-
Charles Babbage
-Often called “The Father of Computing,”
-Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, philosopher and inventor.
-In 1824, won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
-Apart from computers, he contributed other inventions – such as a pilot or ‘cow catcher’ to be put on the front of engines to catch obstacles on railways. At various times, he worked for Brunel’s Great Western Railways. -
Herman Hollerith
-Graduated from the Columbia University School of Mines with an "Engineer of Mines" degree in 1879, at age 19.
- Formed the Tabulating Machine Company, opening a shop in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC.
- Widely regarded as the father of modern automatic computation. -
Jack Kilby
-Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was an American electrical engineer who took part (along with Robert Noyce) in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958.
-Born in Jefferson City, Missour.
-Kilby received his bachelor of science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. -
Z1 Computer
-It was completed in 1938 and financed completely from private funds.
-The machine was only capable of executing instructions while reading from the punched tape reader, so the program itself was not loaded in its entirety into internal memory in advance. -
1st generation computers
-The UNIVAC and ENIAC computers are examples of first-generation computing devices.
- Relied on machine language, the lowest-level programming language understood by computers, to perform operations, and they could only solve one problem at a time. -
Eniac
-The ENIAC was not originally designed as an internally programmed computer. The program was set up manually by varying switches and cable connections.
-The master programmer contained ten 6-stage counters--each routing incoming program pulses over a field of six output channels. -
Univac
-UNIVAC was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly (designers of the ENIAC).
-The UNIVAC I was unique in that it separated the complex problems of input and output from the actual computation facility.
-The machine was 25 feet by 50 feet in length, contained 5,600 tubes, 18,000 crystal diodes, and 300 relays. It utilized serial circuitry, 2.25 MHz bit rate, and had an internal storage capacity 1,000 words or 12,000 characters. -
Steve Jobs
-In 1972, designed his own version of the classic video game, Pong.
-In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed their own business, which they named "Apple Computer Company" in remembrance of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples. -
Bill Gates
-He is consistently ranked one of the world's wealthiest people.
-From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006, Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy.
-During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect. -
2nd Generation computers
-Moved from cryptic binary machine language to symbolic, or assembly, languages, which allowed programmers to specify instructions in words.
-The first computers of this generation were developed for the atomic energy industry. -
3rd Generation computers
-Instead of punched cards and printouts, users interacted with third generation computers through keyboards and monitors and interfaced with an operating system.
-Computers for the first time became accessible to a mass audience because they were smaller and cheaper than their predecessors. -
Basic
-Developed at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny, Mary Keller, andd Thomas Kurt.
-Mainly popular during 1970-1980
-It is not used today to develop programs but to help teach the fundamentals of progamming. -
4th Generation computers
-Could be linked together to form networks.
-Help led to the development of the Internet. -
The Altair
-Sold around 2000+
-Sold for $439, incloudning everthing than the Altair.
-Ed Roberts, the owner and president of MITS ( Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems), helped with the design of the Altair. -
Apple II
-Included C\color display, eight internal exparsion slots, and a case with a keyboard.
-One fo the first user-friendly systems
-Had an extended life time of 15 years. -
Visicalc
-Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented VisiCalc.
-By 1982 VisiCalc's price had risen from $100 to $250.
-VisiCalc sold over 700,000 copies in six years, and as many as 1 million copies over its history. -
WordStar
-It was the most feature-rich and easy-to-use word processor available for this operating system, and became a de facto standard.
-Deliberately written to make as few assumptions about the underlying system as possible -
Introduction of the GUI
-The honor for producing the first working GUI goes to Doug Englebart – at the time an employee of Stanford Research Institute.
-The Star, was the first GUI-based OS available to the public. -
Osborned
-Considered to be the first portable computer.
- Adam Osborne, is the founder of the Osborne Computer, and Lee Felsenstein design the Osborne.
-Couldn't Display more than 52 characters per line.
-Included 2 built-in floppy drivers which held 91k if data each. -
PageMaker
-Helped to popularize the Macintosh platform and the Windows environment.
-PageMaker relies on Adobe Systems' PostScript page description language.
-Operating system:Windows Vista and earlier, Mac OS 9, OS/2 v3.01. -
Excel
-Supports charts, graphs, or histograms generated from specified groups of cells.
-Supports programming through Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is a dialect of Visual Basic. -
Mosaic
-First web browser with the ability to display text and images inline, meaning you could put pictures and text on the same page together, in the same window.
-At the time of its release, NCSA Mosaic was free software, but it was available only on Unix. -
Netscape
-First company to attempt to capitalize on the nascent World Wide Web.
-Founded under the name Mosaic Communications Corporation, the brainchild of Jim Clark who had recruited Marc Andreessen as co-founder and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as investors.
-Their first product was the web browser, called Mosaic Netscape 0.9
