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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Interface Message Processor (or IMP), was essentially the first router, as routers would eventually become known. It was the first device built with the purpose of switching packets across a network and was intended for use with the ARPANET. It was created by BBN in the early 1960s using…
The precursor to the Internet, ARPANET was a large wide-area network created by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Established in 1969, ARPANET served as a testbed for new networking technologies, linking many universities and research centers. The first two nodes that formed the ARPANET were UCLA and…
From Lucent Technologies’ “Creation of the UNIX Operating System” After three decades of use, the UNIX computer operating system from Bell Labs is still regarded as one of the most powerful, versatile, and flexible operating systems (OS) in the computer world. Its popularity is due to many factors, including its…
This robot arm was designed in 1969 by Victor Scheinman, a Mechanical Engineering student working in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL). This 6 degree of freedom (6-dof) all-electric mechanical manipulator was one of the first “robots” designed exclusively for computer control. Following experience with a couple of earlier manipulators,…