Category Archives: Inventions

Gary Starkweather created the first laser printer at Xerox in 1971. The first commercial laser printer was the IBM 3800 released in 1976 and is shown  here. It was a large affair that often took up alot of space, but offered high volume printing. The Xerox Star 8010 was introduced in 1977 for use with an individual computer, but it was incredibly expensive.

With the spread of personal computers in the 80s, HP introduced the Laserjet 8ppm in 1984, followed quickly by many others. The laser printer helped bring about the era of desktop publishing with the debut of the Apple Laserwriter for the Macintosh and Aldus Pagemaker in 1985.

The 8″ floppy disk was the grandfather of all disks that came after. It first appeared on the high-tech landscape in the late sixties in the form of a big, thin plastic disk housed in an eight-inch-square black jacket. An oblong hole in each side left the recording surface open to the drive and also, unfortunately, to clumsy fingers.

Norman Abramson designed a network of radio links that allowed the exchange of data among computers located on four of the Hawaiian Islands. At the behest of Robert Taylor, then head of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, funding was put into a network that sends messages through radio waves to computing it’s feasibility. In 1970 he hired Abramson at the University of Hawaii to take charge of the project. He sets up a system of small radios that transmit on the same frequency, each of them in turn linked to a host computer.

Larry Roberts succeeds Taylor later that year and is also interested in the idea, developing a theory with Bob Kahn on a mobile computer network. The Army becomes interested, and several “packet-radio networks” as they become known as, are installed. Kahn envisions a satellite network that would be capable of transmitting messages anywhere on the planet. Eventually he organizes SATnet, and this development opens the possibility of connecting all networks on a global scale.

An automatic teller machine or ATM allows a bank customer to conduct their banking transactions from almost every other ATM machine in the world. Don Wetzel was the co-patentee and chief conceptualist of the automated teller machine, an idea he said he thought of while waiting in line at a Dallas bank. At the time (1968) Wetzel was the Vice President of Product Planning at Docutel, the company that developed automated baggage-handling equipment. The other two inventors listed on the patent were Tom Barnes, the chief mechanical engineer and George Chastain, the electrical engineer. It took five million dollars to develop the ATM. The concept of the modern ATM first began in 1968, a working prototype came about in 1969 and Docutel was issued a patent in 1973. The first working ATM was installed in a New York based Chemical Bank.

The precursor to the Internet, ARPANET was a large wide-area network created by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Established in 1969, ARPANET served as a testbed for new networking technologies, linking many universities and research centers. The first two nodes that formed the ARPANET were UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute, followed shortly thereafter by the University of Utah.

Larry Roberts and Bob Taylor are primarily responsible for the project when Taylor, then head of computing programs at ARPA, starts the ball rolling for the creation of a national computer network. He shared predecessor J.C.R. Licklider’s view, and moves forward with a plan for creating a network of electronic links among the computers at various research centers.

He hires Larry Roberts to head the project and three years later ARPANet is born. The network would rely on Robert’s theory on machines called Interface Message Processor (IMPs), which would connect, route messages, scan for errors and confirm arrival. After hundreds of proposals, the contract to build them goes to Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). They work around the clock to deliver the first one by the Labor Day 1969 deadline. Requests for assistance goes out to the “Intergalactic Network”, and the response is overwhelming as mostly graduate students prepare their host computers for IMPs.

Linked by dedicated phone lines, all of the first four IMPs are in place on schedule and allow users to log on to remote computers and run their programs. This four node preliminary trial is successful, and by spring of 1971 nineteen other sites across the country have joined. The next year the network makes it’s public appearance and the idea of a more expansive network takes root. Others are involved in ARPAnet’s design and completion, and they develop new protocols, write software, connect wires, and unknowingly start the network revolution.

 This robot arm was designed in 1969 by Victor Scheinman, a Mechanical Engineering student working in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL).

This 6 degree of freedom (6-dof) all-electric mechanical manipulator was one of the first “robots” designed exclusively for computer control. Following experience with a couple of earlier manipulators, the Stanford-Rancho Arm (a modified prosthetic arm) and the Stanford Hydraulic Arm (a high speed but dangerous and difficult to control manipulator), this arm was designed to be easy to control and compatible with the existing computer systems (PDP-6) and the SAIL facility. This arm was entirely built on campus, primarily using shop facilities in the Chemistry Department.

An “artificial pacemaker” is a small, battery-operated device that helps the heart beat in a regular rhythm. Some are permanent (internal) and some are temporary (external). They can replace a defective natural pacemaker or blocked pathway.

A pacemaker uses batteries to send electrical impulses to the heart to help it pump properly. An electrode is placed next to the heart wall and small electrical charges travel through the wire to the heart.
Most pacemakers are demand pacemakers. They have a sensing device. It turns the signal off when the heartbeat is above a certain level. It turns the signal back on when the heartbeat is too slow.

In an April, 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore stated that the complexity of integrated circuits would double in 24 months. Douglas Englebart had also made a similar observation earlier, but Moore expounded on it in the magazine article, saying that by 1975 the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000 and that they would fit on a single wafer. It was later called “Moore’s Law” by Caltech professor Carver Mead.

The popular formulation is the doubling of transitors on integrated circuits, but by the end of the 70s it was the limit for the number of transistors on the most complex chips. It is also common to cite Moore’s law to refer to the rapidly continuing advance in computing power per unit cost.

The acoustically coupled modem, which sends digital data over phone lines as audio pulses, was invented in the early 1960’s, but it wasn’t until John Van Geen at the Stanford Research Institute improved the device that it became available for general use. Phone companies at this time did not allow unapproved devices to be attached to phone lines, but Van Geen won approval for the modem by making it mimic the characteristics of an ordinary handset. He also greatly improved the ability of the modem to extract data bits from the background hiss of standard telephone connections. Until the 1980’s acoustic modems operated by inserting a standard phone handset into the two soundproofed depressions on the modem chassis.

The acoustic modem set off the era of the so-called “dumb terminal” – a video display that could do nothing in and of itself unless hooked up to a remote computer via a modem. The era lasted until the late 1970’s when computers became small enough for the display monitor to sit on top of the computer itself. Later things shifted again when the internet was born and most computers connected to other remote servers to view and send data.