Major Events and People in the History of Computers -- Amanda Henrichs
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Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS was an English polymath. He was a mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, who is best remembered now for originating the concept of a programmable computer. -
Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith was an American statistician and inventor who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of the Tabulating Machine Company that later merged to become IBM. Hollerith is widely regarded as the father of modern machine data processing. With his invention of the punched card evaluating machine the beginning of the era of automatic data processing systems was marked. -
Jack Kilby
*Born in Jefferson City, Missouri,
Mr. Kilby grew up in Great Bend, Kansas. With B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin respectively, he began his career in 1947 with the Centralab Division of Globe Union Inc. in Milwaukee, developing ceramic-base, silk-screen circuits for consumer electronic products. -
Z1 Computer
*It was created by Konrad Zuse.
*It included a control unit and separate memory functions.
*Important breakthrough for future computer design. -
Eniac
*First successful high-speed electronic digital computer. -
Univac
*The first UNIVAC I was delivered on June 14, 1951.
*From 1951 to 1958 a total of 46 UNIVAC I computers were delivered, -
2nd generation computers
The transition from first generation to second generation of computers was not abrupt. There was all round development in technology, designs and programming languages. Diode and transistor technology formed the basis of the electronic switches and the switching time came down to around 0.3 microseconds. -
Steve Jobs
was an American entrepreneur, marketer, and inventor, who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he is widely recognized as a charismatic and design-driven pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields, transforming "one industry after another, from computers and smartphones to music and movies." Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a membe -
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates, III is an American business magnate, philanthropist, investor, computer programmer, and inventor. Gates is the former chief executive and chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen. -
BASIC
*A language that beginning programming students could easily learn.
*It led to the creation of Microsoft. -
3rd generation computers
In this era, there were several innovations in various fields of computer technology. These include Integrated Circuits (ICs), Semiconductor Memories, Microprogramming, various patterns of parallel processing and introduction of Operating Systems and time-sharing. In the Integrated Circuit, division there was gradual progress. Firstly, there were small-scale integration (SSI) circuits (having 10 devices per chip), which evolved to medium scale integrated (MSI) circuits (having 100 devices per ch -
Excel
One of the first commercial uses of computers was in processing payroll and other financial records, so the programs (and, indeed, the programming languages themselves)were designed to generate reports in the standard "spreadsheet" format bookkeepers andaccountants used. As computers became more available and affordable in the last quarter of the 20th century, more software became available for them, and programs to keepfinancial records and generate spreadsheet reports -
4th generation computers
All modern day computers are Fourth Generation Computers. All of us are using Fourth Generation Computers for our day-to-day activities. With the improvement in the IC (Integrated Circuit), the size of the computers started to go down. Invention of VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) squeezed hundreds of thousands of components onto a single chip, where as the ULSI (Ultra-large Scale Integration) increased that number into the millions by the year 1980. -
Introduction of the GUI
*Allowed users to interact with the computer more easily.
*Apple was the first company to use GUI.
*It was not invented by a computer company. -
Altair computer
Computer from MITS that was developed by Henry Edward Roberts it introduced on December 19, 1974. It was later published on the front cover of Popular Electronics in 1975 making it almost instantly a huge success. The Altair 8800 included an Intel 8080 processor, "1024 word" memory boards with 256 bytes of memory (expandable to 64 K) and was available as a kit for $439 or assembled for $621 -
Apple II
Manufacturer: Apple Computer Co.
Model: Apple ][
Date Canceled: 1980
made in the USA
Price $1,200
Current Value $25-$250 -
WordStar
WordStar was a word processor application, published by MicroPro, originally written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS, that enjoyed a dominant market share during the early-to-mid-1980s. Seymour I. Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company -
Osborne Computer
Manufacturer: Osborne Computer Corporation
Model: Osborne 1
Date Canceled: 1983 (with the dissolution of the company)
made in the USA
Price $1,800
Current Value $5-$200 -
PageMaker
For millennia, humans have struggled to communicate, first with grunts and sign language, then with speech. But it was when humans learned to write that civilization became possible. First we painted on cave walls, then chiseled in stone, then wrote on more practical and portable things, like wood, papyrus, and finally paper. Hand printing ink on paper was the state of the art for hundreds of years until mechanical inventing was invented, first with engraving and then with movable type. -
Mosaic
Allowed users to view multimedia on web.
Increased internet traffic by 350%. -
NetScape
Netscape, of course, was the company that would launch the dot com era. Though not technically the first internet startup per-se, Netscape was the first internet startup that mattered. It produced the first widely popular internet application, Netscape Navigator, and it grew symbiotically with the explosion in popularity of the World Wide Web. -
Viscalc
By the summer of 1978, Microchess was available on all of the popular personal computers of the day, the S-100 bus machines, the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET. Micro-Ware had a booth at PC-78 in Atlantic City and the cassettes were flying off the table. Carl Helmers, editor of Byte Magazine, came by and introduced me to someone I should meet because “we have a lot in common”. This turned out to be Dan Fylstra, at the time, an MBA student at Harvard, a writer for Byte, and a 6800 programmer. -
1st Generation computers
CHARACTERISTICS
1) First generation computers were based on vacuum tubes.
2) The operating systems of the first generation computers were very slow.
3) They were very large in size.
4) Production of the heat was in large amount in first generation computers.
5) Machine language was used for programming.
6) First generation computers were unreliable.
7) They were difficult to program and use.
