediate solutions for later use, and to accept and display entries in a form similar to standard scientific notation.
Helped advance the calculators we now use in every day mathematics. -
Alto
Researchers at 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 simultaneously in windows, offered menus and icons, and could link to a local area network. Although Xerox never sold the Alto commercially, it gave a number of them to universities. Engineers later incorporated its features into work stations and personal computers.
Help advance our at home desktops. Easily accessable. -
Osborne l
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.
This invention is what began, what is now our laptop.
