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…
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…
Linus Torvalds was born in 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. He attended the University of Helsinki and graduated in 1996 with a degree in computer science. In the early 90s he discovered the Minix demo, a Unix based operating system, and was inspired to create his own. While attending the university,…
Founded in 1969 and based in Sunnyvale, California, AMD is a global supplier of integrated circuits for the personal and networked computer/communications markets with facilities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. AMD produces microprocessors, Flash memory devices, and silicon solutions for communications and networking.
Begun in 1969 by Allen-Bradley, MOS Technology originally was a supplier for Atari, but in 1975 they joined with ex-Motorola engineers to design and build low cost CPUs that performed better than leading CPUs like the Motorola 6800. The first MOS chip, the 6501, was four times faster than the…
The Interface Message Processor (or IMP), was essentially the first router, as routers would eventually become known. It was the first device built with the purpose of switching packets across a network and was intended for use with the ARPANET. It was created by BBN in the early 1960s using…
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…
From Lucent Technologies’ “Creation of the UNIX Operating System” After three decades of use, the UNIX computer operating system from Bell Labs is still regarded as one of the most powerful, versatile, and flexible operating systems (OS) in the computer world. Its popularity is due to many factors, including its…
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,…