Computerhistory

  • Hewlett-Packard

    The Hewlett-Packard is founded. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillitor
  • EDSAC

    The first practical stored computer is created at Cambridge University.
  • First integrated circuit

    Jack Kilby created the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments to prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material.
  • Semiconductor

    Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. built the first standard metal oxide semiconductor product for data processing applications, an eight-bit arithmetic unit and accumulator.
  • Advertisment

    The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appeared in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the 4004 had 2250 transistors and could perform up to 90,000 operations per second in four-bit chunks.
  • Commodore PET

    The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) — the first of several personal computers released in 1977 — came fully assembled and was straightforward to operate, with either 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, two built-in cassette drives, and a membrane "chiclet" keyboard.
  • Macintosh

    Apple Computer launched the Macintosh, the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphic user interface, with a single $1.5 million commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl.
  • CPU

    Intel released the 80486 microprocessor and the i860 RISC/coprocessor chip, each of which contained more than 1 million transistors.
  • Netscape

    Netscape Communications Corporation is founded.