A family of operating systems for personal computers originally released in 1985 with version 1.0 from Microsoft. Windows dominates the personal computer world, running, by some estimates, on 90 percent of all personal computers. The remaining 10 percent are mostly Macintosh computers. Like the Macintosh operating environment, Windows provides a graphical user interface (GUI), virtual memory management, multitasking, and support for many peripheral devices.
This Day In Tech History
- 1947 - The Eckert-Mauchly Corporation is incorporated.
More Tech History
This was a big year for computing history, first with the debut of BASIC. An easy to learn language, it was developed at Dartmouth College.
IBM's SABRE reservation system debuts at American Airlines. It used telephone lines to link 2,000 terminals in 65 cities with two 7090 computers and delivered flight information in 3 seconds.
The CDC 6600 is introduced. Performing a whopping 3 million calculations, it quickly became the fastest computer in the world at the time. It was 3xs faster than the IBM Stretch, and used smaller computers to funnel data to a larger processor.
Object oriented languages get a boost with the development of Simula. It was the first of it's kind to group data and instructions into blocks called objects.
The acoustically coupled modem gets an upgrade courtesy of Jon Van Geen of Stanford Research Institute. His device reliably received bits of data despite line noise heard on long distance lines.
Hewlett Packard enters the computing game with the 2115, which supported a number of programming languages and packed the same power as much larger systems of the time.
Larry Roberts connects computers via dedicated phone line.
Moore's Law is first published in Electronics Magazine.