Built by NEC in 1958, this was one of Japan’s first digital computers. It used so called parametron devices invented by Goto Eiichi and was the first Japanese computer to do floating point arithmetic. The devices utilized a switching technology similar to magnetic core that was more stable than vacuum…
The EDVAC (Electronic Discreete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers and is most noted for using binary and stored programs, radical differences to the previous ENIAC system. Designed by Eckert & Mauchly while at the University of Pennsylvania for the U.S. Army’s Ballistics Research Lab on…
Based on the full ACE design by Alan Turing, the Pilot ACE was one of Britain’s first computers. Designed at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), it ran it’s first program in May of 1950. Running at a blistering 1 megahertz, it was one of the fastest early computers and despite…
The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator was first introduced to the public on January 27th, 1948. It was a hybrid, made up of a mix of electromechanical relays and vacuum tubes. It was put on display behind a large window in the ground floor of IBM’s New York headquarters, and was…
One of the first high level programming languages written for a computer, Plankalkül was created by Konrad Zuse in Nazi Germany during World War II. Stemming from his work on the Z1 and Z2, he developed the language between 1943 and 1945. It was a non-von Neumann, algorithmic language and…
The online social network Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University. Originally it was a student-only site that provided “hot or not” type interaction based on student photos originally called “Facemash”. The site as the world really knows it today launched on Feb. 4th as thefacebook.com….
The IBM Roadrunner is a supercomputer built for the Los Alamos National Laboratory and is the world’s second fastest supercomputer and the first supercomputer to boast petaflop performance. A unique system built with off the shelf parts, it achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25th, 2008. Costing $133 million, it’s also…
The da Vinci Surgical System was approved by the U.S. FDA in 2000 and was the product of development and research in the late 1980s by SRI International. In 1991 the National Institutes of Health provided funding and a prototype robotic surgical system was created. This caught the attention of…
Vista was the first desktop operating system by Microsoft since Windows XP in 2001. It was a radically different architecture from XP and introduced major new features and changes. Released worldwide Jan. 30th, 2007, it was panned by business and consumer users for a number of reasons including poor performance…
Windows 2000 was released by Microsoft February 17th, 2000 as the successor to Windows NT. It was used for desktop, notebooks and servers. It was initially released in four versions: Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter Server. It is the final release to display the Windows NT designation. Originally called…