The Central Processing Unit

  • Weaving

    Weaving
    In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Used like a code of some sorts to make weaving easier.
  • Colossus

    Colossus
    Colossus was the world's first electronic, digital, computer that was programmable. The Colossus computers were used by British codebreakers during World War II to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus was designed by engineer Tommy Flowers, to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park.
  • Baby

    Baby
    The Manchester SSEM (the Baby) was the first fully electronic computer to run a stored program. It ran a factoring program for 52 minutes on June 21, 1948, after running a simple division program and a program to show that two numbers were relatively prime.
  • Neumann

    Neumann
    It was during the course of this development work that Georg Neumann made his most important contribution to modern electrical engineering. In 1947 he developed a process by which nickel cadmium batteries could be made without the excessive formation of gas and so totally gas tight - an invention that has direct links with virtually every modern electronic apparatus. Flash units, hearing aids, cameras, radios, etc, all rely on minute nickel cadmium batteries.
  • RAM

    RAM
    The first true random access memory was indeed the Williams tube used on the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine of 1948.
  • William Shockley

    William Shockley
    Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s led to California's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of electronics innovation.
  • Hard Disk

    Hard Disk
    The commercial usage of hard disk drives began in 1956 with the shipment of an IBM 305 RAMAC system including IBM Model 350 disk storage. US Patent 3,503,060 issued March 24, 1970, and arising from the IBM RAMAC program is generally considered to be the fundamental patent for disk drives
  • IBM

    IBM
    The appointment of John R. Opel as CEO in 1981 coincided with the beginning of a new era in computing. Thanks to the birth of the IBM Personal Computer or PC, the IBM brand began to enter homes, small business and schools. Computers in homes and businesses.
  • Toshiba, storage and Optical

    Toshiba, storage and Optical
    Flash memory is a solid state memory. It was invented in 1980s by Toshiba. A flash memory is a particular type of EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory). It is a no-volatile memory. Optical media are the media that use laser light technology for data storage and retrieval.