Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the had transistors and could perform up to 90, operations per second in four-bit chunks. Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture.
Under the direction of engineer Dr. Based on the Intel microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. Designer Thi Truong developed the computer while Philippe Kahn wrote the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that did not require high performance, such as process control and highway toll collection.
In , Truong sold R2E to Bull. Designed by Don Lancaster, the TV Typewriter is an easy-to-build kit that can display alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A cassette tape interface provided supplementary storage for text.
The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the s. Wang was a successful calculator manufacturer, then a successful word processor company. The Wang makes it a successful computer company, too. Wang sold the primarily through Value Added Resellers, who added special software to solve specific customer problems. The first commercially advertised US computer based on a microprocessor the Intel , the Scelbi has 4 KB of internal memory and a cassette tape interface, as well as Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces.
Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. In , Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market. The Alto is a groundbreaking computer with wide influence on the computer industry.
It was based on a graphical user interface using windows, icons, and a mouse, and worked together with other Altos over a local area network. It could also share files and print out documents on an advanced Xerox laser printer. For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders.
Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor. The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications.
Southwest Technical Products is founded by Daniel Meyer as DEMCO in the s to provide a source for kit versions of projects published in electronics hobbyist magazines. Of the dozens of different SWTP kits available, the proved the most popular. Tailored for online transaction processing, the Tandem is one of the first commercial fault-tolerant computers.
The banking industry rushed to adopt the machine, built to run during repair or expansion. The Video Display Module VDM marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers. Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March , the visual display module enabled the use of personal computers for interactive games.
The fastest machine of its day, The Cray-1's speed comes partly from its shape, a "C," which reduces the length of wires and thus the time signals need to travel across them. High packaging density of integrated circuits and a novel Freon cooling system also contributed to its speed.
Typical applications included US national defense work, including the design and simulation of nuclear weapons, and weather forecasting. Intel and Zilog introduced new microprocessors. Five times faster than its predecessor, the , the Intel could address four times as many bytes for a total of 64 kilobytes. The Zilog Z could run any program written for the and included twice as many built-in machine instructions. Designed by Sunnyvale, California native Steve Wozniak, and marketed by his friend Steve Jobs, the Apple-1 is a single-board computer for hobbyists.
With an order for 50 assembled systems from Mountain View, California computer store The Byte Shop in hand, the pair started a new company, naming it Apple Computer, Inc. In all, about of the boards were sold before Apple announced the follow-on Apple II a year later as a ready-to-use computer for consumers, a model which sold in the millions for nearly two decades. When connected to a color television set, the Apple II produced brilliant color graphics for the time.
Millions of Apple IIs were sold between and , making it one of the longest-lived lines of personal computers. Apple gave away thousands of Apple IIs to school, giving a new generation their first access to personal computers. The TRS proved popular with schools, as well as for home use. The TRS line of computers later included color, portable, and handheld versions before being discontinued in the early s.
The first of several personal computers released in , the PET comes fully assembled with either 4 or 8 KB of memory, a built-in cassette tape drive, and a membrane keyboard.
The PET was popular with schools and for use as a home computer. After the success of the PET, Commodore remained a major player in the personal computer market into the s. The success of the VAX family of computers transformed DEC into the second-largest computer company in the world, as VAX systems became the de facto standard computing system for industry, the sciences, engineering, and research.
Shortly after delivery of the Atari VCS game console, Atari designs two microcomputers with game capabilities: the Model and Model The served primarily as a game console, while the was more of a home computer. Atari's 8-bit computers were influential in the arts, especially in the emerging DemoScene culture of the s and '90s.
The Motorola microprocessor exhibited a processing speed far greater than its contemporaries. This high performance processor found its place in powerful work stations intended for graphics-intensive programs common in engineering.
Intended to be a less expensive alternative to the PET, the VIC 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. About 50, were sold in Britain, primarily to hobbyists, and initially there was a long waiting list for the system. The machine was expandable, with ports for cassette storage, serial interface and rudimentary networking. The DN is based on the Motorola microprocessor, high-resolution display and built-in networking - the three basic features of all workstations.
Apollo and its main competitor, Sun Microsystems, optimized their machines to run the computer-intensive graphics programs common in engineering and scientific applications.
Apollo was a leading innovator in the workstation field for more than a decade, and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in IBM's brand recognition, along with a massive marketing campaign, ignites the fast growth of the personal computer market with the announcement of its own personal computer PC. It featured a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, a modem, and two 5. Thousands of software titles were released over the lifespan of the C64 and by the time it was discontinued in , it had sold more than 22 million units.
It is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest selling single computer of all time. Franklin was able to undercut Apple's pricing even while offering some features not available on the original.
Sun Microsystems grows out of this prototype. Sun helped cement the model of a workstation having an Ethernet interface as well as high-resolution graphics and the UNIX operating system.
Lisa is the first commercial personal computer with a graphical user interface GUI. It was thus an important milestone in computing as soon Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh would soon adopt the GUI as their user interface, making it the new paradigm for personal computing. The success of the Portable inspired many other early IBM-compatible computers.
Compaq's success launched a market for IBM-compatible computers that by had achieved an percent share of the personal computer market. The Macintosh was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface and was based on the Motorola microprocessor. The PC Jr. While the PC Jr.
It also included more memory and accommodated high-density 1. By the early s, Dell became one of the leading computer retailers. It developed a very loyal following while add-on components allowed it to be upgraded easily. The inside of the Amiga case is engraved with the signatures of the Amiga designers, including Jay Miner as well as the paw print of his dog Mitchy.
At 4 million operations per second and 4 kilobytes of memory, the gave PCs as much speed and power as older mainframes and minicomputers. The chip brought with it the introduction of a bit architecture, a significant improvement over the bit architecture of previous microprocessors. It had two operating modes, one that mirrored the segmented memory of older x86 chips, allowing full backward compatibility, and one that took full advantage of its more advanced technology.
It performed 2 million instructions per second, but other RISC-based computers worked significantly faster. Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corporation moves artificial intelligence a step forward when he develops the controversial concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine CM The machine used up to 65, one-bit processors and could complete several billion operations per second.
Each processor had its own small memory linked with others through a flexible network that users altered by reprogramming rather than rewiring. Using this system, the machine could work faster than any other at the time on a problem that could be parceled out among the many processors. One of Britain's leading computer companies, Acorn continued the Archimedes line, which grew to nearly twenty different models, into the s. The computer he created, an all-black cube was an important innovation.
This object-oriented multitasking operating system was groundbreaking in its ability to foster rapid development of software applications. VTech, founded in Hong Kong, had been a manufacturer of Pong-like games and educational toys when they introduce the Laser computer. The RISC microprocessor had a bit integer arithmetic and logic unit the part of the CPU that performs operations such as addition and subtraction , a bit floating-point unit, and a clock rate of 33 MHz.
The chips remained similar in structure to their predecessors, the chips. What set the apart was its optimized instruction set, with an on-chip unified instruction and data cache and an optional on-chip floating-point unit. Combined with an enhanced bus interface unit, the microprocessor doubled the performance of the without increasing the clock rate.
Apple had initially included a handle in their Macintosh computers to encourage users to take their Macs on the go, though not until five years after the initial introduction does Apple introduce a true portable computer.
Sales were weaker than projected, despite being widely praised by the press for its active matrix display, removable trackball, and high performance. The line was discontinued less than two years later. It would serve as the model for several other significant multi-processor systems that would be among the fastest in the world.
Based on Charles Babbage's second design for a mechanical calculating engine, a team at the Science Museum in London sets out to prove that the design would have worked as planned. Apple's Macintosh Portable meets with little success in the marketplace and leads to 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 s laptop design. The PowerBook was the entry-level machine, while the PowerBook was more powerful and had a larger memory.
The PowerBook was the high-end model, featuring an active matrix display, faster processor, as well as a floating point unit.
The PowerBook line of computers was discontinued in Based on the Touchstone Delta computer Intel had built at Caltech, the Paragon is a parallel supercomputer that uses 2, later increased to more than four thousand Intel i processors. More than one hundred Paragons were installed over the lifetime of the system, each costing as much as five million dollars. The Paragon at Caltech was named the fastest supercomputer in the world in Paragon systems were used in many scientific areas, including atmospheric and oceanic flow studies, and energy research.
Apple enters the handheld computer market with the Newton. The handwriting recognition software was much maligned for inaccuracy. The Newton line never performed as well as hoped and was discontinued in The Pentium introduced several advances that made programs run faster such as the ability to execute several instructions at the same time and support for graphics and music. Using dual PowerPC CPUs, and featuring a large variety of peripheral ports, the first devices were used for software development.
While it did not sell well, the operating system, Be OS, retained a loyal following even after Be stopped producing hardware in after less than 2, machines were produced. Officially known as the Track Write, the automatically expanding full-sized keyboard used by the ThinkPad is designed by inventor John Karidis. The keyboard was comprised of three roughly triangular interlocking pieces, which formed a full-sized keyboard when the laptop was opened -- resulting in a keyboard significantly wider than the case.
Palm Inc. Sony had manufactured and sold computers in Japan, but the VAIO signals their entry into the global computer market. The first VAIO, a desktop computer, featured an additional 3D interface on top of the Windows 95 operating system as a way of attracting new users. The VAIO line of computers would be best known for laptops were designed with communications and audio-video capabilities at the forefront, including innovative designs that incorporated TV and radio tuners, web cameras, and handwriting recognition.
The line was discontinued in Until the year , it was the world's fastest supercomputer, able to achieve peak performance of 1. The machine was noted for its ease-of-use and included a 'manual' that contained only a few pictures and less than 20 words. The camera had a maximum resolution of 0. The J-Phone line would quickly expand, releasing a flip-phone version just a month later. Cameras would become a significant part of most phones within a year, and several countries have even passed laws regulating their use.
A consortium of aerospace, energy, and marine science agencies undertook the project, and the system was built by NEC around their SX-6 architecture. To protect it from earthquakes, the building housing it was built using a seismic isolation system that used rubber supports. The Earth Simulator was listed as the fastest supercomputer in the world from to Leaving Palm Inc. After retiring their initial Visor series of PDAs, Handspring introduced the Treo line of smartphones, designed with built-in keyboards, cameras, and the Palm operating system.
The Treo sold well, and the line continued until Handspring was purchased by Palm in With a distinctive anodized aluminum case, and hailed as the first true bit personal computer, the Apple G5 is the most powerful Macintosh ever released to that point. While larger than the previous G4 towers, the G5 had comparatively limited space for expansion. Harkening back to the hobbyist era of personal computing in the s, Arduino begins as a project of the Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea, Italy.
Each credit card-sized Arduino board consisted of an inexpensive microcontroller and signal connectors which made Arduinos ideal for use in any application connecting to or monitoring the outside world.
Nearly a quarter century after IBM launched their PC in , they had become merely another player in a crowded marketplace. Lenovo became the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world with the acquisition, later also acquiring IBM's server line of computers. Named in honor of the space shuttle which broke-up on re-entry, the Columbia supercomputer is an important part of NASA's return to manned spaceflight after the disaster.
Columbia was used in space vehicle analysis, including studying the Columbia disaster, but also in astrophysics, weather and ocean modeling. At its introduction, it was listed as the second fastest supercomputer in the world and this single system increased NASA's supercomputing capacity fold.
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 themselves. By , over 2. Many companies have attempted to release electronic reading systems dating back to the early s. Online retailer Amazon released the Kindle, one of the first to gain a large following among consumers.
The first Kindle featured wireless access to content via Amazon. The first release proved so popular there was a long delay in delivering systems on release. Follow-on versions of the Kindle added further audio-video capabilities. Apple launches the iPhone - a combination of web browser, music player and cell phone - which could download new functionality in the form of "apps" applications from the online Apple store.
The touchscreen enabled smartphone also had built-in GPS navigation, high-definition camera, texting, calendar, voice dictation, and weather reports. Apple introduces their first ultra notebook — a light, thin laptop with high-capacity battery. The Air incorporated many of the technologies that had been associated with Apple's MacBook line of laptops, including integrated camera, and Wi-Fi capabilities. To reduce its size, the traditional hard drive was replaced with a solid-state disk, the first mass-market computer to do so.
The Roadrunner is the first computer to reach a sustained performance of 1 petaflop one thousand trillion floating point operations per second. It was used to model the decay of the US nuclear arsenal, analyze financial data, and render 3D medical images in real-time. The Jaguar was used to study climate science, seismology, and astrophysics applications. It was the fastest computer in the world from November to June Since the release of the Macintosh in , Apple has placed emphasis on high-resolution graphics and display technologies.
With a screen resolution of up to pixels-per-inch PPI , Retina displays approached the limit of pixel visibility to the human eye. The display also used In Plane Switching IPS technology, which allowed for a wider viewing angle and improved color accuracy. The machines were used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to run massive solar energy simulations, as well as some of the most complex molecular studies ever undertaken. Captions English Add a one-line explanation of what this file represents.
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