The Automatic Digital Network System began development in the late 1950s as a joint project between IBM, Western Union, and RCA for the US Air Force to centralize communications for its vast number of logistics centers. Built on a network of “switching centers” in strategic locations in the US and…
The Atlas was the first real supercomputer and was developed by Tom Kilburn and a team at Manchester University in England. A transistorized computer, it was the first to use virtual memory and pioneered paging. It was brought online on December 7th, 1962 as part of a joint project with…
Offered by Neiman Marcus in their 1969 catalog, the computer was actually a Honeywell 316 under the hood, but it was marketed as an extravagant gift by the brand. Advertised as a way to store recipes and weighing in at 100 pounds, it set you back $10,000 in 1969. Typical…
The CTSS was the first time sharing computer system and was developed by MIT in the 1960s by Fernando Corbato, an American physicist and computer scientist. The project was funded by DARPA and went online in 1963. It was developed on various IBM systems, including the 709, 7090, and 7094…
The Honeywell 800 had its first installation in 1960 and was a transistorized electric computer. Spawned from a joint Honeywell/Raytheon project in 1955, the H-800 only sold 89 units. Honeywell released the 1800 and 1800-II later. It was capable of running a few different languages, including COBOL and FORTRAN.
The Z-80 Softcard was developed my Microsoft in 1980 to turn an Apple computer into a CP/M system. It’s first hardware product, it was based on the Zilog Z-80 and bundled with BASIC. It allowed Apple II computers to run the CP/M operating system and all of the software programs…
The Kenbak-1 was the world’s first personal computer. John Blakenbaker developed it at the Kenbak Corporation in 1970. It was before the first microprocessor, so it did not have a single CPU. The first units were sold in 1971, but only 50 machines were built. It sold for $750 US…
SENDMSG was one of the earliest e-mail programs ever developed for a multi-user system running the TENEX operating system. Along with READMAIL, it was the first networked mail system. Ray Tomlinson updated the program in 1971 to allow users of the ARPANET to send messages to one another. It is…
Founded in 1969 by Jacob Goldman, Xerox’s then chief scientist. As a division of Xerox, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) contributed to the foundation of many modern computing concepts like laser printing, communications, programming, and most significantly, the graphical user interface (GUI). The facility opened in July of 1970…
Begun in 1958 by an international committee, the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), ALGOL was a hugely influential series of algorithmic programming languages. Culminating in ALGOL 60 in 1960, later languages were heavily influenced by ALGOL’s concepts for lexicon, structure, and syntax. It’s considered the first of the so called…