Transistor – 1947

The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley. This was perhaps the most important electronics event of the 20th century, as it later made possible the integrated circuit and microprocessor that are the basis of modern electronics. Prior to the transistor the only alternative to its current regulation and switching functions (TRANSfer resISTOR) was the vacuum tubes, which could only be miniaturized to a certain extent, and wasted a lot of energy in the form of heat.

Compared to vacuum tubes, it offered:

• smaller size
• better reliability
• lower power consumption
• lower cost

 

Floppy Disk – 1950

Invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo by Yoshiro Nakamats. But there are many draw backs of this invention too. The main draw back is its storage capacity is very small. Generally its storage capacity is 1.44 mb. It is not used these days frequently.

UNIVAC 1 – 1951

UNIVAC-1. The first commercially successful electronic computer, UNIVAC I, was also the first general purpose computer - designed to handle both numeric and textual information. It was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. The implementation of this machine marked the real beginning of the computer era. Remington Rand delivered the first UNIVAC machine to the U.S. Bureau of Census in 1951. This machine used magnetic tape for input.

• design was derived from the ENIAC (same developers)
• first client = U.S. Bureau of the Census
• $1 million
• 48 systems built
• first successful commercial computer

Compiler – 1952

Grace Murray Hopper an employee of Remington-Rand worked on the NUIVAC. She took up the concept of reusable software in her 1952 paper entitled "The Education of a Computer" and developed the first software that could translate symbols of higher computer languages into machine language. (Compiler)

ARPANET–1969

The Advanced Research Projects Agency was formed with an emphasis towards research, and thus was not oriented only to a military product. The formation of this agency was part of the U.S. reaction to the then Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957. (ARPA draft, III-6). ARPA was assigned to research how to utilize their investment in computers via Command and Control Research (CCR). Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to head this effort.

• Developed for the US DoD Advanced Research Projects Agency
• 60,000 computers connected for communication among research organizations and universities

 

Intel 4004 – 1971

The 4004 was the world's first universal microprocessor. In the late 1960s, many scientists had discussed the possibility of a computer on a chip, but nearly everyone felt that integrated circuit technology was not yet ready to support such a chip. Intel's Ted Hoff felt differently; he was the first person to recognize that the new silicon-gated MOS technology might make a single-chip CPU (central processing unit) possible.

Hoff and the Intel team developed such architecture with just over 2,300 transistors in an area of only 3 by 4 millimeters. With its 4-bit CPU, command register, decoder, decoding control, control monitoring of machine commands and interim register, the 4004 was one heck of a little invention. Today's 64-bit microprocessors are still based on similar designs, and the microprocessor is still the most complex mass-produced product ever with more than 5.5 million transistors performing hundreds of millions of calculations each second - numbers that are sure to be outdated fast.

Altair 8800 – 1975

By 1975 the market for the personal computer was demanding a product that did not require an electrical engineering background and thus the first mass produced and marketed personal computer (available both as a kit or assembled) was welcomed with open arms. Developers Edward Roberts, William Yates and Jim Bybee spent 1973-1974 to develop the MITS (Micro Instruments Telemetry Systems ) Altair 8800. The price was $375, contained 256 bytes of memory (not 256k),but had no keyboard, no display, and no auxiliary storage device. Later, Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first product for the Altair -- a BASIC compiler (named after a planet on a Star Trek episode).