The CDC 6600 by Control Data Corporation is believed to have been the first computer to be designated as a supercomputer, offering the fastest clock speed for its day (100 nanoseconds). It was one of the first computers to use Freon refrigerant cooling and as also the first commercial computer…
In the late 1950s, IBM teamed with American Airlines to devise a teleprocessing solution — SABRE. When fully implemented, SABRE established a dominant design for reservations processing that was copied throughout the airline industry. Functional enhancements transformed SABRE from a reservations system into a passenger services system that supported many…
BASIC (Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a system developed at Dartmouth College in 1964 under the directory of J. Kemeny and T. Kurtz. It was implemented for the G.E.225. It was meant to be a very simple language to learn and also one that would be easy to…
Tandy was originally formed in 1919 by Norton Hinckley and Dave L. Tandy, and was known as the Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company. In 1963 it bought Radio Shack, paving the way for the company to be part of the computer revolution in the 1970s. In 1977 it introduced the TRS-80 to…
The oNLine System, or NLS, was created by Douglas Englebart and the Augmentation Research Center team at Stanford Research Institute. The computer system was years ahead of it’s time, designed as a collaboration system, it employed the use of hypertext, the mouse, video monitors, and many other aspects of today’s…
The first computer mouse was developed by Doug Englebart in 1963 at Stanford Research Institute. He had been creating the oN-Line System, or NLS, a hardware and software system that incorporated many of the concepts of today’s modern computers. Using two gear wheels at perpindicular positions, it allowed movement of…
Born in 1915 in St.Louis, Missouri, J.C.R. Licklider (Lick) studied physics, chemistry, fine arts, and psychology, eventually earning undergraduate degrees and a Ph.D. He was a professor at Harvard University in the 40s, before moving on to MIT. There he was in charge of a human engineering group at Lincoln…
Acquired by Stanford University in 1963, the Rancho Arm, a machine that is used as a human arm, holds a place among the first artificial robotic arms to be controlled by a computer. The dream has been fulfilled for the unfortunate children and adults that have been taken hold of…
Acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced ask-ee, ASCII is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to…
Computer engineer Paul Baran of BBN (Bolt,Beranek,Newman) writes a paper, “On Distributed Communication Networks”, describing what later becomes known as packet switching, in which digital data are sent over a distributed network in small units and reassembled into a whole message at the receiving end. Packet switching will be an…