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…
Edson deCastro was a former product manager at DEC, creators of the PDP series of computers. He left the company to form Data General and in 1968 they produced the Nova, competing directly with deCastro’s former employers. Although considered crude in comparison, the system was fast for it’s day and…
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…
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…
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…
From “Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC): The Genesis of a Technological Revolution” by Samuel A. Rosenfeld Personal computers, now as ubiquitous as typewriters, are direct descendants of the LINC, an invention made some two decades ago, at the close of the paleo/computing era. In the early 1960’s, digital computers were accorded…
Announced in October 1959, the 1401 was equipped with ferrite-core memories having capacities of 1,400, 2,000 or 4,000 characters. The system could be configured to use punched-cards and magnetic tape, and could be used either as a stand-alone computer or as a peripheral system for larger computers. The 1401 processing…
From the PDP-1 handbook, 1960 The Programmed Data Processor (PDP-1) is a high speed, solid state digital computer designed to operate with many types of input-output devices with no internal machine changes. It is a single address, single instruction, stored program computer with powerful program features. Five-megacycle circuits, a magnetic…
Sylvania delivered the first MOBIDIC (MOBile Digital Computer) to the U.S. Army in 1959 after winning the bid for a transistorized computer that could automate the flow of information on the battlefield, taking messages in any form and passing them to their destination. This concept was called Fieldata by the…
The IBM 7030 Data Processing System — or “Stretch” computer — was delivered in April 1961, offering a performance that was 200 times faster than the IBM 701, 40 times faster than the IBM 709 and seven times faster than the IBM 7090. Although the 7030 was the industry’s fastest…