Apple II

After Wozniak had completed design on the Apple-1, he already had in mind enhancements that would make his computer faster and more functional. He wanted to make it display in color. He worked to combine the terminal and memory functions of the Apple-1 by moving the display into main memory,…

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Cray-1

The first Cray-1® system by Cray Research (originally Control Data Corporation) was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 for $8.8 million. It boasted a world-record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second (160 megaflops) and an 8 megabyte (1 million word) main memory. The Cray-1’s architecture reflected…

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Altair 8800

The MITS Altair 8800 was built by Ed Roberts, who founded MITS in the early 1970s. Originally producing lights for electronic hobbyists, they were heavily in debt by 1974. Roberts had a new idea, a computer affordable for the average person, and managed to make a deal with Intel to…

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Scelbi 8h

Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. Designed by Nate Wadsworth and Bob Findley in 1973,  it was based on the Intel 8008 processor, and was the first microprocessor based kit to hit the market. It came with 1KB…

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Xerox Alto

The Xerox Alto was designed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It was the first personal computer with a desktop/GUI. Designed by Chuck Thacker, it had 128kb of memory that was expandable to a whopping 512kb. It also held a hard drive with a 2.5mb cartridge, all inside a small refrigerator-size…

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Micral

The Micral was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a micro-processor, the Intel 8008. Thi Truong developed the computer and Philippe Kahn the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that didn’t require high performance.

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Apollo Guidance Computer

The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first recognizably modern embedded system. It was developed by Charles Draper and the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Each flight to the moon had two of these computers. They ran the inertial guidance systems of both the command module and LEM. The Apollo flight computer was…

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CDC 6600

The CDC 6600 by Control Data Corporation is believed to have been the first computer to be designated as a supercomputer, offering the fastest clock speed for its day (100 nanoseconds). It was one of the first computers to use Freon refrigerant cooling and as also the first commercial computer…

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SABRE

In the late 1950s, IBM teamed with American Airlines to devise a teleprocessing solution — SABRE. When fully implemented, SABRE established a dominant design for reservations processing that was copied throughout the airline industry. Functional enhancements transformed SABRE from a reservations system into a passenger services system that supported many…

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oNLine System (NLS)

The oNLine System, or NLS, was created by Douglas Englebart and the Augmentation Research Center team at Stanford Research Institute. The computer system was years ahead of it’s time, designed as a collaboration system, it employed the use of hypertext, the mouse, video monitors, and many other aspects of today’s…

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