This was IBM’s first portable computer (shown here with printer attached). Released on April 3rd, 1986, it was also known as the IBM 5140. It featured power managment, the ability to run on batteries, and a CMOS version of the Intel 8088. It ran at a galloping 4mhz and had…
AOL began in 1985, originally founded as Quantum Computer Services. It officially became America Online in 1989. Four years later, in 1993, AOL had only 500,000 members. It provided access to the Internet, and, in addition, offered access to its own online information and services, which were specifically tailored to…
Created in 1984 by Michael Dell while enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, it was initially called PCs Limited. Working on his own, he ran the company from his dormitory, and sold IBM compatible PCs built from standard parts. After getting an investment from his family, Dell dropped…
Designed by Manuel Fernandez, owner and founder of the Gavilan Computer Corporation, the Gaviian SC was one of the earliest portable computers and was the first machine dubbed a “laptop”. Although most portable computers were not the ultra light and powerful machines we know of today, it was one of…
The Rainbow 100 was a microcomputer produced by DEC and released in 1982. It borrowed from the VT102 for its video display and was one of the earliest dual CPU microcomputers, using a 4MHz Zilog and a 4.8 MHz Intel 8088. DEC produced three models during the production lifespan of…
American engineers have been calling small flaws in machines “bugs” for over a century. Thomas Edison talked about bugs in electrical circuits in the 1870s. When the first computers were built during the early 1940s, people working on them found bugs in both the hardware of the machines and in…
The Connection Machine was the first commercial computer designed expressly to work on simulating intelligence and life. A massively parallel supercomputer with 65,536 processors, it was the brainchild of Danny Hillis, conceived while he was a graduate student under Marvin Minsky at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. At it’s height,…
ATI (Array Technologies Incorporated) was founded in 1985 in Markham, Ontario, Canada by three men from Hong Kong. It started out manufacturing integrated graphics chips for companies like IBM. By 1987 it was producing it’s own graphics cards, the EGA and VGA Wonder brands, and on it’s way to the…
Bjarne Stroustrup invented C++ in 1983 while working at Bell Labs, improving on the original C language. An extension to C, it is a descendent of the language B developed by Ken Thompson for the Unix operating system, and unlike C it is an object oriented language.
CDs and DVDs are everywhere these days. Whether they are used to hold music, data or computer software, they have become the standard medium for distributing large quantities of information in a reliable package. Compact discs are so easy and cheap to produce that America Online sent out millions of…