Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs had been friends in high school. They had both been interested in electronics, and both had been perceived as outsiders. They kept in touch after graduation, and both ended up dropping out of school and getting jobs working for companies in Silicon Valley. ( Woz for Hewlett-Packard, Jobs for Atari ). Wozniak had been dabbling in computer-design for some time when, in 1976, he designed what would become the Apple I. Jobs, who had an eye for the future, insisted that he and Wozniak try to sell the machine, and on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was born.
This Day In Tech History
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.
-Popular Mechanics, March 1949More Tech History
The IAS computer is operational.
The first programming compiler, A-0 Compiler, is completed by Grace Hopper.
The 702, the first high speed magnetic tape storage system, is announced by IBM. It was typically sold alongside the IBM 701.
IBM begins to emerge with the IBM 701 computer. It's use of speed coding trimmed weeks off the programming schedule, and was the company's first electronic computer. 19 were sold to research companies, the federal government, and aircraft companies.
The AVIDAC computer is operational for the first time.
The Burroughs Adding Machine Company is renamed to Burroughs Corporation. The company would be second only to IBM in the mainframe market by the mid 1960s.
The first color television broadcast hits the airwaves.