boxchronicles.com – Page 17 – tech that changed the world

Pong

Pong was the first hit video game, per se. This game is one that shaped the entire video game industry. Pong was first introduced in 1972. Al Alcorn, one of Atari’s first employees, created the first Pong arcade machine, a prototype mounted on pinball bars. The system was first tested…

Laser Printers

Inventions

Gary Starkweather created the first laser printer at Xerox in 1971. The first commercial laser printer was the IBM 3800 released in 1976 and is shown here. It was a large affair that often took up alot of space, but offered high volume printing. The Xerox Star 8010 was introduced…

Email

Apps

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer at BBN, composes two programs to exchange electronic messages with users of ARPANet. He introduced the @ symbol, which becomes the standard way of separating the user and the user’s server. Although not designed for communication among users, ARPANet messages were commonly e-mail….

Eight Inch Floppies

Inventions

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…

Intel 4004

CPUs

The 4004 was Intel’s first microprocessor. This breakthrough invention powered the Busicom calculator and paved the way for embedding intelligence in inanimate objects as well as the personal computer. The birth of the 4004 was an intense moment witnessed by the designer, Federico Faggin alone, working into the night in…

SQL

Code

The original concept of relational databases was introduced with the publication of “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Databanks” in 1970 by Dr. E.F.Codd. The SQL language itself was originally created by Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce at IBM based on Codd’s model in the early 70s. Originally…

C Programming

Code

The C programming language was invented at Bell Labs in the early 70s by Dennis Ritchie and was intended to be used with Unix. It has since become a widely used language in many areas including system software and in computer science education. It has spawned C++ and influenced many…

AlohaNet

Inventions

Norman Abramson designed a network of radio links that allowed the exchange of data among computers located on four of the Hawaiian Islands. At the behest of Robert Taylor, then head of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, funding was put into a network that sends messages through radio waves to…

ATMs

Inventions

An automatic teller machine or ATM allows a bank customer to conduct their banking transactions from almost every other ATM machine in the world. Don Wetzel was the co-patentee and chief conceptualist of the automated teller machine, an idea he said he thought of while waiting in line at a…

MOS Technology

Companies

Begun in 1969 by Allen-Bradley, MOS Technology originally was a supplier for Atari, but in 1975 they joined with ex-Motorola engineers to design and build low cost CPUs that performed better than leading CPUs like the Motorola 6800. The first MOS chip, the 6501, was four times faster than the…

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