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A Digital Timeline
A History of Digital Technology
Beginnings to 1900
Compiled by Skip Schiel
(added April 24, 2002)
(revised December 12, 2009)
An attempt at charting the trajectory of digital technology, with special attention to graphical applications. Comments solicited, corrections gladly considered,
links and images most graciously desired. (Special note: those attributed as inventors or creators more often were joined by many others, some named, some
not. And dates are often only approximations.)
1901 - 1959
1960 - 1979
1980 - 1985
1986 - 1995
1996 -2005
The name Abacus derives from the
Greek word abax, meaning table or
board covered with dust. The origins
3000 BCE Abacus of the Abacus are buried deep in the
history of mankind. It is known that
in its 'modern' form it appeared in
China in the 13th century AD.
Nearing the end of his life, John
Napier, who is generally considered
the inventor of logarithms, developed
an ingenious arithmetic trick— not as
remarkable as logarithms, but very
useful all the same. His invention was
Logarithms, "Napier’s a method for performing arithmetic
operations by the manipulation of
bones," multiplication rods, called “bones” because they
1550-1617 tables on a stick were often constituted from bones
and printed with integers. Napier’s
John Napier rods essentially rendered the complex
processes of multiplication and
division into the comparatively
simple tasks of addition and
subtraction.
—Alexandros Diploudis
Schickard wrote that he had built a
machine that "...immediately
computes the given numbers
automatically; adds, subtracts,
A machine for adding, multiplies, and divides".
subtracting, multiplying Unfortunately, no original copies of
1592-1635 and dividing Schickard's machine exist, but
working models have been
constructed from his notes.
Wilhelm Schickard
—Bebop BYTES Back
(An Unconventional Guide to
Computers)
1644 Pascaline (a mechanical A mechanism to add & subtract with
calculator) 8 figures and carrying of 10's, 100's,
and 1000's etc.
Blair Pascal
The first Slide Rule appeared in 1650
and was the result of a joint effort of
two Englishmen, Edmund Gunter and
the Reverend William Oughtred. This
slide rule based on Napier's
logarithms was to become the first
Slide Rule
analog computer (of the modern
1650 ages) since multiplication and
Edmund Gunter and William subtraction were figured out by
Oughtred physical distance. This invention was
dormant until 1850 when a French
Artillery officer Amedee Mannheim
added the movable double sided
cursor, which gave it its appearance
as we know it today.
He improved the Pascaline by
The differential calculus & a creating a machine that could also
1679 machine to multiply
multiply. Like its predecessor,
Leibniz's mechanical multiplier
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz worked by a system of gears and
dials.
Joseph Marie Jacquard's inspiration
of 1804 revolutionized patterned
textile weaving. For the first time,
fabrics with big, fancy designs could
be woven automatically by one man
working without assistants...
Power loom with an
This was the earliest use of punched
1804 automatic card reader cards programmed to control a
manufacturing process. Although he
Joseph Marie Jacquard created his mechanism to aid the local
silk industry, it was soon applied to
cotton, wool, and linen weaving. It
appeared in the United States about
1825 or 1826.
—Steven E. Schoenherr
The honor of first establishing the
manufacture of calculating machines
Arithmometer (mass- as an industry goes to Charles Xavier
Thomas of Colmar, France, or
produced mechanical Thomas de Colmar, as he is more
1820 calculator) commonly known. Like others,
Thomas used the stepped cylinder
Thomas de Colmar invented by Leibniz as his digital-
value actuator.
—George C. Chase
A mechanical digital computer which,
viewed with the benefit of a century
and a half's hindsight, anticipated
virtually every aspect of present-day
computers.
Difference & analytic His subsequent invention, the analytic
engine, inspired by Jacquard’s
1822 engines punched cards, used a store, a mill,
Charles Babbage and an output device (automated type
setter)
— John Walker
A biogaphy of Charles Babbage
(Thanks to Jane Matthews)
1830 Telegraph Electrical signals encode information,
dots & dashes, to form letters and
Samuel F.B. Morse & Joseph words.
Henry
Silver salts, converted to free silver by
Photography light and chemicals, co-discovered by
1839 William Henry Fox Talbot, Joseph
Talbot, Niépce, & Daguerre Nicéphore Niépce, & Louis Jacques
Mandé Daguerre
She suggested to Babbage writing a
plan for how the Engine might
calculate Bernoulli numbers. This
Programs & subroutines for plan is now regarded as the first
the Analytic Engine "computer program." A software
1843 language developed by the U.S.
Ada Augusta Byron, aka Lady Department of Defense was named
Lovelace "Ada" in her honor in 1979.
—Dr. Betty Toole
The Calculus of Logic
In a work lately published I have
exhibited the application of a new and
peculiar form of Mathematics to the
expression of the operations of the
Algebra from logic, truth
mind in reasoning...
1854 tables
The part of the system to which I shall
George Boole confine my observations is that which
treats of categorical propositions...
—George Boole Cambridge and Dublin
Mathematical Journal, Vol. III (1848),
pp. 183-98
Typewriter
While developing a machine for
1866 numbering book pages, they were
Sholes and Carlos Glidden and inspired to build a machine that could
others print words as well as numbers
In Boston, Massachusetts, Alexander
Graham Bell invented the telephone.
Thomas Watson fashioned the device
itself; a crude thing made of a
wooden stand, a funnel, a cup of acid,
Telephone and some copper wire. But these
1876 simple parts and the equally simple
Alexander Graham Bell first telephone call —"Mr. Watson,
come here, I want you!" — belie a
complicated past.
—Tom Farley
The device consisted of a cylindrical
drum wrapped in tinfoil and mounted
on a threaded axle. A mouthpiece
attached to a diaphragm was
connected to a stylus that etched
vibrational patterns from a sound
Phonograph source on the rotating foil. For
1877 playback the mouthpiece was
Thomas Edison replaced with a "reproducer" that
used a more sensitive diaphragm.
Edison recited "Mary Had a Little
Lamb" into the mouthpiece for the
first demonstration.
—Geoffrey Rubinstein
A punch-card tabulation machine
Punch card reader & system that revolutionized statistical
1890 tabulating machine computation
Herman Hollerith at MIT Used during the 1890 US census
Lumiere's portable, suitcase-sized
cinematographe served as a camera,
film processing unit, and projector all
in one. He could shoot footage in the
Cinema morning, process it in the afternoon,
and then project it to an audience that
1895 evening. His first film was the arrival
Auguste and Louis Lumière &
Thomas Edison of the express train at Ciotat. Other
subjects included workers leaving the
factory gates, a child being fed by his
parents, people enjoying a picnic
along a river.
Radio—signaling and audio
communication using
electromagnetic radiation—was first
employed as a "wireless telegraph",
for point-to-point links where regular
Radio
telegraph lines were unreliable or
1895 impractical. Next developed was
Guglielmo Marconi radio's ability to broadcast messages
simultaneously to multiple locations,
at first using the dots-and-dashes of
telegraphic code, and later in full
audio.
"Edison invented
the motion
pictures as a
supplement to his
phonograph, in
the belief that
sound plus a
moving picture
would provide
better
entertainment
than sound alone.
But in a short time
the movies proved
to be good enough
entertainment
without sound. It
has been said that
although the
motion picture
and the
Sound
phonograph were
cinema intended to be
partners, they
Thomas Edison grew up
separately. And it
might be added
that the motion
picture held the
phonograph in
such low esteem
that for years it
would not speak.
Throughout the
long history of
efforts to add
sound, the success
of the silent movie
was the great
obstacle to
commercialization
of talking
pictures."
—Edward W.
Kellog ,June 1955,
Journal of the
SMPTE
Could there exist, at least in principle,
a definite method or process by which
it could be decided whether any given
mathematical assertion was
provable?
To answer such a question needed a
definition of 'method' which would be
not only precise but compelling. This
is what Turing supplied. He analysed
what could be achieved by a person
performing a methodical process, and
seizing on the idea of something done
The Turing Machine 'mechanically', expressed the analysis
1936 in terms of a theoretical machine able
Alan Turing to perform certain precisely defined
elementary operations on symbols on
paper tape. He presented convincing
arguments that the scope of such a
machine was sufficient to encompass
everything that would count as a
'definite method.' Daringly he
included an argument based on the
transitions between 'states of mind' of
a human being performing a mental
process.
— Andrew Hodges
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer was
the world's first electronic digital
computer. It was built by John
Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry
at Iowa State University during 1937-
Digital computer 42. It incorporated several major
innovations in computing including
1937 the use of binary arithmetic,
John Vincent Atanasoff & Clifford
Berry at Iowa State University regenerative memory, parallel
processing, and separation of
memory and computing functions.
—Department of Computer Science,
Iowa State University
Enigma is used to scramble all of
Germany's most top-secret
communications. It is the most
advanced cipher ever designed and
was, until now, thought unbreakable.
In 1938 Turing published a
mathematical paper entitled On
1940 Breaking a German code, Computational Numbers in which he
the Enigma introduced the theory of so-called
Universal Turing Machines,
Alan Turing mechanical devices capable of being
configured in order to tackle any
mathematical problem imaginable.
Turing used this ingenious concept to
create precisely configurable large
Enigma M3 machines called "bombes" capable of
applying the enormous amount of
mathematical effort required to break
the enigma code by brute force.
Television came into being based on
the inventions and discoveries of
many men and scientists. The 'first'
generation of television sets were not
entirely electronic. The display (TV
screen) had a small motor with a
1941 Television spinning disc and a neon lamp, which
worked together to give a blurry
reddish-orange picture about half the
size of a business card!
—www.tvhistory.tv/pre-1935.htm
Konrad Zuse was the creator of the
first full automatic, program
controlled and freely programmable,
Digital computer (Z3) in binary floating point arithmetic
1941 working computer. The Z3 was
Konrad Zuse finished in 1941.
—Professor Dr. Friedrich L. Bauer
Colossus reduced the time to break
Lorenz messages from weeks to
hours. It was just in time for the
deciphering of messages which gave
vital information to Eisenhower and
Montgomery prior to D-Day. These
deciphered Lorenz messages showed
that Hitler had swallowed the
deception campaigns, the phantom
army in the South of England, the
phantom convoys moving east along
Entirely electric computer the channel; that Hitler was
(COLOSSUS) convinced that the attacks were
1943 coming across the Pas de Calais and
Max Newman & Tommy Flowers that he was keeping Panzer divisions
in Belgium. After D-day the French
resistance and the British and
American Air Forces bombed and
strafed all the telephone and
teleprinter land lines in Northern
France, forced the Germans to use
radio communications and suddenly
the volume of intercepted messages
went up enormously.
—Tony Sale
Von Neumann's interest in computers
differed from that of his peers by his
quickly perceiving the application of
computers to applied mathematics for
specific problems, rather than their
mere application to the development
of tables. During the war, von
Neumann's expertise in
Stored program, sort and hydrodynamics, ballistics,
meteorology, game theory, and
merge operations statistics, was put to good use in
1944
several projects. This work led him to
John Louis von Neumann consider the use of mechanical devices
for computation, and although the
stories about von Neumann imply
that his first computer encounter was
with the ENIAC, in fact it was with
Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I
(ASCC) calculator.
—J. A. N. Lee
The Mark I was constructed out of
switches, relays, rotating shafts, and
clutches, and was described as
sounding like a "roomful of ladies
Relay-based computer knitting." The machine contained
(MARK 1) more than 750,000 components, was
1944 50 feet long, 8 feet tall, and weighed
Howard Aiken at Harvard-IBM approximately 5 tons!
—Bebop BYTES Back
(An Unconventional Guide to
Computers)
The world's first electronic digital
computer was developed by Army
Ordnance to compute World War II
ballistic firing tables.
By today's standards for electronic
computers the ENIAC was a
grotesque monster. Its thirty separate
units, plus power supply and forced-
air cooling, weighed over thirty tons.
Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500
relays, and hundreds of thousands of
resistors, capacitors, and inductors
ENIAC (electronic consumed almost 200 kilowatts of
electrical power.
numerical integrator and
But ENIAC was the prototype from
computer) which most other modern computers
1946 evolved. It embodied almost all the
John W. Mauchly and J. P. components and concepts of today's
Eckert, Jr. at University of high- speed, electronic digital
Pennsylvania computers. Its designers conceived
what has now become standard
circuitry such as the gate (logical
"and" element), buffer (logical "or"
element) and used a modified Eccles-
Jordan flip-flop as a logical, high-
speed storage-and-control device. The
machine's counters and
accumulators, with more
sophisticated innovations, were made
up of combinations of these basic
elements.
—Martin H. Weik
William Shockley and Walter
Brattain had both been working with
semiconductors since the early 1930’s,
and in 1939, Shockley had an idea, to
use a piece of copper screen in a piece
Transistor of semi-conducting material.
1948 Although that particular experiment
Barden, Shockley, & Brattain failed, in 1940 Russell Ohl
accidentally discovers the silicon p-n
junction at Bell Labs.
—Shelley A. Steiner
The first UNIVAC computer was
delivered to the Census Bureau in
June 1951. Unlike the ENIAC, the
UNIVAC processed each digit serially.
But its much higher design speed
permitted it to add two ten-digit
numbers at a rate of almost 100,000
additions per second. Internally, the
Business computer
UNIVAC operated at a clock
(UNIVAC 1) frequency of 2.25 MHz, which was no
1951 mean feat for vacuum tube circuits.
John W. Mauchly and J. P. The UNIVAC also employed mercury
Eckert, Jr. at University of delay-line memories. Delay lines did
Pennsylvania not allow the computer to access
immediately any item data held in its
memory, but given the reliability
problems of the alternative Cathode
Ray Tube (CRT) technology, this was
a good technical choice.
—University of Pennsylvania Library
Tom Watson, Jr., led IBM to
introduce the model 604 computer, its
first with transistors, that became the
basis of the model 608 of 1957, the
Transistorized computer first solid-state computer for the
1953 commercial market. Transistors were
Tom Watson at IBM expensive at first, cost $8 vs. $.75 for
a vacuum tube.
—Steven E. Schoenherr
TRADIC stands for TRAnisitor
DIgital Computer, and as the name
suggests this was the first machine to
use all transistors and diodes and no
vacuum tubes. It was built by Bell
Labs for the U.S. Air Force, which was
interested in the lightweight nature of
TRADIC—a fully such a computer for airborne use. The
1955 transistorized computer machine consisted of 700 point-
contact transistors and 10,000
Bell Labs germanium diodes. During two years
of continuous operation only 17 of
these devices failed, a vastly lower
failure rate than Vacuum tube
machines of the time.
— Tom Howe
It was a relatively simple device that
Jack Kilby showed to a handful of co-
workers gathered in TI's
semiconductor lab more than 40
Integrated circuit years ago -- only a transistor and
other components on a slice of
1958 germanium. Little did this group of
Jack Kilby at Texas
onlookers know, but Kilby's invention,
Instruments
7/16-by-1/16-inches in size and called
an integrated circuit, was about to
revolutionize the electronics industry.
—Texas Instruments
The first development efforts on
Modem digital modems appear to have
1959 stemmed from the need to transmit
Bell Labs data for North American air defense
during the 1950s.
As a graduate student in electrical
engineering at UC Berkeley after
World War II Doug Engelbart began
Mouse to imagine ways in which all sorts of
information could be displayed on the
1963 screens of cathode ray tubes like the
Doug Engelbart at ones he had used as a radar
Stanford technician during the war, and he
dreamed of "flying" through a variety
of information spaces.
—MouseSite
The idea behind HTML was a modest
one. When Tim Berners-Lee was
putting together his first elementary
browsing and authoring system for
the Web, he created a quick little
Hypertext editing system hypertext language that would serve
(HTML) his purposes. He imagined dozens, or
even hundreds, of hypertext formats
1967 <img> in the future, and smart clients that
Andy van Dam & Tim could easily negotiate and translate
Berners-Lee documents from servers across the
Net. It would be a system similar to
Claris XTND on the Macintosh, but
would work on any platform and
browser.
—Jeffrey Veen
At that time, RAM was a known and
used concept: memory reserved for
writing to and reading from in a
temporary fashion, to be erased every
time the computer is turned off.
1968 However, in the mid-1960s RAM
Random Access Memory required an elaborate system of wires
(RAM) and magnets that negated in practice
RAM's theoretical efficiency.
Dennard's revolutionary achievement
Robert Dennard was to reduce RAM to a memory cell
or an earlier tube version on a single transistor. His key insight
was that it should be possible to store
binary data as a positive or negative
charge on a capacitator. After several
months of experimenting, Dennard
had reduced his RAM cell to a single
field-effect transistor and a data line
that both wrote and read the charge
in a small capacitator. The ultimate
effect of Dennard's invention was that
a single chip could hold 16 million
RAM cells
—The Lemelson-MIT Program's
Invention Dimension
The DEC PDP-8 computer on March
22, 1965, is generally recognized as
the most important small computer of
Mini-computer the 1960's. It was the least expensive
parallel general purpose computer on
Ken Olsen at Digital the market, the first computer sold on
a retail basis, and the first parallel
Equipment Corporation general purpose digital computer sold
in a table-top configuration.
—Douglas W. Jones
The global Internet's progenitor was
Internet the Advanced Research Projects
Agency Network (ARPANET) of the
1969 U.S. Department of Defense. This is
Department of Defense an important fact to remember...
—Michael Hauben
The Creation of the UNIX* Operating
System
After three decades of use, the UNIX*
computer operating system from Bell
Labs is still regarded as one of the
most powerful, versatile, and flexible
operating systems (OS) in the
computer world. Its popularity is due
to many factors, including its ability
Unix to run a wide variety of machines,
from micros to supercomputers, and
its portability -- all of which led to its
adoption by many manufacturers.
Like another legendary creature
whose name also ends in 'x,' UNIX
rose from the ashes of a multi-
organizational effort in the early
1960s to develop a dependable
timesharing operating system.
—www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/
Floppy disk drives were originally
introduced commercially as a read-
only device to hold microcode and
1971 Floppy disk diagnostics for large IBM mainframe
computer systems in the early 1970s.
—Accurite Technologies Inc
In 1969, a Japanese firm called
Busicom contacted Intel about
developing custom chips for its new
desktop-printing calculator. Hoff
thought there was a better, simpler
Microprocessor way to develop the technology than
what the Japanese were initially
looking for. Rather than build 12
Gilbert P. Hyatt & Ted customized calculator chips, each
Hoff at Intel with a single specific function, Hoff
proposed that Intel develop a more
universal CPU chip[computer
processing unit] that could also run
the calculator. The idea of a CPU on a
chip had been around since the early
1960s but had not been feasible then.
But Fairchild and Rockwell had both
done some preliminary work in the
area and Hoff thought he could make
it work.
—Linda Stranahan
The history of graphical user
interfaces (GUIs) goes back to the
1970s. Project Smalltalk was
established at Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center (Parc) which
attempted to look into the future. The
Graphical user interface idea was to assume that in the future
1974 computing power would be abundant
Xerox and inexpensive. How could the best
use be made of the power available?
Two influential developments
resulted: object-oriented
programming and the graphical user
interface.
—Alistair D. N. Edwards
Altairs were originally "Hobbyist"
computers and have their roots in
Altair personal computer kits. They helped define the "personal"
in Personal Computers. These
machines where part of an open
Ed Roberts at Micro
1975 architecture concept that later made
Instrumentation the PC successful. The S-100 bus
Telemetry Systems allowed Altairs to be expanded and
(MITS) created opportunities for other
companies to form.
—William Thomas Sanderson
Bill Gates: "We realized things were
Programming language— starting to happen. Just because, we
had the vision for a long time of
Beginner's All-purpose where this chip could go, what it
Symbolic Instruction could mean….. that didn't mean the
Code (BASIC) industry was going to wait for us
while I stayed and finished my degree
at Harvard."
A commercial version by
Bill Gates & Paul Allen Paul Allen: "So, I called up Ed and
[said: we have] this basic
[interpreter] and... it's not that far
from being done, and we would like to
come out and show it to you."
Bill Gates: "So we created this basic
interpreter. Paul took the paper tape
and flew out. In fact, the night before
he got some sleep while I double-
checked everything to make sure that
we had it all right."
At that time, in the CPM world, the
Electric Pencil was the word
processor of the day. I took the care to
contact Dave Schrayer, author of
Word processor (Electric Electric Pencil and asked if I could use
Pencil) the same "dot" commands for printer
1976 formatting. This way, electric Pencil
users would already know the
Michael Schrayer commands if they decided to go to
EasyWriter. Or go with Electric Pencil
if they had to work in CPM.
—Webcrunchers International
Wozniak had been dabbling in
computer-design for some time when,
Apple computers in 1976, he designed what would
become the Apple I. Jobs, who had an
Steven Jobs & Steven eye for the future, insisted that he and
Wozniak try to sell the machine, and
Wozniak on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was
born.
—Glen Sanford
As time passed many enhancements
were made to the existing protocol but
by 1973 it was clear that [the first
Network network] was unable to handle the
intercommunication— volume of traffic passing through it...
1978 Transfer Control The TCP/IP and gateway architecture
Protocol/Internet was proposed in 1974. This protocol
was to be independent of the
Protocol (TCP/IP) underlying network and computer
hardware as well as having universal
connectivity throughout the network.
This would enable any kind of
platform to participate in the
network.In 1981 a series of requests
for comment was issued,
standardising the TCP/IP version 4
for the Arpanet.
—PeteDotCom
The idea for the electronic
spreadsheet came to me while I was a
student at the Harvard Business
School, working on my MBA degree,
in the spring of 1978. Sitting in
Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would
daydream. "Imagine if my calculator
had a ball in its back, like a mouse..."
(I had seen a mouse previously, I
Spreadsheet program think in a demonstration at a
(VISICALC) conference by Doug Engelbart, and
maybe the Alto). And "..imagine if I
had a heads-up display, like in a
Dan Bricklin & Bob fighter plane, where I could see the
Frankston virtual image hanging in the air in
front of me. I could just move my
mouse/keyboard calculator around,
punch in a few numbers, circle them
to get a sum, do some calculations,
and answer '10% will be fine!'" (10%
was always the answer in those days
when we couldn't do very complicated
calculations...)
—Dan Bricklin
The original laser printer was
developed at the Xerox Palo Alto
Laser printer Research Center. Xerox Engineer,
Gary Starkweather adapted Xerox
copier technology adding a laser
Xerox beam to it to come up with the laser
printer.
—Mary Bellis
Atari is most known for its
innovations in video game
technology. But a wealth of computer
products and technologies were
Atari microcomputer pioneered by Atari. In 1979 Atari Inc.
showcased its first computer product
1979 at the Winter Consumer Electronics
Steve Mayer and Ron. show.
Milner
From that point on Atari created
innovative 8 bit computers which
were manufactured and supported up
until 1992!
Usenet came into being in late 1979,
shortly after the release of V7
UNIX with UUCP. Two Duke
University grad students in North
Unix User Network Carolina,
(Usenet) Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought
of hooking computers together to
exchange information with the UNIX
Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, & community. Steve Bellovin, a grad
Steve Bellovin student at the University of North
Carolina, put together the first
version of the news software using
shell scripts and installed it on
the first two sites: "unc" and "duke."
—Mark Moraes
Star was designed as an office
automation system. The idea was that
professionals in a business or
organization would have
workstations on their desks and
would use them to produce, retrieve,
distribute, and organize
documentation, presentations,
Mouse with computer— memos, and reports. All of the
Xerox Star workstations in an organization
would be connected via Ethernet and
would share access to file servers,
printers, etc.
—Jeff Johnson and Teresa L. Roberts
et al
WordPerfect originated in the days
when top-of-the-line printers were
Word Perfect daisywheel impact devices requiring
manual intervention to change fonts,
1980 and when on-screen displays were
Satellite Software & restricted to a single monospaced
Corel font. Particularly flexible dot-matrix
printers included half a dozen fonts.
—Rod Smith
In the early part of 1980, IBM decided
to create a microcomputer (up to this
date, IBM produced only mini and
mainframes). They didn't really know
1981 IBM PC with DOS & Intel that they wanted and they didn't
think for one second that producing
microcomputers was a profitable
business (who would have thought!)!
—OldComputers.com
Introduced at the West Coast
Computer Faire in 1981, the Osborne 1
Portable computer— was the brain child of Adam Osborne,
a computer columnist, writer, and
engineer. It was co-developed with
1981 Osburne I Lee Felsenstien, and Lee designed it.
The goal was a truly integrated
Adam Osborne computer that could go wherever the
user wanted to. The machine was
shipped as a full package including all
the hardware and software a user
could need including: 64K RAM, Z-80
CPU, 5" CRT, two floppy drives,
keyboard, serial ports, CP/M
operating system, WordStar,
SuperCalc, and two versions of
BASIC: CBASIC and MBASIC. The
machine also had the ability to
connect with scientific equipment via
a built-in IEEE-488 interface, and
could run an optional external
monitor via the built-in port. Not only
was the machine complete, it was
cheap - $1795.
— Justin Mayrand
Once upon a time there were lots of
disk-repair utilities for the Mac.
Symantec made Norton Utilities,
Central Point made MacTools, and
Fifth Generation made Public
Utilities. MacTools and Public
Utilities could scan disks during idle-
time. MacTools had TrashBack, the
best way to undelete files I've ever
seen, and could boot itself from a
RAM disk. What did Norton have? It
1982 Norton Utilities had a bunch of components you don't
find in the current release, including a
Directory Assistance utility that
improved Open/Save dialogs, a
backup utility, and a utility for
duplicating floppy disks. The last item
is as obsolete as Fast Find, but I think
many users would enjoy having the
first two as part of the current Norton
Utilities package.
—Michael Tsai
Adobe One of the brilliant engineers working
at Xerox was John Warnock. He
1982 developed a language called
John Warnock & Charles "Interpress" that could be used to
Geschke control Xerox laser printers. He and
his boss, Charles M. 'Chuck' Geschke,
tried for two years to convince Xerox
to turn Interpress into a commercial
product. When this failed, they
decided to leave Xerox and try it on
their own.
John Warnock and Chuck Geschke
named their company Adobe, after a
little creek that ran behind the house
of Warnock in Los Altos, California.
You sometimes see it mentioned in
wine guides on maps of Napa Valley
where some of the finest Californian
wines are made.
— L. Leurs
The 'sewing machine' was the very
first Compaq computer.When this
machine came out, there were no
clones. An IBM compatible had the
three magic letters on the case.
Compaq Period. Part of the reason was that
1982 IBM had published the source code for
Rod Canion, co-founder their BIOS (basic input/output
system)so that they could claim that
anyone who brought out their own
Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill BIOS had infringed on IBM's
Murto, founders copyrights and would have to stop.
—Paul Braun
War of the Words: Microsoft Word
versus WordPerfect
Dec. 1982
Satellite Software International ships
WordPerfect for DOS for $500.
Microsoft Word Apr. 1983
1983 Microsoft introduces Multi-Tool Word
Bill Gates at al for DOS.
Nov. 1983
WordPerfect 3.0 for DOS ships at
$500. Microsoft releases Microsoft
Word 1.0 for $375.
—Marquette University
Named for one of its designer's
daughters, the Lisa (pictured below
left) was supposed to be the Next Big
Graphical interface with Thing. It was the first personal
computer— Lisa computer to use a Graphical User
1983 Interface. Aimed mainly at large
businesses, Apple said the Lisa would
Apple increase productivity by making
computers easier to work with.
—Glen Sanford
Released with much fanfare in
January of 1984, the Macintosh was
the first affordable computer to
include a Graphical User Interface. It
was built around the new Motorola
Macintosh computer 68000 chip, which was significantly
1984 faster than previous processors,
Apple running at 8 MHz. The Mac came in a
small beige case with a black and
white monitor built in. It came with a
keyboard and mouse, and had a
floppy drive that took 400k 3.5"
disk—the first personal computer to
do so. It originally sold for $2,495.
— Glen Sanford
The purpose of the domain name
system is to allow any computer on
the Internet to figure out what IP
com address (for example, 216.112.23.10)
Domain name system net corresponds with a particular
computer hostname (for example,
1984 org "www.ahref.com"), and also what
Paul Mockapetris gov hostname, if any, corresponds with
mil an IP(internet protocol) address. Your
computer needs to know remote
computers' IP addresses to figure out
how and where to send things like
email messages and requests for web
pages.
—ep Productions, Inc
In 1984, the same year that the
Macintosh was introduced, Apple
Computer released the first program
called AppleWorks. (Select this link
for more information on AppleWorks
for the Apple II). It was a strange
time for consumers: the Macintosh
was newer, had fancy fonts and
styles, had a wonderfully clear
display, but all the software that was
Apple Works available for it was a simple word
1984 processor called "MacWrite" and a
Apple paint program called "MacPaint." On
the other hand, AppleWorks made the
old Apple II more capable than the
Mac, since it combined a word
processor, a database, and a
spreadsheet, and it let you create in
any of those "modules" and move the
information into either of the others.
It was, in other words, an integrated
program.
—Gareth Jones
After seeing the Office System on the
Lisa computer, Lissner conceived the
idea of a single program that would
put word processing, database, and
spreadsheet capabilities together, and
run on an Apple II. It was originally
called "Apple Pie", and he began work
on it in 1982. Lissner took two years
to complete his program, and did it
1987 AppleWorks & Claris entirely in assembly language to
achieve better speed. He wrote
Rupert Lissner versions of the program to work on
both the Apple II and Apple III
computers, making use of the same
filetypes and data structures. Apple
Pie files created on an Apple II could
be used on an Apple III, and vice-
versa.
—Steven Weyhrich
Excel was originally written for the
512K Apple Macintosh in 1984-1985.
Excel was one of the first spreadsheets
to use a graphical interface with pull
Excel down menus and a point and click
1985 capability using a mouse pointing
Microsoft device. [This] was easier for most
people to use than the command line
interface of PC-DOS spreadsheet
products.
—D. J. Power
To appreciate PostScript, you have to
know how the market worked before
it became available. In those days, if
you needed typesetting equipment,
you went to Acme Typesetters, and
they would sell you an Acme system
with an Acme output device. Then you
would follow at least two weeks of
training to learn how to use the
system. The Acme system would be
Postscript incompatible with equipment from
1985 any other manufacturer. In most
Adobe cases, it would even be difficult or
impossible to exchange data with
Chuck Geschke and John Warnock other systems.
If you owned a personal computer,
you could hook it up to a dot-matrix
printer that would output low quality
bitmap character. Graphics could be
done but the quality was only
acceptable to the nerds that bought
computers in those days.
—L. Leurs
Aldus PageMaker is released for the
Macintosh in July and desktop
publishing is born. Because of
advances in printing technology and
the Macintosh WYSIWYG (what you
see is what you get) operating system,
publishers can now arrange text into
columns and headlines and move
Page Maker their text around the page. Users can
1985 also easily incorporate graphics into
Paul Brainard & Aldus their page. Soon the days of X-Acto
knives and hot wax were gone forever
as publishers began to create their
pages on screen and print. This is also
very cost effective for professional
printers who no longer needed
expensive typesetting, drawing and
page layout equipment.
—Melissa Creech
Microsoft first began development of
the Interface Manager (subsequently
renamed Microsoft Windows) in
September 1981. Although the first
prototypes used Multiplan and Word-
like menus at the bottom of the screen,
the interface was changed in 1982 to
use pull-down menus and dialogs, as
used on the Xerox Star. Microsoft
finally announced Windows in
Windows 1.0 November 1983, with pressure from
1985 just-released VisiOn and impending
Microsoft TopView. Windows promised an
easy-to-use graphical interface,
device-independent graphics and
multitasking support. The
development was delayed several
times, however, and the Windows 1.0
hit the store shelves in November
1985. The selection of applications
was sparse, however, and Windows
sales were modest.
—pcbiography.net
My love affair with the T1100+ began
in the early Summer of 2000. While
perusing the offerings of an annual
street wide garage sale in my
neighbourhood, I spotted what
appeared to be an old word processor
for sale for $25. I looked it over. The
1985 Laptop computer owner pointed out rather flatly that it
ran DOS and was fully functional. His
Toshiba spouse was much more enthusiastic
about my investigations, adding how
useful it had been.
—
www.cyberus.ca/~pgillil/toshiba.htm
l
Announced in January 1986, the Mac
Plus was the answer to complaints
that the original Mac was not
expandable. It doubled the ROM of
the 512k from 64k to 128k, and
increased the RAM to 1 MB
(expandable to 4 MB). It was the first
Mac to include a SCSI port, allowing
1986 for a variety of external peripherals,
MacPlus and was the first mac to use the now
familiar platinum case color
Apple (although it initially shipped in beige).
The Mac Plus originally sold for
$2600, and was sold to educational
markets as the Mac ED.
—Glen Sanford
The conceptor of the Amiga 1000 was
Jay Miner, who created the Atari 800
many years before. He wanted to
make the most powerful computer
ever, then he joined a little California
Amiga 1000 company called Amiga. He used the
principle of the three coprocessors
Jay Milner (again) to help the main processor.
— oldcomputers.com
Today, LCDs are everywhere we look,
but they didn't sprout up overnight. It
took a long time to get from the
discovery of liquid crystals to the
multitude of LCD applications we
now enjoy. Liquid crystals were first
discovered in 1888, by Austrian
botanist Friedrich Reinitzer. Reinitzer
observed that when he melted a
curious cholesterol-like substance
(cholesteryl benzoate), it first became
a cloudy liquid and then cleared up as
its temperature rose. Upon cooling,
Liquid Crystal Display the liquid turned blue before finally
crystallizing. Eighty years passed
(LCD) before RCA made the first
experimental LCD in 1968. Since then,
Toshiba A liquid crystal display (LCD) test LCD manufacturers have steadily
developed ingenious variations and
cell improvements on the technology,
taking the LCD to amazing levels of
technical complexity. And there is
every indication that we will continue
to enjoy new LCD developments in the
future!
—Marshall Brain
The Internet bulletin-board system
Quantum Computer Services acquires
a new name, America Online (AOL),
and focuses on recruiting a diverse,
broad-based subscribership. From
1986 or 1989? 1989 to 1998, AOL grows from its
roots as an insignificant start-up with
America On Line (AOL) barely 100,000 members, to an
industry leader with more than 14
million members.
— The Moschovitis Group
The "Brain" virus is probably the
earliest MS-DOS virus. At one time it
was the most widespread of PC viral
programs.
Brain is a boot sector infector,
somewhat longer than some of the
more recent BSIs. Brain occupies
three sectors itself, and, as is usual
1987 Computer virus with BSIs, repositions the normal
boot sector in order to "mimic" the
boot process. As the boot sector is only
Brain a single sector, Brain, in infecting a
disk, reserves two additional sectors
on the disk for the remainder of itself,
plus a third for the original boot
sector.
—Robert M. Slade
Adobe® Illustrator® 10 software
defines the future of vector graphics
with groundbreaking creative options
and powerful tools for efficiently
publishing artwork on the Web, in
print, everywhere. Produce superb
Illustrator Web graphics using symbols and
innovative slicing options. Explore
creative ideas with live distortion
Adobe tools. Publish in record time with
dynamic data-driven graphics and
other productivity features.
—Adobe
Software engineer Tim Gill founded
Quark in 1981, producing the first
word processor for the Apple II
computer. Gill named the company
Quark after the subatomic particle
proposed as a building block for all
XPress matter—an appropriate metaphor for
the role that QuarkXPress would soon
Quark come to play in the electronic
publishing industry.
—Quark
In 1987 Canon USA Inc. released a
new computer named the Canon Cat.
This computer was targeted at low-
level clerical worked such as
secretaries. After six months on the
market and with 20,000 units sold,
Cat Canon discontinued the Cat. The Cat
featured an innovative text based user
Canon interface that did not rely upon a
mouse, icons, or graphics. The key
person behind the Cat was Mr. Jef
Raskin, an eclectic gadgeteer, who
began the design of the Cat during his
work on the first Macintosh project at
Apple Computer in 1979.
—David T. Craig
On the evening of November 2, 1988,
a self-replicating program was
released upon the Internet (1) This
program (a worm) invaded VAX and
Sun-3 computers running versions of
1988 Berkeley UNIX, and used their
Worm resources to attack still more
computers (2). Within the space of
hours this program had spread across
the U.S., infecting hundreds or
thousands of computers and making
many of them unusable due to the
burden of its activity. This paper
provides a chronology for the
outbreak and presents a detailed
description of the internals of the
worm, based on a C version produced
by decompiling.
—Donn Seeley
In service for nearly 10 years,
Disinfectant was probably the most
popular Macintosh anti-viral
program of all time. It was free, it
was so perfectly programmed that it
caused no extension conflicts, and it
was updated promptly every time a
Anti-virus software new virus was discovered.
Disinfectant was an application and a
companion INIT, providing both on-
demand and and on-access or
background scanning. John Norstad
retired Disinfectant on 6 May, 1998.
—John Norstad
A broad term for one of the fastest
computers currently available. Such
computers are typically used for
number crunching including scientific
simulations, (animated) graphics,
analysis of geological data (e.g. in
Graphics super petrochemical prospecting),
computers structural analysis, computational
fluid dynamics, physics, chemistry,
electronic design, nuclear energy
Apollo, Ardent, Stellar, research and meteorology. Perhaps
Cray CRAY-1 SuperComputer the best known supercomputer
manufacturer is Cray Research.
—Free On-line Dictionary of
Computing
My love affair with the T1100+ began
in the early Summer of 2000. While
perusing the offerings of an annual
street wide garage sale in my
neighbourhood, I spotted what
Portable Macintosh appeared to be a old word processor
for sale for $25. I looked it over. The
1989 owner pointed out rather flatly that it
Apple ran DOS and was fully functional. His
spouse was much more enthusiastic
about my investigations, adding how
useful it had been
—
www.cyberus.ca/~pgillil/toshiba.htm
l
A twist on integrated software began
with the introduction of Microsoft
Office: a single box containing
versions of Microsoft's word
processing, spreadsheet, and
presentation programs, along with a
few alterations that let them work
Office together in an integrated way. Like
integrated programs, such "suites"
are very popular. Other software
Microsoft suites have been offered by Lotus,
Corel, and Sun.
—Gareth Jones
Touchpads are relative motion
devices. That is, there is no
isomorphism from the screen to the
touchpad. Instead, relative motion of
the user's fingers causes relative
motion of the cursor. The buttons
below or above the pad serve as
Touch sensitive mouse standard buttons. You can also
pad/touchpad click by tapping your finger on the
touchpad, and drag with a tap
following by a continuous pointing
motion (a click-and-a-half). Some
touchpads also have "hotspots":
locations on the touchpad that
indicate user intentions other than
pointing. For example, on certain
touchpads, moving your finger along
the right edge of the touch pad will
control the scrollbar and scroll the
window that has the focus vertically.
Moving the finger on the bottom of
the touchpad often scrolls in
horizontal direction. Some touchpads
can emulate multiple mouse buttons
by either tapping in a special corner
of the pad, or by tapping with two or
more fingers.
—en.wilipedia.org.wiki/Touchpad
The Object Management Group
(OMG) is an open membership, not-
for-profit consortium that produces
Multi media platform and maintains computer industry
specifications for interoperable
specifications enterprise applications. Our
membership includes virtually every
Object Management large company in the computer
Group, including industry, and hundreds of smaller
ones. Most of the companies that
Microsoft, IBM, AT&T and shape enterprise and Internet
others computing today are represented on
our Board of Directors.
—www.omg.org/
The story of one of the original "killer
apps" begins in Ann Arbor, Michigan
(USA) with a college professor named
Glenn Knoll. Glenn was a photo
enthusiast who maintained a
darkroom in the family basement. He
1990 was also a technology aficionado
Photo Shop intrigued by the emergence of the
personal computer. His two sons,
Thomas and John, inherited their
Adobe father's inquisitive nature. And the
vision for future greatness began with
their exposure to Glenn's basement
darkroom and with the Apple II Plus
that he brought home for research
projects.
—Derrick Story
In November of 1996, Macromedia
was getting tired of hearing about
our product when they worked with
Disney to use Macromedia1s
Shockwave product. So Macromedia
approached us about working
together. We had been running
FutureWave for 4 years with a total
investment of $500,000 and the idea
of having access to the resources of a
1992 larger company to help us get
Macromedia FutureSplash established in a market
that was full of competitors and
growing slowly seemed like a good
one. So in December of 1996, we sold
FutureWave Software to Macromedia
and FutureSplash Animator became
Macromedia Flash 1.0
— Jonathan Gay
In 1993, Apple Computer Inc.
introduced the world to the first PDA,
the Newton®. They were dubbed
PDAs (personal digital assistants) by
John Sculley, former chairman of
Apple Computer Inc, and were sold as
the ultimate information appliance.
Sculley predicted PDAs would become
ubiquitous tools that would hold
Personal Digital Assistant telephone numbers, keep your
1993 calendar, store notes, plus send and
Apple receive data wirelessly. Although, the
Newton was not able to deliver all of
those features at the time it was
released.
For the next three years, PDA sales
dwindled, and were almost off the
charts.
Then, in March 1996, Palm™, Inc.
delivered the industry's first truly
compelling handheld computer, the
PalmPilot. A robust yet small go-
anywhere device that helped people
manage and organize their personal
and professional lives by providing
instant, anytime access to schedules,
important phone numbers, to-do lists
and other key information. This new
type of information management was
met with tremendous acceptance.
Mobile, busy people embraced the
small and powerful Palm™
handhelds.
—
www.handango.com/PDAHistory.jsp
?siteId=1
Apple sees the camera being used for
business, education and "memories".
It is fully automatic, with a built-in
flash. A window at the rear of the
camera is surrounded by four buttons
which control the flash, picture
resolution, self-timer, and delete
functions. The camera can store up to
QuickTake 100 camera 32 images at a resolution of 320 x 240
1994 pixels - each a quarter of a 13 inch
Apple monitor screenful - or eight 640 x 480
pixel images - each a full 13 inch
monitor screenful - for up to a year in
its internal flash memory. The
resolution can be changed on a shot-
by-shot basis if required
—John Henshall
inventors.about.com/library/invento
rs/bldigitalcamera.htm
In March 1995, Iomega launched the
low-cost Iomega Zip 100MB drive for
the consumer and small business
Zip disk and drive market. It was an instant success that
revolutionized the storage industry,
1995 becoming one of the fastest-selling
Iomega and most successful peripherals in the
history of computing. Today, Iomega
has sold more than 55 million Zip
drives and 350 million Zip disks
To demonstrate what
they saw as a possible
future in digital devices,
the Green Team locked
themselves away in an
anonymous office on
Sand Hill Road in Menlo
Park, cut all regular
communications with
Java Sun, and worked around
the clock for 18 months.
Sun Microsystems
In the summer of 1992,
they emerged with a
working demo, an
interactive, handheld
home-entertainment
device controller with an
animated touchscreen
user interface.
In the demo, the now
familiar Java technology
mascot, Duke, was
shown waving and
doing cartwheels on the
screen. The device was
called *7 ("StarSeven"),
named after an "answer
your phone from any
extension" feature of the
phone system in the
Green Team office. Duke
was actually a
representation of the *7's
"agent", a software
entity that did tasks on
behalf of the user.
—Jon Byous
The basic idea of a plasma
screen is to illuminate tiny
colored fluorescent lights to
form an image. Each pixel is
Flat screen made up of three fluorescent
lights -- a red light, a green
Sony
light and a blue light. The
plasma display varies the
intensities of the different lights
to produce a full range of colors
In the early 90s—the dawn of
history as far as the World
Wide Web is concerned—
relatively few users were
communicating across this
global network. They used an
assortment of shareware and
other software for Microsoft
Windows® operating system.
Internet Explorer In 1995, Microsoft hosted an
Internet Strategy Day and
Microsoft
announced its commitment to
adding Internet capabilities to
all its products. In fulfillment of
that announcement, Microsoft
Internet Explorer arrived as
both a graphical Web browser
and the name for a set of
technologies.
—www.microsoft.com/windows
40 million people connected to
the Internet, more that $1
billion commerce per year,
1996 rapidly growing internet
Internet's 25th anniversary companies like Netscape
Tim Berner-Lee
This processor
competes
successfully with
1997 Athlon Pentium chips
processor
Advanced
Micro Devices
A new technology
used in IBM's
Deskstar 16 GP, a
16.8 GB drive,
Giant bringing down the
Magneto- cost of memory to
Resistive 25 cents per
heads megabyte
IBM
A 7.5 million transistor
processor incorporates
MMX technology,
which is designed
specifically to process
Pentium II video, audio, and
processor graphics data efficiently
Pentium
5.2 GB rewriteable
capacity on a double-
sided cartridge, enough
to hold a full length 2
1998 hr movie (not be
confused with DVD-
DVD-RAM drive ROM)
iPod is not based on a
new concept.
Companies before
Apple released hard
drive based music
players, but none had
the charm and
elegance in the Apple
implementation.
Unlike the competitors,
2001 iPod the iPod used a high
Apple speed FireWire
interface to transfer
files on and off of it,
and it used a tiny hard
drive, that made the
device a quarter of the
size of comparable
products.
—Saad
A person's computer
should be worn, much
as eyeglasses or
clothing are worn, and
interact with the user
based on the context of
the situation. With
heads-up displays,
unobtrusive input
devices, personal
wireless local area
Wearable networks, and a host of
2005 other context sensing
computer
and communication
tools, the wearable
computer can act as an
intelligent assistant,
whether it be through a
Remembrance Agent,
augmented reality, or
intellectual collectives.
—Wearable Computing,
MIR
things haven't changed
as much as the hype
would have it. I think
that years from now,
when the details have
been washed away by
the acid rains of time,
four major commercial
20th events will stand out in
the history of personal
2006 anniversary of computers: the advent
the MacPlus of the microprocessor
which drove prices of
computers down to the
point where
individuals could buy
them and led to the
first flowering of the
present computer
revolution, the
ascendancy of the
software industry and
the shift from "users
will program them" to
"users will run
software packages",
the Mac interface and
its followers which
brought the benefits of
computers to a far
broader audience and
fundamentally
changed the way we
use computers of all
sizes and software of
all kinds, and (to tread
on dangerous ground
since the event is
relatively recent) the
blossoming of the
Internet. To sum up the
history: cheap
hardware, application,
software, human
interface, & internet
—Jef Raskin
