Built by NEC in 1958, this was one of Japan’s first digital computers. It used so called parametron devices invented by Goto Eiichi and was the first Japanese computer to do floating point arithmetic. The devices utilized a switching technology similar to magnetic core that was more stable than vacuum…
DEC was created by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, two MIT engineers, in 1957 and rose to legendary status during it’s existence. The company has produced several influential computers and design concepts, forever emblazing it on the face of technology history. It is one of the first computer companies to…
The LISP programming language was invented by John McCarthy at MIT in 1958. Since it’s inception, it has been closely related with artificial intelligence research. It used many principles from the first AI language, Information Processing Language. He published a paper showing that one could build an entire language using…
Bolt, Beranek and Newman was one of the pioneer companies in the world of computers. Two MIT professors, Richard Bolt and Leo Beranek, started up a small acoustical consulting company in 1948. With the addition of Robert Newman, Bolt Baranek and Newman or BBN, was born. Throughout the 1950s, the…
In 1958, researchers at Bell Telephone Labs invent the modem, a device that converts data from computers to the phone line and back again. This switching of digital to analog makes computer networks possible. At the time there was a desire to connect to distant computers, and the obvious choice…
From A Brief History of Lucent Technologies On Feb. 14, 1876 Elisha Gray lost his race to invent the telephone; Alexander Graham Bell put in a patent application just hours before Gray filed one. Gray, however, had already left his mark on telephony seven years before when, in 1869, he…
Transistors had become commonplace in everything from radios to phones to computers, and now manufacturers wanted something even better. Sure, transistors were smaller than vacuum tubes, but for some of the newest electronics, they weren’t small enough. One day in late July, Jack Kilby was sitting alone at Texas Instruments….