The 8″ floppy disk was the grandfather of all disks that came after. It first appeared on the high-tech landscape in the late sixties in the form of a big, thin plastic disk housed in an eight-inch-square black jacket. An oblong hole in each side left the recording surface open to the drive and also, unfortunately, to clumsy fingers.
This Day In Tech History
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.
-Popular Mechanics, March 1949More Tech History
The first successful test of the point contact resistor occurs, creating a revolution in semiconductors. It would later replace the use of vacuum tubes in computers.
The BINAC computer is constructed by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp., a fledgling company formed by John Eckert and John Mauchly.
Claude Shannon introduces the bit , the basic component of computation.
Norbert Wiener publishes "Cybernetics" , revolutionizing the study of artificial intelligence.
IBM completes the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator.