Transcript File - Ms. Richardson`s Computer Class

History of Computers
1930’s Z1

Developed and built the world’s
first binary digital computer,
the Z1. He completed the first
fully functional programcontrolled electromechanical
digital computer, the Z3, in
1941. Only the Z4 - the most
sophisticated of his creations survived World War II.
1943 - Colossus

Designed by British engineer
Tommy Flowers, the Colossus was
designed to break the complex
codes used by the Nazis during
WWII. A total of ten Colossi were
delivered to Bletchley, each using
1,500 vacuum tubes and a series of
pulleys transported continuous rolls
of punched paper tape containing
possible solutions to a particular
code. Colossus reduced the time to
break codes from weeks to hours.
The machine’s existence was not
made public until the 1970s
1944 - The Mark I

Harvard Mark-1 is completed.
Conceived by Harvard professor
Howard Aiken, and designed
and built by IBM, the Harvard
Mark-1 was a room-sized,
relay-based calculator. The
machine had a fifty-foot long
camshaft that synchronized the
machine’s thousands of
component parts. The Mark-1
was used to produce
mathematical tables but was
soon superseded by stored
program computers.
1951 - UNIVAC I

The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S.
Census Bureau was the first
commercial computer to attract
widespread public attention.
Although manufactured by
Remington Rand, the machine often
was mistakenly referred to as the
"IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand
eventually sold 46 machines at
more than $1 million each.F.O.B.
factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for
a high speed printer.
1955 - Transistors

Felker and Harris program
TRADIC, AT&T Bell Laboratories
announced the first fully
transistorized computer,
TRADIC. It contained nearly
800 transistors instead of
vacuum tubes. Transistors completely cold, highly efficient
amplifying devices invented at
Bell Labs - enabled the machine
to operate on fewer than 100
watts, or one-twentieth the
power required by comparable
vacuum tube computers.
1970 - ARPANET

Computer-to-computer
communication expanded when the
Department of Defense established
four nodes on the ARPANET: the
University of California Santa
Barbara and UCLA, SRI
International, and the University of
Utah. Viewed as a comprehensive
resource-sharing network,
ARPANET’s designers set out with
several goals: direct use of
distributed hardware services;
direct retrieval from remote, one-ofa-kind databases; and the sharing
of software subroutines and
packages not available on the users
ｴ primary computer due to
incompatibility of hardware or
languages.
1971 - Microprocessor

The first advertisement for a
microprocessor, the Intel 4004,
appeared in Electronic News.
Developed for Busicom, a Japanese
calculator maker, the 4004 had
2250 transistors and could perform
up to 90,000 operations per second
in four-bit chunks. Federico Faggin
led the design and Ted Hoff led the
architecture
1972 - Pong

Pong is released. In 1966, Ralph
Baer designed a ping-pong game for
his Odyssey gaming console. Nolan
Bushnell played this game at a
Magnavox product show in
Burlingame, California. Bushnell
hired young engineer Al Alcorn to
design a car driving game, but when
it became apparent that this was
too ambitious for the time, he had
Alcorn to design a version of pingpong instead. The game was tested
in bars in Grass Valley and
Sunnyvale, California where it
proved very popular. Pong would
revolutionize the arcade industry
and launch the modern video game
era.
1977 - Apple II

The Apple II became an instant
success when 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."
When hooked up to a color
television set, the Apple II
produced brilliant color
graphics.
1984 - Macintosh

Apple Computer launched the
Macintosh, the first successful
mouse-driven computer with a
graphic user interface (GUI), with a
single $1.5 million commercial
during the 1984 Super Bowl. Based
on the Motorola 68000
microprocessor, the Macintosh
included many of the Lisa’s features
at a much more affordable price:
$2,500.
1990 - World Wide Web

The World Wide Web was born
when Tim Berners-Lee, a
researcher at CERN, the highenergy physics laboratory in
Geneva, developed HyperText
Markup Language. HTML, as it
is commonly known, allowed
the Internet to expand into the
World Wide Web, using
specifications he developed
such as URL (Uniform Resource
Locator) and HTTP (HyperText
Transfer Protocol). A browser,
such as Netscape or Microsoft
Internet Explorer, follows links
and sends a query to a server,
allowing a user to view a site.
1998 - Google
 Software that searches
the world wide web
for specific web pages