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Lilienfeld patents FET
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Eniac the first electronic copmputer (using vacuum tubes is announced. It is 1000 tinmes faster than mechanical devices and uses 17,246 vacuum tubes
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Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley invent bipolar junction transistor
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Texas Instruments and IDEA produce first transistor radio
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Biard and Pittmandevelop the LED
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The Programma 101 was able to calculate the basic four arithmetic functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), plus square root, absolute value, and fractional part.There were 16 jump instructions and 16 conditional jump instructions. It's the conditional jump instructions that help lay claim to "computer" (a state machine) rather than "calculator" (a simple enumerator of instructions)
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Handheld consumer electronic calulator introduced. Sharp unit shown sold for $345
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Motorola demonstrates first hand held telephone
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The Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips), which is less than what is now considered a complete personal computer. It had no keyboard monitor or case
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Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) lauches first commercial cell network
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IBM PC used the then-new Intel 8088 processor. Like other 16-bit CPUs, it could access up to 1 megabyte of RAM, but it used an 8-bit-wide data bus to memory and peripherals. This design allowed use of the large, readily available, and relatively inexpensive family of 8-bit-compatible support chips.
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It was the first personal computer to be sold without a programming language at all. Included a 400K hard drive
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Contemperary music players were bulky and awkward or small and useless. Apple founder Steve Jobs "announced it as a Mac-compatible product with a 5 GB hard drive that put "1,000 songs in your pocket'
