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David Packard and Bill Hewlett found HP in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular peice of test equipment for engineers. Exact date is unknown.
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There are no specific dates to speak of.
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Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer; the first customer of which was the U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. The drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words on them.
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The IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator established itself as the first mass-produced computer, with the company selling 450 in one year. Spinning at 12,500 rpm, the 650's magnetic data-storage drum allowed mush faster access to stored material than other drum memory machines.
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SAGE linked hundreds of radar stations in the United States and Canada in the first large-scale computer communication network.
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HP introduced the HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational power only previously found in much larger computers. It supported a variety of languages, among them BASIC, ALGOL, AND FORTRAN.
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A company by the name of Data General Corp., which was founded by a group of engineers that left Digital Equipment Corp., introduced the Nova, with 32 kilobytes of memory, for $8,000. The simple arcitecture of the Nova instruction set inspired Steve Wozniak's Apple I board eight years later.
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The Kenbak-1, the very first personal computer, advertised fro $750 in Scientific American. It was designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-scale and samll-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory.
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Scelbi adverised its 8H computer, the first commercially advertised computer in the U.S. based on a microprocessor, Intel's 8008. It had 4 kilobytes of internal memory and a cassette tape, with both tletype and oscilloscope interfaces.
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Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Researc Center designed the Alto - the first work station with a built-in mouse for input. The Alto stored many files simultaneously in windows, offered menus and icons, and could link to a local area network for possible collaberation with others. It never sold commercially but it was given to several universities. Engineers incorporated its features into work stations and personal computers.
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The Apple II became an instant success when it was released in 1977 with its printed circuit motherboard, switching power supply, keyboard, case assembly, manual, game paddles, A/C powercord, and cassette tape with the computer game "Breakout". Produced brilliant colors when hooked up to a color T.V.
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The VAX 11/780 from Digital Equipment Corp. introduced the ability to address up to 4.3 GIGABYTES of virtual memory, providing hundreds of times the capacity of most minicomputers.
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IBM introduced its PC, starting a fast growth inside the personal computer market. The first PC ran on 4.77 MHz 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system.
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Apple introduces their Lisa computer. It was the first computer with graphical user interface. However, the Lisa's sloth and high price of $10,000 led to its ultimate failure.
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The Macintosh, launched by Apple was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a GUI. The Macintosh included many of Lisa's features at a much more affordable price: $2,500.
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IBM introduced its PS/2 machines, which made the 3 1/2 inch floppy disk drive and video graphics array standard for IBM computers. They were the first IBMs to include Intel's 80386 chip, the company shipped more than 1 million units by the end to the year. IBM also released a new OS at the same time. The OS/2, allowing the use of a mouse with IBMs for the first time.
