Transcript History of Computers The 60`s and 70`s

History of
Computers
The 60’s and 70’s
Created by Chasidy Loosier
Clark
1960
Digital Equipment introduced the first minicomputer, the PDP-1, for
$120,000. It was the first commercial computer equipped with a
keyboard and monitor.
1961

According to
Datamation Magazine,
IBM had an 81.2 %
share of the computer
market in 1961, the
year it introduced the
1400 Series. The 1401
mainframe, the first in
the series, replaced the
vacuum tube with
smaller, more reliable
transistors and used a
magnetic core memory.
IBM 1401
1962

LINC-8
The LINC (Laboratory
Instrument Computer)
offered the first real
time laboratory data
processing. Designed
by Wesley Clark at
Lincoln Laboratories,
Digital Equipment Corp.
later commercialized it
as the LINC-8.
1963

ASCII- American Standard
Code for Information
Interchange-permitted
machines from different
manufacturers exchange
data. ASCII consists of 128
unique strings of ones and
zeros. Each sequence
represents a letter of the
English alphabet, an Arabic
numeral, an assortment of
punctuation marks and
symbols, or a function such
as a carriage return.
1964

CDC’s 6600 supercomputer,
designed by Seymour Cray,
performed up to 3 million
instructions per second- a
processing speed three times
faster than that of it’s closest
competitor, the IBM Stretch.
The speed of the computer
came from it’s design, which
had 10 small computers,
known as peripheral
processors, funneling data to
a large processing unit.
CDC 6600
1965
Object Oriented languages got and early boost with Simula, written by
Kristen Nygaard and Ole-John Dahl. Simula grouped data and instructions
into blocks called objects, each representing one facet of a system
intended for simulation.
1966

HP-2115
Hewlett-Packard
entered the general
purpose computer
business with its HP2115 for computation,
offering a computational
power formerly found
only in much larger
computers. It
supported a wide
variety of languages,
among them BASIC,
ALGOL, and FORTRAN.
1967

Seymour Papert
designed LOGO as a
computer language for
children. Initially a
drawing program, LOGO
controlled the actions of
a mechanical “turtle,”
which traced it’s path
with pen on paper.
Electronic turtles made
their designs on a video
display monitor.
“People give lip service to learning
to learn, but if you look at
curriculum in schools, most of it is
about dates, fractions, and science
facts; very little of it is about
learning. I like to think of learning
as an expertise every one of us can
acquire.”
1968

Apollo Guidance
Computer
The Apollo Guidance
Computer made its
debut orbiting the Earth
on Apollo 7. A year
later, it steered Apollo
11 to the lunar surface.
Astronauts
communicated by
punching two-digit
codes and the
appropriate syntactic
category into the
display and keyboard
unit.
1969

Xerox Corp. bought Scientific
Data Systems for nearly $1
billion- 90 times the latter’s
earnings. The SDS series of
minicomputers in the early
1960’s logged more sales
than did the Digital
Equipment Corp. Xerox
changed the series to the
XDS computers but
eventually closed the division
and ceased to manufacture
the equipment.
1970

ARPANET topology
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-of-a-kind
databases; and the sharing of
software subroutines and packages
not available on the user’s primary
computer due to incompatibility of
hardware or languages.
1971

The first advertisement for a
microprocessor, the Intel
4004, appeared in Electronic
News. Federico Faggin, Ted
Hoff, and others at Intel
designed the 4004 while
building a custom chip for
Busicom, a Japanese
calculator maker. The 4004
had 2,250 transistors,
handling data in four-bit
chunks, and could perform
60,000 operations a second.
Intel 4004
1972

Hewlett-Packard announced
the HP-35 as “ a fast,
extremely accurate electronic
slide rule” with a solid-state
HP-35
memory similar to that of a
computer. The HP-35
distinguished itself from its
competitors by its ability to
perform a broad variety of
logarithmic and
trigonometric functions, to
store more immediate
solutions for later use, and
to accept and display entries
in a form similar to standard
scientific notation.
1973

The TV Typewriter, designed by
Don Lancaster, provided the first
display of alphanumeric
information on an ordinary
television set. It used $120
worth of electronics
components. The original
design included two memory
boards and could generate and
store 512 characters as 16 lines
of 32 characters. A 90- minute
cassette tape provided
supplementary storage for
about 100 pages of text.
TV Typewriter
1974

Scelbi 8H
Scelbi advertised its 8H
computer, the first
commercially advertised U.S.
computer based
microprocessor, Intel’s 8008.
Scelbi aimed the 8H,
available both in kit form and
fully assembled, at scientific,
electronic, and biological
applications. It had 4
kilobytes of internal memory
and a cassette tape, with
both teletype and
oscilloscope interfaces.
1975

The visual display module
(VDM) prototype, designed
in 1975 by Lee Felsenstein,
marked the first
implementation of a memory
mapped alphanumeric video
display for computers.
Introduced at the Altair
Convention in Albuquerque
in March 1976, the VDM
allowed use of personal
computers for interactive
games.
Felsenstein’s VDM
1976

Cray I
The Cray I made its
name as the first
commercially successful
vector processor. The
fastest machine of its
day, its speed came
partly from its shape, a
C, which reduced the
length of wires and thus
the time signals needed
to travel across them.
1977

The Apple II became and
instant success when
released in 1977 with its
printed circuit motherboard,
switching power supply,
keyboard, case assembly,
manual, game paddles, A/C
power cord, and cassette
tape with the computer
game “Breakout”. When
hooked up to a color
television set, the Apple II
produced brilliant color
graphics.
Apple II
1978
June 8th- Intel 8086
 Arcade Video game “Space Invaders”

1979

Bob Frankston & Dan Brinklin
Harvard MBA candidate
Daniel Bricklin and
programmer Robert
Frankston developed
VisiCalc, the program made
a business machine of a
personal computer, for the
Apple II. VisiCalc (for
Visible Calculator)
automated the recalculation
of spreadsheets. A huge
success, more than 100,000
copies sold in one year.