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Holes in cards (punch card)
A piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. -
The Analytical Machine
An mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician Charles Babbage. The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. -
von Neumann architecture
An design architecture for an electronic digital computer with subdivisions of a processing unit consisting of an arithmetic logic unit and processor registers, a control unit containing an instruction register and program counter, a memory to store both data and instructions, external mass storage, and input and output mechanisms. The meaning of the term has evolved to mean a stored-program computer in which an instruction fetch and a data operation cannot occur at the same time becaus -
ENIAC
was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory -
UNIVAC
It was the second commercial computer produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Design work was begun by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand. -
PC
Any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator. This contrasted with the batch processing or time-sharing models which allowed larger, more expensive minicomputer and mainframe systems to be used by many people, usually at the same time -
UNIX Operating System
A multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs. The Unix operating system was first developed in assembly language, but by 1973 had been almost entirely recoded in C, greatly facilitating its further development and porting to other hardware -
First electronic spreadsheet
VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet on a microcomputer, and it helped turn the Apple II computer into a popular and widely used system. Lotus 1-2-3 was the leading spreadsheet when DOS was the dominant operating system. Excel now has the largest market share on the Windows and Macintosh platforms -
High-level programming language
A programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. -
Windows
A computer operating system with a graphical user interface -
Altair
A microcomputer design based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the microcomputer revolution of the next few years -
Apple
An American multinational corporation headquartered in Cupertino, California that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. Its best-known hardware products are the Mac line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad -
CRAY-1
CRAY-1 is a supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Cray Research. The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Cray-1 used only four different IC types, an ECL dual 5-4 NOR gate (one 5-input, and one 4-input, each with differential output) -
Macintosh
Macintosh is a line of personal computers (PCs) designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. It is targeted mainly at the home, education, and creative professional markets
