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Hewlett-Packard (HP) is developed in Palo Alto. Their first product was HP 200A Audio Oscillator. Walt Disney Pictures ordered 8 of them for their movie, Fantasia. This was important because it was the start of sound being put onto movies.
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A German enigineer, Konrad Zuse, finished the Z3 computer. The Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic. It had a 22-bit word length. It was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943. It started the computers reading binary code.
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Claude Shannon's "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" taught engineers how they should code information so they could check for accuracy between transmissons between computers. This was the beginning of computers recieving and sending things to each other.
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Engineering Research Associates from Minneapolis built the, ERA 1101. It was the first commercially produced computer. Their first customer was the U.S. Navy. This was the first magnetic storage device, so many things have come from this.
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The silicon based junction transistor was perfected and sold for $2.50 by Texas Instruments. From this we have developed a silicon chip that does all the processing in a computer.
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IBM created the System/360. It was a group of 6 compatible computers that could work together. This was the beginning of servers.
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The Apollo guidance computer was sent into space, a year later it steered Apollo 11 to the mooon. Without this development man wouldn't have landed on the moon when they did.
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In Southern National Bank in Georgia the first ATM was installed. ATM's are used a lot nowadays this was the first one.
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The Kenbak-1 was the first personal computer, It costed $750. This was a big event because most people have a personal computer, the Kenbak-1 was the start.
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The first portable computer was made by Adam Osborne. It had a 5 in. screen, and 2 floppy disk drives. This is important to me because I use a laptop everyday in school.
