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Floppy disks
A floppy disk, is a type of disk storage composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic enclosure lined with fabric that removes dust particles.
The first commercial floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (200 mm) in diameter; they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and then were sold separately beginning in 1972 by Memorex and others. -
CRAY I (Seymour Cray)
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer created by Cray Research in 1975. Over 100 Cray-1's were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. It is best known for its shape, a small C-shaped cabinet with a ring of benches around the outside covering the power supplies.
The Cray-1 implemented the vector processor design. These systems improve the performance of math operations by arranging memory and registers to quickly perform a single operation on a large set of data. -
ARPANET protocols (Vint Cerf)
The starting point for host-to-host communication on the ARPANET was the 1822 protocol. An 1822 message consisted of a message type, a host address, and a data field. To send a message, the transmitting host formatted a data message containing the destination address and the data message being sent, and then transmitted the message through the 1822 hardware interface. When the message was ultimately delivered to the destination host, the receiving IMP would transmit a Ready for Next Message. -
Altair 8800 (MITS)
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issues and was sold through advertisements In Radio-Electronics, and in other magazines. It is widely recognized as the spark of the microcomputer revolution. The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft’s founding product, Altair BASIC. -
Microsoft (Bill Gates & Paul Allen)
Microsoft is an American multinational technology company which develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, etc. Its best known products are the Microsoft Windows operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge browsers. It was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975. It rose to dominate the personal computer OS market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. -
Apple Computer, Inc (Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniac)
Apple is an American multinational technology company that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. It's considered one of the Big Four technology companies alongside Amazon, Google, and Facebook. It was founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. Its first product is the Apple I, a computer designed and hand-built entirely by Wozniak, and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club, -
Apple II (Steve Wozniak)
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak. It was introduced at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire and was the first consumer product sold by Apple. It is the first model in a series of computers which were produced until 1993. The Apple II marks Apple's first launch of a personal computer aimed at a consumer market—branded toward American households. -
IBM PC compatible (IBM)
IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones. These "clones" duplicate almost exactly all the significant features of the IBM PC architecture. This was facilitated by IBM's choice of commodity hardware components and by various manufacturers' ability to reverse engineer the BIOS firmware using a "clean room design" technique. -
Laser printing
Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text, graphics and photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser over a negatively charged cylinder called a "drum" to define an image. The drum then selectively collects electrically charged powdered ink, and transfers the image to paper. Invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, laser printers were introduced for the office and then home markets by IBM, Canon, Xerox, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and many others. -
1st video card (MDA)
The Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) is IBM's standard video display card and computer display standard for the PC introduced in 1981. The MDA does not have any pixel-addressable graphics modes. It has only a single monochrome text mode (PC video mode 7), which can display 80 columns by 25 lines of high resolution text characters or symbols useful for drawing forms. -
8086 (Intel)
The 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between 1976 and 1978. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus and is notable as the processor used in the original IBM PC design.
The 8086 gave rise to the x86 architecture, which eventually became Intel's most successful line of processors. On June 5, 2018, Intel released a limited-edition CPU celebrating the anniversary of the Intel 8086, called the Intel Core i7-8086K. -
MS-DOS (Microsoft)
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and some operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS". MS-DOS was the main OS for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s, from which point it was gradually superseded by OS offering a graphical user interface, in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system. -
Windows 1.0
Windows 1.0 is a graphical personal computer operating environment developed by Microsoft. Windows 1.0 offers limited multitasking of existing MS-DOS programs and concentrates on creating an interaction paradigm (cf. message loop), an execution model and a stable API for native programs for the future. Windows 1.0 is often regarded as a "front-end to the MS-DOS operating system", a description which has also been applied to subsequent versions of Windows -
Basic programming language (Sophie Wilson)
BASIC, an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, is a family of high-level programming languages. At the time, almost all computer use required coding custom-made software, thus restricting people with training as scientists and mathematicians. BASIC was originally developed as a teaching tool. BASIC remains popular today in a handful of highly modified dialects, and in new languages, influenced by BASIC such as Microsoft Visual Basic or Prawns on GNU/Linux. -
1st definition of the Internet
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as in the WWW, electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing. -
1st computer with graphical interface
The Apple Lisa was a computer designed and manufactured by Apple Computer in the early 1980s. It was a very advanced microcomputer for its time and pioneer in integrating a set of technological advances that ended up becoming industry standards for computing, such as mouse, GUI, bitmap system, white background screen with WYSIWYG display before printing, hard drive, microfloppy, virtual memory, Multitasking capability, translational task windows, and office suite software as a built-in package. -
C++ programming language (Rick Mascitti)
C++ is a high-level, general-purpose programming language created as an extension of the C programming language. It has expanded significantly over time, and modern C++ has object-oriented, generic, and functional features in addition to facilities for low-level memory manipulation. It is almost always implemented as a compiled language, and many vendors provide C++ compilers, including the Free Software Foundation, LLVM, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, and IBM, so it is available on many platforms. -
CD-ROM (Sony & Philips)
A Compact Disc Read-Only Memory (CD-ROM) is a compact disc with which they use laser beams to read information in digital format. The standard CD-ROM was established in 1984 by Sony and Philips. Some drives read CD-ROMs and burn to single-recorded CDs (CD-RWs). These units are called burners because they work with a laser that "burns" the surface of the disc to record the information. Currently, they are starting to fall into disuse by DVD drives, mainly due to increased storage capacity. -
1st sound card: Sound Blaster (Creative Labs)
A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs.
The Sound Blaster family of sound cards was the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system platform, until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95, which standardized the programming interface at application level (eliminating the importance of backward compatibility with Sound). -
Java programming language (James Gosling)
Java is a general-purpose programming language that is class-based, object-oriented, and designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers write once, run anywhere meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine regardless of the underlying computer architecture. -
World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee)
The World Wide Web (WWW), also known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://www.example.com/), which are interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible on the Internet. The resources of the WWW are transferred via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser and are published by a software application called a web server. -
1st Pentium Microprocessor (Pentium)
Intel Pentium is a range of fifth-generation microprocessors with x86 architecture produced by Intel Corporation. The first Pentium was released on March 22, 1993 with initial speeds of 60 and 66 MHz, 3,100,000 transistors, internal 8 KiB cache for data, and 8 KiB for instructions. It was marketed at speeds between 60 and 200 MHz, with bus speed of 50, 60 and 66 MHz. Versions that included MMX instructions provided the user with better handling of multimedia applications.
