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 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…
Development of the IAS Computer at the Institute for Advanced Study began in 1945. Designed and built by Alfred von Nuemann based on some earlier concepts, it is also known as the von Nuemann machine. This also spawned the von Neumann architecture, in influential stored-program computing design that is still…
The evolution of modern torpedoes goes back to just before the Civil War, when they could only maintain a straight course and preset depth. By the time World War I rolled around, navies around the world had developed a complicated manual procedure using slide rules. During World War II, almost…
Developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s, the Star7 was one of the earliest known handheld touchscreen devices. Although it never really made it past the prototype phase , it was innovative for it’s time and is widely considered one of the first PDAs. It sported gesture based interaction,…
A U.S. Navy team had built some early code-breaking computers during World War II similar to the Colossus machine in Britain. After the war, the group formed Engineering Research Associates (ERA) to continue building computers for the military and commercial sectors. The first “Alpha” models initially funded by the U.S….
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…
The EDVAC (Electronic Discreete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers and is most noted for using binary and stored programs, radical differences to the previous ENIAC system. Designed by Eckert & Mauchly while at the University of Pennsylvania for the U.S. Army’s Ballistics Research Lab on…