From Intel’s “Corporate Overview”; For more than three decades, Intel Corporation has developed technology enabling the computer and Internet revolution that has changed the world. Founded in 1968 to build semiconductor memory products, Intel introduced the world’s first microprocessor in 1971. Today, Intel supplies the computing and communications industries with…
Edson deCastro was a former product manager at DEC, creators of the PDP series of computers. He left the company to form Data General and in 1968 they produced the Nova, competing directly with deCastro’s former employers. Although considered crude in comparison, the system was fast for it’s day and…
The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first recognizably modern embedded system. It was developed by Charles Draper and the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Each flight to the moon had two of these computers. They ran the inertial guidance systems of both the command module and LEM. The Apollo flight computer was…
From LOGO promotional material: The fun and easy programming language for all ages. Yes the turtle that draws! Beginners can learn it within minutes, yet LOGO is far from a simple language. It is as powerful as any other language. The language was based on LISP and designed to teach…
An “artificial pacemaker” is a small, battery-operated device that helps the heart beat in a regular rhythm. Some are permanent (internal) and some are temporary (external). They can replace a defective natural pacemaker or blocked pathway. A pacemaker uses batteries to send electrical impulses to the heart to help it…
In an April, 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore stated that the complexity of integrated circuits would double in 24 months. Douglas Englebart had also made a similar observation earlier, but Moore expounded on it in the magazine article, saying that by 1975 the number of components…
Larry Roberts was an integral part of the formation of ARPANet as one of it’s chief designers, and was also the first to connect two computers to one another via dedicated phone lines, proving that such connections were possible. After receiving a PhD from MIT , he heard the inspiring…
The acoustically coupled modem, which sends digital data over phone lines as audio pulses, was invented in the early 1960’s, but it wasn’t until John Van Geen at the Stanford Research Institute improved the device that it became available for general use. Phone companies at this time did not allow…
The SIMULA programming language was designed and built by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard at the Norwegian Computing Centre (NCC) in Oslo between 1962 and 1967. It was originally designed and implemented as a language for discrete event simulation, but was later expanded and reimplemented as a full scale general…
In recent years, object-oriented programming has emerged as the dominant computer programming style, and object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java enjoy wide use in academia and industry. Object-oriented languages dominate procedural languages in certain software-engineering categories, but not in others. Further progress may involve adapting and reintroducing principles that…