In an April, 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore stated that the complexity of integrated circuits would double in 24 months. Douglas Englebart had also made a similar observation earlier, but Moore expounded on it in the magazine article, saying that by 1975 the number of components…
The acoustically coupled modem, which sends digital data over phone lines as audio pulses, was invented in the early 1960’s, but it wasn’t until John Van Geen at the Stanford Research Institute improved the device that it became available for general use. Phone companies at this time did not allow…
In recent years, object-oriented programming has emerged as the dominant computer programming style, and object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java enjoy wide use in academia and industry. Object-oriented languages dominate procedural languages in certain software-engineering categories, but not in others. Further progress may involve adapting and reintroducing principles that…
The first computer mouse was developed by Doug Englebart in 1963 at Stanford Research Institute. He had been creating the oN-Line System, or NLS, a hardware and software system that incorporated many of the concepts of today’s modern computers. Using two gear wheels at perpindicular positions, it allowed movement of…
Acquired by Stanford University in 1963, the Rancho Arm, a machine that is used as a human arm, holds a place among the first artificial robotic arms to be controlled by a computer. The dream has been fulfilled for the unfortunate children and adults that have been taken hold of…
Acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced ask-ee, ASCII is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to…
What do you do when you run out of real random access memory (RAM)? Easy. Pass it off to virtual memory. To do this you need a virtual memory manager (usually a function of the operating system) that maps chunks of data and code to storage areas that aren’t RAM….
In 1950 the Bank of America asked SRI to assess the possibility of developing electronic computers that could take over the labor-intensive banking tasks of handling checks and balancing accounts. The creation of branch offices and the rapidly increasing number of checks being used by a growing clientele threatened to…
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…
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….