In 1950 the Bank of America asked SRI to assess the possibility of developing electronic computers that could take over the labor-intensive banking tasks of handling checks and balancing accounts. The creation of branch offices and the rapidly increasing number of checks being used by a growing clientele threatened to…
From MIT’s History of the Servomechanisms Lab The MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory was established in 1939 under the direction of Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Gordon S. Brown. The laboratory grew out of a special program on servomechanisms and fire control (gun-positioning instruments) established by the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering…
DEC was created by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, two MIT engineers, in 1957 and rose to legendary status during it’s existence. The company has produced several influential computers and design concepts, forever emblazing it on the face of technology history. It is one of the first computer companies to…
The LISP programming language was invented by John McCarthy at MIT in 1958. Since it’s inception, it has been closely related with artificial intelligence research. It used many principles from the first AI language, Information Processing Language. He published a paper showing that one could build an entire language using…
Transistors had become commonplace in everything from radios to phones to computers, and now manufacturers wanted something even better. Sure, transistors were smaller than vacuum tubes, but for some of the newest electronics, they weren’t small enough. One day in late July, Jack Kilby was sitting alone at Texas Instruments….
In response to the arrival of the Soviet made satellite Sputnik in orbit, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). They’re given free reign to develop advanced technology with long term potential. Eventually the Internet would form from the ARPANet project. Eisenhower, a progressive president who…