History of Computers by Owen Weaver

1939- HP was began

31weavero — 2025-09-02 15:45:45 UTC

David Packard and Bill Hewlett made their company in a Palo Alto, California garage. There first product the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, became a popular item to test equipment for engineers. Walt Disney Pictures bought eight of the 200B model to test recording equipment and speaker systems for the 12 specially equipped movie theatres that showed the movie “Fantasia” in 1940.

1940 The Complex Number Calculator is completed

31weavero — 2025-09-02 17:26:05 UTC

In 1939, Bell Telephone Laboratories completes this calculator, designed by scientist George Stibitz. In 1940, Stibitz showed the CNC at an American Mathematical Society meeting at Dartmouth College. Stibbits shocked the group by performing calculations remotely on the CNC (located in New York City) using a Teletype terminal connected to New York over telephone lines. This is probably the first example of remote access computing.

1950 era1101 was introduced

31weavero — 2025-09-03 15:19:53 UTC

One of the first commercially produced computers, the company´s first customer was the US Navy. The 1101, designed by ERA but made by Remington-Rand, was intended fast computing and had 1 million bits of storage on its magnetic drum one of the earliest magnetic storage devices and a technology which ERA had done much to perfect in its own laboratories and places

1960 dec pdp1 introduced

31weavero — 2025-09-03 15:22:35 UTC

The typical PDP-1 computer system, which sells for about $120,000, includes a cathode ray tube graphic display, paper tape input/output, needs no cooling and requires only one operator; Its big scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar!, as well as programs to play music. More than 50 PDP-1s werenought buy consumers.

1970 The first kembak 1 is sold

31weavero — 2025-09-03 15:25:21 UTC

One of the first personal computers, the Kenbak-1 is advertised for $750 in Scientific American magazine. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and tiny-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory. In 1973, after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors.

1980 Commodore VIC-20

31weavero — 2025-09-03 15:28:54 UTC

Commodore puts out the VIC-20 home computer as the new counter part to the Commodore PET personal computer. Intended to be a cheap alternative to the PET, the VIC-20 was highly successful, becoming the first computer to sell more than a million units. Commodore even used Star Trek television star William Shatner in advertisements.

1992 power book laptops were made

31weavero — 2025-09-03 15:31:21 UTC

Apple's Macintosh Portable meets a complete redesign of Apple's line of portable computers. All three PowerBooks introduced featured a built-in trackball, internal floppy drive, and palm rests, which would eventually become typical of 1990s laptop design. The PowerBook 100 was the entry-level machine, while the PowerBook 140 was more powerful and had a larger memory. The PowerBook 170 was the greatest model, featuring an active matrix display, better processor, as well as a floating point unit. The PowerBook line of computers was discontinued in 2006.

2007 one laptop per child initive begins

31weavero — 2025-09-04 15:29:40 UTC

At the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announces it will create a program to deliver technology and resources to targeted schools in the least developed countries. The project became the One Laptop per Child Consortium (OLPC) The first offering to the public required the buyer to purchase one to be given to a child in the developing world as a condition of acquiring a machine for people. By 2011, over 2.4 million laptops had been shipped.

2010 Chinas super computer are now active

31weavero — 2025-09-04 15:32:34 UTC

With a peak speed of over a petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations (Milky Way 1) is developed by the Chinese National University of Defense Technology using Intel Xeon processors combined with AMD graphic processing units (GPUs). The upgraded and faster Tianhe-1A used Intel Xeon CPUs as well, but switched to nVidia's Tesla GPUs and added more than 2,000 Fei-Tang (SPARC-based) processors. The computer were used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to run massive solar energy simulations, as well as some of the largest molecular studies ever done.