From “Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC): The Genesis of a Technological Revolution” by Samuel A. Rosenfeld Personal computers, now as ubiquitous as typewriters, are direct descendants of the LINC, an invention made some two decades ago, at the close of the paleo/computing era. In the early 1960’s, digital computers were accorded…
What do you do when you run out of real random access memory (RAM)? Easy. Pass it off to virtual memory. To do this you need a virtual memory manager (usually a function of the operating system) that maps chunks of data and code to storage areas that aren’t RAM….
Announced in October 1959, the 1401 was equipped with ferrite-core memories having capacities of 1,400, 2,000 or 4,000 characters. The system could be configured to use punched-cards and magnetic tape, and could be used either as a stand-alone computer or as a peripheral system for larger computers. The 1401 processing…
Space War may be the most important computer game ever. The first version was developed for the PDP-1 at MIT in 1960. The game has been under essentially constant development since. The first CRT display was a converted oscilloscope used to play Space War. The first trackball (and thus, the…
From the PDP-1 handbook, 1960 The Programmed Data Processor (PDP-1) is a high speed, solid state digital computer designed to operate with many types of input-output devices with no internal machine changes. It is a single address, single instruction, stored program computer with powerful program features. Five-megacycle circuits, a magnetic…
Sylvania delivered the first MOBIDIC (MOBile Digital Computer) to the U.S. Army in 1959 after winning the bid for a transistorized computer that could automate the flow of information on the battlefield, taking messages in any form and passing them to their destination. This concept was called Fieldata by the…
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…
The IBM 7030 Data Processing System — or “Stretch” computer — was delivered in April 1961, offering a performance that was 200 times faster than the IBM 701, 40 times faster than the IBM 709 and seven times faster than the IBM 7090. Although the 7030 was the industry’s fastest…
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…