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Computer HistoryBefore Personal Computers

11

1969

The root of what is to become the

Internet begins when the Department of
Defense establishes four nodes on the
ARPAnet: two at University of California
campuses (one at Santa Barbara and one
at Los Angeles) and one each at SRI
International and the University of Utah.

IBMs 7000 series mainframes are the

companys first transistorized computers.

1971

A team at IBMs San Jose Laboratories

invents the 8'' floppy disk.

Robert Noyces practical integrated circuit, invented at Fairchild Camera and

Instrument Corp., allows printing of
conducting channels directly on the silicon surface.

1971

The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appears in

Electronic News.

1971

The Kenbak-1, one of the first personal

computers, advertises for $750 in
Scientific American.

1972

Hewlett-Packard announces the HP-35 as

a fast, extremely accurate electronic
slide rule with a solid-state memory
similar to that of a computer.

1956

The era of magnetic disk storage dawns

with IBMs shipment of a 305 RAMAC to
Zellerbach Paper in San Francisco.

1958

Jack Kilby creates the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments to prove that
resistors and capacitors can exist on the
same piece of semiconductor material.

1959
1959

1960

Chapter 1

Bell Labs designs its Dataphone, the first

commercial modem, specifically for converting digital computer data to analog
signals for transmission across its longdistance network.

1960

The precursor to the minicomputer,

DECs PDP-1, sells for $120,000.

1972

Intels 8008 microprocessor makes its

debut.

1961

According to Datamation magazine, IBM

has an 81.2% share of the computer
market in 1961, the year in which it
introduces the 1400 Series.

1972

Steve Wozniak builds his blue box, a

tone generator to make free phone calls.

1973

Robert Metcalfe devises the Ethernet

method of network connection at the
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

1973

The Micral is the earliest commercial,

non-kit personal computer based on a
microprocessor, the Intel 8008.

1973

The TV Typewriter, designed by Don

Lancaster, provides the first display of
alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set.

1974

Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto

Research Center design the Alto, the first
workstation with a built-in mouse for
input.

1974

Scelbi advertises its 8H computer, the first

commercially advertised U.S. computer
based on a microprocessor, Intels 8008.

1975

Telenet, the first commercial packetswitching network and civilian equivalent of ARPAnet, is born.

1964

CDCs 6600 supercomputer, designed by

Seymour Cray, performs up to three million instructions per seconda processing speed three times faster than that of
its closest competitor, the IBM Stretch.

1964

IBM announces System/360, a family of

six mutually compatible computers and
40 peripherals that can work together.

1964

Online transaction processing makes its

debut in IBMs SABRE reservation system, set up for American Airlines.

1965

Digital Equipment Corp. introduces the

PDP-8, the first commercially successful
minicomputer.

1966

Hewlett-Packard enters the generalpurpose computer business with its

HP-2115 for computation, offering a
computational power formerly found
only in much larger computers.

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Development of the PC

1975

The January edition of Popular Electronics

features the Altair 8800, which is based
on Intels 8080 microprocessor, on its
cover.

1981

IBM introduces its PC, igniting a fast

growth of the personal computer market. The IBM PC is the grandfather of
all modern PCs.

1975

The visual display module (VDM) prototype, designed by Lee Felsenstein, marks
the first implementation of a memorymapped alphanumeric video display for
personal computers.

1981

Sony introduces and ships the first

3 1/2'' floppy drives and disks.

1981

Philips and Sony introduce the CD-DA

(Compact Disc Digital Audio) drive.
Sony is the first with a CD player on
the market.

1983

Apple introduces its Lisa, which incorporates a GUI thats very similar to the
one first introduced on the Xerox Star.

1983

Compaq Computer Corp. introduces its

first PC clone that uses the same software as the IBM PC.

1984

Apple Computer launches the

Macintosh, the first successful mousedriven computer with a GUI, with a
single $1.5 million commercial during
the 1984 Super Bowl.

1984

IBM releases the PC-AT (PC Advanced

Technology), three times faster than
original PCs and based on the Intel 286
chip. The AT introduces the 16-bit ISA
bus and is the computer all modern
PCs are based on.

1985

Philips introduces the first CD-ROM

drive.

1986

Compaq announces the Deskpro 386,

the first computer on the market to use
what was then Intels new 386 chip.

1987

IBM introduces its PS/2 machines,

which make the 3 1/2'' floppy disk
drive and VGA video standard for PCs.
The PS/2 also introduces the
MicroChannel Architecture (MCA) bus,
the first plug-and-play bus for PCs.

1988

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who left

Apple to form his own company,
unveils the NeXT.

1976

Steve Wozniak designs the Apple I, a

single-board computer.

1976

The 5 1/4'' flexible disk drive and disk

are introduced by Shugart Associates.

1976

The Cray I makes its name as the first

commercially successful vector processor.

1977

Tandy Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80.

1977

Apple Computer introduces the Apple II.

1977

Commodore introduces the PET

(Personal Electronic Transactor).

1978

The VAX 11/780 from Digital Equipment

Corp. features the capability to address
up to 4.3GB of virtual memory, providing hundreds of times the capacity of
most minicomputers.

1979

Motorola introduces the 68000 microprocessor.

1980

John Shoch, at the Xerox Palo Alto

Research Center, invents the computer
worm, a short program that searches a
network for idle processors.

1980

Seagate Technology creates the first hard

disk drive for microcomputers, the ST-506.

1980

The first optical data storage disk has 60

times the capacity of a 5 1/4'' floppy
disk.

1981

Xerox introduces the Star, the first personal computer with a graphical user
interface (GUI).

1981

Adam Osborne completes the first

portable computer, the Osborne I, which
weighs 24 lbs. and costs $1,795.

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Computer HistoryBefore Personal Computers

1988

1988

1989

1990

1993

Compaq and other PC-clone makers

develop Enhanced Industry Standard
Architecture (EISA), which unlike
MicroChannel retains backward compatibility with the existing ISA bus.
Robert Morriss worm floods the
ARPAnet. The 23-year-old Morris, the
son of a computer security expert for the
National Security Agency, sends a nondestructive worm through the Internet,
causing problems for about 6,000 of the
60,000 hosts linked to the network.
Intel releases the 486 (P4) microprocessor, which contains more than one million transistors. Intel also introduces 486
motherboard chipsets.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is born
when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at
CERNthe high-energy physics laboratory in Genevadevelops Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML).
Intel releases the Pentium (P5) processor.
Intel shifts from numbers to names for
its chips after it learns its impossible to
trademark a number. Intel also releases
motherboard chipsets and, for the first
time, complete motherboards as well.

1995

Intel releases the Pentium Pro processor,

the first in the P6 processor family.

1995

Microsoft releases Windows 95, the first

mainstream 32-bit operating system, in
a huge rollout.

1997

Intel releases the Pentium II processor,

essentially a Pentium Pro with MMX
instructions added.

1997

AMD introduces the K6, which is compatible with the Intel P5 (Pentium).

1998

Microsoft releases Windows 98.

1998

Intel releases the Celeron, a low-cost version of the Pentium II processor. Initial
versions have no cache, but within a few
months Intel introduces versions with a
smaller but faster L2 cache.

Chapter 1

13

1999

Intel releases the Pentium III, essentially a Pentium II with SSE (Streaming
SIMD Extensions) added.

1999

AMD introduces the Athlon.

2000

Microsoft releases Windows Me

(Millennium Edition) and Windows
2000.

2000

Both Intel and AMD introduce processors running at 1GHz.

2000

AMD introduces the Duron, a low-cost

Athlon with reduced L2 cache.

2000

Intel introduces the Pentium 4, the latest processor in the Intel Architecture
32-bit (IA-32) family.

2001

Intel releases the Itanium processor, its

first 64-bit (IA-64) processor for PCs.

2001

The industry celebrates the 20th

anniversary of the release of the original IBM PC.

2001

Intel introduces the first 2GHz processor, a version of the Pentium 4. It took
the industry 28 1/2 years to go from
108KHz to 1GHz, but only 18 months
to go from 1GHz to 2GHz.

2001

Microsoft releases Windows XP Home

and Professional, for the first time
merging the consumer (9x/Me) and
business (NT/2000) operating system
lines under the same code base (an
extension of Windows 2000).

2002

Intel releases the first 3GHz-class

processor, a 3.06GHz version of the
Pentium 4. This processor also introduces Intels Hyper-Threading (HT)
technology (which enables a single
processor to work with two application
threads at the same time) to desktop
computing.

2003

AMD releases the Athlon 64, the first

64-bit processor targeted at the mainstream consumer and business markets.

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Development of the PC

Mechanical Calculators
One of the earliest calculating devices on record is the abacus, which has been known and widely
used for more than 2,000 years. The abacus is a simple wooden rack holding parallel rods on which
beads are strung. When these beads are manipulated back and forth according to certain rules, several
types of arithmetic operations can be performed.
Math with standard Arabic numbers found its way to Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries. In the
early 1600s, a man named Charles Napier (the inventor of logarithms) developed a series of rods (later
called Napiers Bones) that could be used to assist with numeric multiplication.
Blaise Pascal is usually credited with building the first digital calculating machine in 1642. It could perform the addition of numbers entered on dials and was intended to help his father, who was a tax collector. Then in 1671, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz invented a calculator that was finally built in 1694. His
calculating machine could not only add, but by successive adding and shifting, it could also multiply.
In 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas developed the first commercially successful mechanical calculator
that could not only add but also subtract, multiply, and divide. After that, a succession of everimproving mechanical calculators created by various other inventors followed.

The First Mechanical Computer

Charles Babbage, a mathematics professor in Cambridge, England, is considered by many to be the
father of computers because of his two great inventionseach a different type of mechanical computing engine.
The Difference Engine, as he called it, was conceived in 1812 and solved polynomial equations by the
method of differences. By 1822, he had built a small working model of his Difference Engine for
demonstration purposes. With financial help from the British government, Babbage started construction of a full-scale model in 1823. It was intended to be steam-powered and fully automatic, and it
would even print the resulting tables.
Babbage continued work on it for 10 years, but by 1833 he had lost interest because he now had an idea
for an even better machine, something he described as a general-purpose, fully program-controlled,
automatic mechanical digital computer. Babbage called his new machine an Analytical Engine. The
plans for the Analytical Engine specified a parallel decimal computer operating on numbers (words) of
50 decimal digits and with a storage capacity (memory) of 1,000 such numbers. Built-in operations were
to include everything that a modern general-purpose computer would need, even the all-important conditional function, which would allow instructions to be executed in an order depending on certain conditions, not just in numerical sequence. In modern computer languages, this conditional capability is
manifested in the IF statement. The Analytical Engine was also intended to use punched cards, which
would control or program the machine. The machine was to operate automatically by steam power and
would require only one attendant.
The Analytical Engine is regarded as the first real predecessor to a modern computer because it had all
the elements of what is considered a computer today. These included
An input device. Using an idea similar to the looms used in textile mills at the time, a form of
punched cards supplied the input.
A control unit. A barrel-shaped section with many slats and studs was used to control or program
the processor.
A processor (or calculator). A computing engine containing hundreds of axles and thousands of
gears about 10 feet tall.
Storage. A unit containing more axles and gears that could hold 1,000 50-digit numbers.
An output device. Plates designed to fit in a printing press that were used to print the final results.