A Digital Timeline A History of Digital Technology Beginnings to 1900 Compiled by Skip Schiel (added April 24, 2002) (revised December 12, 2009) An attempt at charting the trajectory of digital technology, with special attention to graphical applications. Comments solicited, corrections gladly considered, links and images most graciously desired. (Special note: those attributed as inventors or creators more often were joined by many others, some named, some not. And dates are often only approximations.) 1901 - 1959 1960 - 1979 1980 - 1985 1986 - 1995 1996 -2005 3000 BCE Abacus The name Abacus derives from the Greek word abax, meaning table or board covered with dust. The origins of the Abacus are buried deep in the history of mankind. It is known that in its 'modern' form it appeared in China in the 13th century AD. Logarithms, "Napier’s bones," multiplication 1550-1617 tables on a stick John Napier Nearing the end of his life, John Napier, who is generally considered the inventor of logarithms, developed an ingenious arithmetic trick— not as remarkable as logarithms, but very useful all the same. His invention was a method for performing arithmetic operations by the manipulation of rods, called “bones” because they were often constituted from bones and printed with integers. Napier’s rods essentially rendered the complex processes of multiplication and division into the comparatively simple tasks of addition and subtraction. —Alexandros Diploudis A machine for adding, subtracting, multiplying 1592-1635 and dividing Wilhelm Schickard Schickard wrote that he had built a machine that "...immediately computes the given numbers automatically; adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides". Unfortunately, no original copies of Schickard's machine exist, but working models have been constructed from his notes. —Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) 1644 Pascaline (a mechanical calculator) Blair Pascal Slide Rule 1650 Edmund Gunter and William Oughtred The differential calculus & a 1679 machine to multiply Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz A mechanism to add & subtract with 8 figures and carrying of 10's, 100's, and 1000's etc. The first Slide Rule appeared in 1650 and was the result of a joint effort of two Englishmen, Edmund Gunter and the Reverend William Oughtred. This slide rule based on Napier's logarithms was to become the first analog computer (of the modern ages) since multiplication and subtraction were figured out by physical distance. This invention was dormant until 1850 when a French Artillery officer Amedee Mannheim added the movable double sided cursor, which gave it its appearance as we know it today. He improved the Pascaline by creating a machine that could also multiply. Like its predecessor, Leibniz's mechanical multiplier worked by a system of gears and dials. Joseph Marie Jacquard's inspiration of 1804 revolutionized patterned textile weaving. For the first time, fabrics with big, fancy designs could be woven automatically by one man working without assistants... Power loom with an 1804 automatic card reader Joseph Marie Jacquard This was the earliest use of punched cards programmed to control a manufacturing process. Although he created his mechanism to aid the local silk industry, it was soon applied to cotton, wool, and linen weaving. It appeared in the United States about 1825 or 1826. —Steven E. Schoenherr Arithmometer (massproduced mechanical 1820 calculator) Thomas de Colmar The honor of first establishing the manufacture of calculating machines as an industry goes to Charles Xavier Thomas of Colmar, France, or Thomas de Colmar, as he is more commonly known. Like others, Thomas used the stepped cylinder invented by Leibniz as his digitalvalue actuator. —George C. Chase A mechanical digital computer which, viewed with the benefit of a century and a half's hindsight, anticipated virtually every aspect of present-day computers. Difference & analytic 1822 engines Charles Babbage His subsequent invention, the analytic engine, inspired by Jacquard’s punched cards, used a store, a mill, and an output device (automated type setter) — John Walker A biogaphy of Charles Babbage (Thanks to Jane Matthews) 1830 Telegraph Samuel F.B. Morse & Joseph Henry 1839 Photography Talbot, Niépce, & Daguerre Electrical signals encode information, dots & dashes, to form letters and words. Silver salts, converted to free silver by light and chemicals, co-discovered by William Henry Fox Talbot, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, & Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre 1843 Programs & subroutines for the Analytic Engine Ada Augusta Byron, aka Lady Lovelace She suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the Engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan is now regarded as the first "computer program." A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in her honor in 1979. —Dr. Betty Toole The Calculus of Logic Algebra from logic, truth 1854 tables George Boole In a work lately published I have exhibited the application of a new and peculiar form of Mathematics to the expression of the operations of the mind in reasoning... The part of the system to which I shall confine my observations is that which treats of categorical propositions... —George Boole Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, Vol. III (1848), pp. 183-98 Typewriter 1866 Sholes and Carlos Glidden and others While developing a machine for numbering book pages, they were inspired to build a machine that could print words as well as numbers 1876 Telephone Alexander Graham Bell In Boston, Massachusetts, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Thomas Watson fashioned the device itself; a crude thing made of a wooden stand, a funnel, a cup of acid, and some copper wire. But these simple parts and the equally simple first telephone call —"Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" — belie a complicated past. —Tom Farley 1877 Phonograph Thomas Edison The device consisted of a cylindrical drum wrapped in tinfoil and mounted on a threaded axle. A mouthpiece attached to a diaphragm was connected to a stylus that etched vibrational patterns from a sound source on the rotating foil. For playback the mouthpiece was replaced with a "reproducer" that used a more sensitive diaphragm. Edison recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into the mouthpiece for the first demonstration. —Geoffrey Rubinstein Punch card reader & 1890 tabulating machine Herman Hollerith at MIT A punch-card tabulation machine system that revolutionized statistical computation Used during the 1890 US census Cinema 1895 1895 Auguste and Louis Lumière & Thomas Edison Radio Guglielmo Marconi Lumiere's portable, suitcase-sized cinematographe served as a camera, film processing unit, and projector all in one. He could shoot footage in the morning, process it in the afternoon, and then project it to an audience that evening. His first film was the arrival of the express train at Ciotat. Other subjects included workers leaving the factory gates, a child being fed by his parents, people enjoying a picnic along a river. Radio—signaling and audio communication using electromagnetic radiation—was first employed as a "wireless telegraph", for point-to-point links where regular telegraph lines were unreliable or impractical. Next developed was radio's ability to broadcast messages simultaneously to multiple locations, at first using the dots-and-dashes of telegraphic code, and later in full audio. Sound cinema Thomas Edison "Edison invented the motion pictures as a supplement to his phonograph, in the belief that sound plus a moving picture would provide better entertainment than sound alone. But in a short time the movies proved to be good enough entertainment without sound. It has been said that although the motion picture and the phonograph were intended to be partners, they grew up separately. And it might be added that the motion picture held the phonograph in such low esteem that for years it would not speak. Throughout the long history of efforts to add sound, the success of the silent movie was the great obstacle to commercialization of talking pictures." —Edward W. Kellog ,June 1955, Journal of the SMPTE Could there exist, at least in principle, a definite method or process by which it could be decided whether any given mathematical assertion was provable? 1936 The Turing Machine Alan Turing To answer such a question needed a definition of 'method' which would be not only precise but compelling. This is what Turing supplied. He analysed what could be achieved by a person performing a methodical process, and seizing on the idea of something done 'mechanically', expressed the analysis in terms of a theoretical machine able to perform certain precisely defined elementary operations on symbols on paper tape. He presented convincing arguments that the scope of such a machine was sufficient to encompass everything that would count as a 'definite method.' Daringly he included an argument based on the transitions between 'states of mind' of a human being performing a mental process. — Andrew Hodges The Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the world's first electronic digital computer. It was built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University during 193742. It incorporated several major innovations in computing including the use of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, parallel processing, and separation of memory and computing functions. Digital computer 1937 John Vincent Atanasoff & Clifford Berry at Iowa State University —Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University Enigma is used to scramble all of Germany's most top-secret communications. It is the most advanced cipher ever designed and was, until now, thought unbreakable. 1940 Breaking a German code, the Enigma Alan Turing Enigma M3 In 1938 Turing published a mathematical paper entitled On Computational Numbers in which he introduced the theory of so-called Universal Turing Machines, mechanical devices capable of being configured in order to tackle any mathematical problem imaginable. Turing used this ingenious concept to create precisely configurable large machines called "bombes" capable of applying the enormous amount of mathematical effort required to break the enigma code by brute force. 1941 Television Television came into being based on the inventions and discoveries of many men and scientists. The 'first' generation of television sets were not entirely electronic. The display (TV screen) had a small motor with a spinning disc and a neon lamp, which worked together to give a blurry reddish-orange picture about half the size of a business card! —www.tvhistory.tv/pre-1935.htm 1941 Digital computer (Z3) Konrad Zuse Konrad Zuse was the creator of the first full automatic, program controlled and freely programmable, in binary floating point arithmetic working computer. The Z3 was finished in 1941. —Professor Dr. Friedrich L. Bauer 1943 Entirely electric computer (COLOSSUS) Max Newman & Tommy Flowers Colossus reduced the time to break Lorenz messages from weeks to hours. It was just in time for the deciphering of messages which gave vital information to Eisenhower and Montgomery prior to D-Day. These deciphered Lorenz messages showed that Hitler had swallowed the deception campaigns, the phantom army in the South of England, the phantom convoys moving east along the channel; that Hitler was convinced that the attacks were coming across the Pas de Calais and that he was keeping Panzer divisions in Belgium. After D-day the French resistance and the British and American Air Forces bombed and strafed all the telephone and teleprinter land lines in Northern France, forced the Germans to use radio communications and suddenly the volume of intercepted messages went up enormously. —Tony Sale 1944 Stored program, sort and merge operations John Louis von Neumann Von Neumann's interest in computers differed from that of his peers by his quickly perceiving the application of computers to applied mathematics for specific problems, rather than their mere application to the development of tables. During the war, von Neumann's expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, and statistics, was put to good use in several projects. This work led him to consider the use of mechanical devices for computation, and although the stories about von Neumann imply that his first computer encounter was with the ENIAC, in fact it was with Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator. —J. A. N. Lee 1944 Relay-based computer (MARK 1) Howard Aiken at Harvard-IBM The Mark I was constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches, and was described as sounding like a "roomful of ladies knitting." The machine contained more than 750,000 components, was 50 feet long, 8 feet tall, and weighed approximately 5 tons! —Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) The world's first electronic digital computer was developed by Army Ordnance to compute World War II ballistic firing tables. 1946 ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer) John W. Mauchly and J. P. Eckert, Jr. at University of Pennsylvania By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forcedair cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. But ENIAC was the prototype from which most other modern computers evolved. It embodied almost all the components and concepts of today's high- speed, electronic digital computers. Its designers conceived what has now become standard circuitry such as the gate (logical "and" element), buffer (logical "or" element) and used a modified EcclesJordan flip-flop as a logical, highspeed storage-and-control device. The machine's counters and accumulators, with more sophisticated innovations, were made up of combinations of these basic elements. —Martin H. Weik 1948 Transistor Barden, Shockley, & Brattain William Shockley and Walter Brattain had both been working with semiconductors since the early 1930’s, and in 1939, Shockley had an idea, to use a piece of copper screen in a piece of semi-conducting material. Although that particular experiment failed, in 1940 Russell Ohl accidentally discovers the silicon p-n junction at Bell Labs. —Shelley A. Steiner Business computer (UNIVAC 1) 1951 John W. Mauchly and J. P. Eckert, Jr. at University of Pennsylvania The first UNIVAC computer was delivered to the Census Bureau in June 1951. Unlike the ENIAC, the UNIVAC processed each digit serially. But its much higher design speed permitted it to add two ten-digit numbers at a rate of almost 100,000 additions per second. Internally, the UNIVAC operated at a clock frequency of 2.25 MHz, which was no mean feat for vacuum tube circuits. The UNIVAC also employed mercury delay-line memories. Delay lines did not allow the computer to access immediately any item data held in its memory, but given the reliability problems of the alternative Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) technology, this was a good technical choice. —University of Pennsylvania Library 1953 Transistorized computer Tom Watson at IBM Tom Watson, Jr., led IBM to introduce the model 604 computer, its first with transistors, that became the basis of the model 608 of 1957, the first solid-state computer for the commercial market. Transistors were expensive at first, cost $8 vs. $.75 for a vacuum tube. —Steven E. Schoenherr 1955 TRADIC—a fully transistorized computer Bell Labs TRADIC stands for TRAnisitor DIgital Computer, and as the name suggests this was the first machine to use all transistors and diodes and no vacuum tubes. It was built by Bell Labs for the U.S. Air Force, which was interested in the lightweight nature of such a computer for airborne use. The machine consisted of 700 pointcontact transistors and 10,000 germanium diodes. During two years of continuous operation only 17 of these devices failed, a vastly lower failure rate than Vacuum tube machines of the time. — Tom Howe Integrated circuit 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments It was a relatively simple device that Jack Kilby showed to a handful of coworkers gathered in TI's semiconductor lab more than 40 years ago -- only a transistor and other components on a slice of germanium. Little did this group of onlookers know, but Kilby's invention, 7/16-by-1/16-inches in size and called an integrated circuit, was about to revolutionize the electronics industry. —Texas Instruments 1959 The first development efforts on digital modems appear to have stemmed from the need to transmit data for North American air defense during the 1950s. Modem Bell Labs As a graduate student in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley after World War II Doug Engelbart began to imagine ways in which all sorts of information could be displayed on the screens of cathode ray tubes like the ones he had used as a radar technician during the war, and he dreamed of "flying" through a variety of information spaces. —MouseSite Mouse 1963 Doug Engelbart at Stanford Hypertext editing system (HTML) 1967 <img> Andy van Dam & Tim Berners-Lee 1968 Random Access Memory (RAM) Robert Dennard The idea behind HTML was a modest one. When Tim Berners-Lee was putting together his first elementary browsing and authoring system for the Web, he created a quick little hypertext language that would serve his purposes. He imagined dozens, or even hundreds, of hypertext formats in the future, and smart clients that could easily negotiate and translate documents from servers across the Net. It would be a system similar to Claris XTND on the Macintosh, but would work on any platform and browser. —Jeffrey Veen At that time, RAM was a known and used concept: memory reserved for writing to and reading from in a temporary fashion, to be erased every time the computer is turned off. However, in the mid-1960s RAM required an elaborate system of wires and magnets that negated in practice RAM's theoretical efficiency. Dennard's revolutionary achievement was to reduce RAM to a memory cell or an earlier tube version Mini-computer Ken Olsen at Digital Equipment Corporation Internet 1969 Department of Defense on a single transistor. His key insight was that it should be possible to store binary data as a positive or negative charge on a capacitator. After several months of experimenting, Dennard had reduced his RAM cell to a single field-effect transistor and a data line that both wrote and read the charge in a small capacitator. The ultimate effect of Dennard's invention was that a single chip could hold 16 million RAM cells —The Lemelson-MIT Program's Invention Dimension The DEC PDP-8 computer on March 22, 1965, is generally recognized as the most important small computer of the 1960's. It was the least expensive parallel general purpose computer on the market, the first computer sold on a retail basis, and the first parallel general purpose digital computer sold in a table-top configuration. —Douglas W. Jones The global Internet's progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the U.S. Department of Defense. This is an important fact to remember... —Michael Hauben Unix 1971 Floppy disk Microprocessor Gilbert P. Hyatt & Ted Hoff at Intel The Creation of the UNIX* Operating System After three decades of use, the UNIX* computer operating system from Bell Labs is still regarded as one of the most powerful, versatile, and flexible operating systems (OS) in the computer world. Its popularity is due to many factors, including its ability to run a wide variety of machines, from micros to supercomputers, and its portability -- all of which led to its adoption by many manufacturers. Like another legendary creature whose name also ends in 'x,' UNIX rose from the ashes of a multiorganizational effort in the early 1960s to develop a dependable timesharing operating system. —www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/ Floppy disk drives were originally introduced commercially as a readonly device to hold microcode and diagnostics for large IBM mainframe computer systems in the early 1970s. —Accurite Technologies Inc In 1969, a Japanese firm called Busicom contacted Intel about developing custom chips for its new desktop-printing calculator. Hoff thought there was a better, simpler way to develop the technology than what the Japanese were initially looking for. Rather than build 12 customized calculator chips, each with a single specific function, Hoff proposed that Intel develop a more universal CPU chip[computer processing unit] that could also run the calculator. The idea of a CPU on a chip had been around since the early 1960s but had not been feasible then. But Fairchild and Rockwell had both done some preliminary work in the area and Hoff thought he could make it work. —Linda Stranahan Graphical user interface 1974 Xerox Altair personal computer 1975 Ed Roberts at Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) Programming language— Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) A commercial version by Bill Gates & Paul Allen The history of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) goes back to the 1970s. Project Smalltalk was established at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Parc) which attempted to look into the future. The idea was to assume that in the future computing power would be abundant and inexpensive. How could the best use be made of the power available? Two influential developments resulted: object-oriented programming and the graphical user interface. —Alistair D. N. Edwards Altairs were originally "Hobbyist" computers and have their roots in kits. They helped define the "personal" in Personal Computers. These machines where part of an open architecture concept that later made the PC successful. The S-100 bus allowed Altairs to be expanded and created opportunities for other companies to form. —William Thomas Sanderson Bill Gates: "We realized things were starting to happen. Just because, we had the vision for a long time of where this chip could go, what it could mean….. that didn't mean the industry was going to wait for us while I stayed and finished my degree at Harvard." Paul Allen: "So, I called up Ed and [said: we have] this basic [interpreter] and... it's not that far from being done, and we would like to come out and show it to you." Bill Gates: "So we created this basic interpreter. Paul took the paper tape and flew out. In fact, the night before he got some sleep while I doublechecked everything to make sure that we had it all right." 1976 Word processor (Electric Pencil) Michael Schrayer Apple computers Steven Jobs & Steven Wozniak 1978 Network intercommunication— Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) At that time, in the CPM world, the Electric Pencil was the word processor of the day. I took the care to contact Dave Schrayer, author of Electric Pencil and asked if I could use the same "dot" commands for printer formatting. This way, electric Pencil users would already know the commands if they decided to go to EasyWriter. Or go with Electric Pencil if they had to work in CPM. —Webcrunchers International Wozniak had been dabbling in computer-design for some time when, in 1976, he designed what would become the Apple I. Jobs, who had an eye for the future, insisted that he and Wozniak try to sell the machine, and on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was born. —Glen Sanford As time passed many enhancements were made to the existing protocol but by 1973 it was clear that [the first network] was unable to handle the volume of traffic passing through it... The TCP/IP and gateway architecture was proposed in 1974. This protocol was to be independent of the underlying network and computer hardware as well as having universal connectivity throughout the network. This would enable any kind of platform to participate in the network.In 1981 a series of requests for comment was issued, standardising the TCP/IP version 4 for the Arpanet. —PeteDotCom Spreadsheet program (VISICALC) Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston Laser printer Xerox The idea for the electronic spreadsheet came to me while I was a student at the Harvard Business School, working on my MBA degree, in the spring of 1978. Sitting in Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would daydream. "Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse..." (I had seen a mouse previously, I think in a demonstration at a conference by Doug Engelbart, and maybe the Alto). And "..imagine if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and answer '10% will be fine!'" (10% was always the answer in those days when we couldn't do very complicated calculations...) —Dan Bricklin The original laser printer was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Xerox Engineer, Gary Starkweather adapted Xerox copier technology adding a laser beam to it to come up with the laser printer. —Mary Bellis Atari microcomputer 1979 Steve Mayer and Ron. Milner Unix User Network (Usenet) Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, & Steve Bellovin Mouse with computer— Xerox Star Atari is most known for its innovations in video game technology. But a wealth of computer products and technologies were pioneered by Atari. In 1979 Atari Inc. showcased its first computer product at the Winter Consumer Electronics show. From that point on Atari created innovative 8 bit computers which were manufactured and supported up until 1992! Usenet came into being in late 1979, shortly after the release of V7 UNIX with UUCP. Two Duke University grad students in North Carolina, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of hooking computers together to exchange information with the UNIX community. Steve Bellovin, a grad student at the University of North Carolina, put together the first version of the news software using shell scripts and installed it on the first two sites: "unc" and "duke." —Mark Moraes Star was designed as an office automation system. The idea was that professionals in a business or organization would have workstations on their desks and would use them to produce, retrieve, distribute, and organize documentation, presentations, memos, and reports. All of the workstations in an organization would be connected via Ethernet and would share access to file servers, printers, etc. —Jeff Johnson and Teresa L. Roberts et al Word Perfect 1980 1981 Satellite Software & Corel IBM PC with DOS & Intel Portable computer— 1981 Osburne I Adam Osborne WordPerfect originated in the days when top-of-the-line printers were daisywheel impact devices requiring manual intervention to change fonts, and when on-screen displays were restricted to a single monospaced font. Particularly flexible dot-matrix printers included half a dozen fonts. —Rod Smith In the early part of 1980, IBM decided to create a microcomputer (up to this date, IBM produced only mini and mainframes). They didn't really know that they wanted and they didn't think for one second that producing microcomputers was a profitable business (who would have thought!)! —OldComputers.com Introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1981, the Osborne 1 was the brain child of Adam Osborne, a computer columnist, writer, and engineer. It was co-developed with Lee Felsenstien, and Lee designed it. The goal was a truly integrated computer that could go wherever the user wanted to. The machine was shipped as a full package including all the hardware and software a user could need including: 64K RAM, Z-80 CPU, 5" CRT, two floppy drives, keyboard, serial ports, CP/M operating system, WordStar, SuperCalc, and two versions of BASIC: CBASIC and MBASIC. The machine also had the ability to connect with scientific equipment via a built-in IEEE-488 interface, and could run an optional external monitor via the built-in port. Not only was the machine complete, it was cheap - $1795. — Justin Mayrand 1982 Norton Utilities Adobe 1982 John Warnock & Charles Geschke Once upon a time there were lots of disk-repair utilities for the Mac. Symantec made Norton Utilities, Central Point made MacTools, and Fifth Generation made Public Utilities. MacTools and Public Utilities could scan disks during idletime. MacTools had TrashBack, the best way to undelete files I've ever seen, and could boot itself from a RAM disk. What did Norton have? It had a bunch of components you don't find in the current release, including a Directory Assistance utility that improved Open/Save dialogs, a backup utility, and a utility for duplicating floppy disks. The last item is as obsolete as Fast Find, but I think many users would enjoy having the first two as part of the current Norton Utilities package. —Michael Tsai One of the brilliant engineers working at Xerox was John Warnock. He developed a language called "Interpress" that could be used to control Xerox laser printers. He and his boss, Charles M. 'Chuck' Geschke, tried for two years to convince Xerox to turn Interpress into a commercial product. When this failed, they decided to leave Xerox and try it on their own. John Warnock and Chuck Geschke named their company Adobe, after a little creek that ran behind the house of Warnock in Los Altos, California. You sometimes see it mentioned in wine guides on maps of Napa Valley where some of the finest Californian wines are made. — L. Leurs Compaq 1982 Rod Canion, co-founder Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto, founders The 'sewing machine' was the very first Compaq computer.When this machine came out, there were no clones. An IBM compatible had the three magic letters on the case. Period. Part of the reason was that IBM had published the source code for their BIOS (basic input/output system)so that they could claim that anyone who brought out their own BIOS had infringed on IBM's copyrights and would have to stop. —Paul Braun War of the Words: Microsoft Word versus WordPerfect Dec. 1982 Microsoft Word 1983 Bill Gates at al Satellite Software International ships WordPerfect for DOS for $500. Apr. 1983 Microsoft introduces Multi-Tool Word for DOS. Nov. 1983 WordPerfect 3.0 for DOS ships at $500. Microsoft releases Microsoft Word 1.0 for $375. —Marquette University 1983 Named for one of its designer's daughters, the Lisa (pictured below left) was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. It was the first personal computer to use a Graphical User Interface. Aimed mainly at large businesses, Apple said the Lisa would increase productivity by making computers easier to work with. —Glen Sanford Graphical interface with computer— Lisa Apple Released with much fanfare in January of 1984, the Macintosh was the first affordable computer to include a Graphical User Interface. It was built around the new Motorola 68000 chip, which was significantly faster than previous processors, running at 8 MHz. The Mac came in a small beige case with a black and white monitor built in. It came with a keyboard and mouse, and had a floppy drive that took 400k 3.5" disk—the first personal computer to do so. It originally sold for $2,495. — Glen Sanford Macintosh computer 1984 Apple Domain name system 1984 Paul Mockapetris com net org gov mil The purpose of the domain name system is to allow any computer on the Internet to figure out what IP address (for example, 216.112.23.10) corresponds with a particular computer hostname (for example, "www.ahref.com"), and also what hostname, if any, corresponds with an IP(internet protocol) address. Your computer needs to know remote computers' IP addresses to figure out how and where to send things like email messages and requests for web pages. —ep Productions, Inc Apple Works 1984 Apple 1987 AppleWorks & Claris Rupert Lissner In 1984, the same year that the Macintosh was introduced, Apple Computer released the first program called AppleWorks. (Select this link for more information on AppleWorks for the Apple II). It was a strange time for consumers: the Macintosh was newer, had fancy fonts and styles, had a wonderfully clear display, but all the software that was available for it was a simple word processor called "MacWrite" and a paint program called "MacPaint." On the other hand, AppleWorks made the old Apple II more capable than the Mac, since it combined a word processor, a database, and a spreadsheet, and it let you create in any of those "modules" and move the information into either of the others. It was, in other words, an integrated program. —Gareth Jones After seeing the Office System on the Lisa computer, Lissner conceived the idea of a single program that would put word processing, database, and spreadsheet capabilities together, and run on an Apple II. It was originally called "Apple Pie", and he began work on it in 1982. Lissner took two years to complete his program, and did it entirely in assembly language to achieve better speed. He wrote versions of the program to work on both the Apple II and Apple III computers, making use of the same filetypes and data structures. Apple Pie files created on an Apple II could be used on an Apple III, and viceversa. —Steven Weyhrich Excel was originally written for the 512K Apple Macintosh in 1984-1985. Excel was one of the first spreadsheets to use a graphical interface with pull down menus and a point and click capability using a mouse pointing device. [This] was easier for most people to use than the command line interface of PC-DOS spreadsheet products. —D. J. Power Excel 1985 Microsoft Postscript 1985 Adobe Chuck Geschke and John Warnock To appreciate PostScript, you have to know how the market worked before it became available. In those days, if you needed typesetting equipment, you went to Acme Typesetters, and they would sell you an Acme system with an Acme output device. Then you would follow at least two weeks of training to learn how to use the system. The Acme system would be incompatible with equipment from any other manufacturer. In most cases, it would even be difficult or impossible to exchange data with other systems. If you owned a personal computer, you could hook it up to a dot-matrix printer that would output low quality bitmap character. Graphics could be done but the quality was only acceptable to the nerds that bought computers in those days. —L. Leurs Page Maker 1985 Paul Brainard & Aldus Windows 1.0 1985 Microsoft Aldus PageMaker is released for the Macintosh in July and desktop publishing is born. Because of advances in printing technology and the Macintosh WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) operating system, publishers can now arrange text into columns and headlines and move their text around the page. Users can also easily incorporate graphics into their page. Soon the days of X-Acto knives and hot wax were gone forever as publishers began to create their pages on screen and print. This is also very cost effective for professional printers who no longer needed expensive typesetting, drawing and page layout equipment. —Melissa Creech Microsoft first began development of the Interface Manager (subsequently renamed Microsoft Windows) in September 1981. Although the first prototypes used Multiplan and Wordlike menus at the bottom of the screen, the interface was changed in 1982 to use pull-down menus and dialogs, as used on the Xerox Star. Microsoft finally announced Windows in November 1983, with pressure from just-released VisiOn and impending TopView. Windows promised an easy-to-use graphical interface, device-independent graphics and multitasking support. The development was delayed several times, however, and the Windows 1.0 hit the store shelves in November 1985. The selection of applications was sparse, however, and Windows sales were modest. —pcbiography.net 1985 Laptop computer Toshiba 1986 MacPlus Apple Amiga 1000 Jay Milner My love affair with the T1100+ began in the early Summer of 2000. While perusing the offerings of an annual street wide garage sale in my neighbourhood, I spotted what appeared to be an old word processor for sale for $25. I looked it over. The owner pointed out rather flatly that it ran DOS and was fully functional. His spouse was much more enthusiastic about my investigations, adding how useful it had been. — www.cyberus.ca/~pgillil/toshiba.htm l Announced in January 1986, the Mac Plus was the answer to complaints that the original Mac was not expandable. It doubled the ROM of the 512k from 64k to 128k, and increased the RAM to 1 MB (expandable to 4 MB). It was the first Mac to include a SCSI port, allowing for a variety of external peripherals, and was the first mac to use the now familiar platinum case color (although it initially shipped in beige). The Mac Plus originally sold for $2600, and was sold to educational markets as the Mac ED. —Glen Sanford The conceptor of the Amiga 1000 was Jay Miner, who created the Atari 800 many years before. He wanted to make the most powerful computer ever, then he joined a little California company called Amiga. He used the principle of the three coprocessors (again) to help the main processor. — oldcomputers.com Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) Toshiba 1986 or 1989? America On Line (AOL) A liquid crystal display (LCD) test cell Today, LCDs are everywhere we look, but they didn't sprout up overnight. It took a long time to get from the discovery of liquid crystals to the multitude of LCD applications we now enjoy. Liquid crystals were first discovered in 1888, by Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer. Reinitzer observed that when he melted a curious cholesterol-like substance (cholesteryl benzoate), it first became a cloudy liquid and then cleared up as its temperature rose. Upon cooling, the liquid turned blue before finally crystallizing. Eighty years passed before RCA made the first experimental LCD in 1968. Since then, LCD manufacturers have steadily developed ingenious variations and improvements on the technology, taking the LCD to amazing levels of technical complexity. And there is every indication that we will continue to enjoy new LCD developments in the future! —Marshall Brain The Internet bulletin-board system Quantum Computer Services acquires a new name, America Online (AOL), and focuses on recruiting a diverse, broad-based subscribership. From 1989 to 1998, AOL grows from its roots as an insignificant start-up with barely 100,000 members, to an industry leader with more than 14 million members. — The Moschovitis Group 1987 Computer virus Brain Illustrator Adobe XPress Quark The "Brain" virus is probably the earliest MS-DOS virus. At one time it was the most widespread of PC viral programs. Brain is a boot sector infector, somewhat longer than some of the more recent BSIs. Brain occupies three sectors itself, and, as is usual with BSIs, repositions the normal boot sector in order to "mimic" the boot process. As the boot sector is only a single sector, Brain, in infecting a disk, reserves two additional sectors on the disk for the remainder of itself, plus a third for the original boot sector. —Robert M. Slade Adobe® Illustrator® 10 software defines the future of vector graphics with groundbreaking creative options and powerful tools for efficiently publishing artwork on the Web, in print, everywhere. Produce superb Web graphics using symbols and innovative slicing options. Explore creative ideas with live distortion tools. Publish in record time with dynamic data-driven graphics and other productivity features. —Adobe Software engineer Tim Gill founded Quark in 1981, producing the first word processor for the Apple II computer. Gill named the company Quark after the subatomic particle proposed as a building block for all matter—an appropriate metaphor for the role that QuarkXPress would soon come to play in the electronic publishing industry. —Quark Cat Canon 1988 Worm In 1987 Canon USA Inc. released a new computer named the Canon Cat. This computer was targeted at lowlevel clerical worked such as secretaries. After six months on the market and with 20,000 units sold, Canon discontinued the Cat. The Cat featured an innovative text based user interface that did not rely upon a mouse, icons, or graphics. The key person behind the Cat was Mr. Jef Raskin, an eclectic gadgeteer, who began the design of the Cat during his work on the first Macintosh project at Apple Computer in 1979. —David T. Craig On the evening of November 2, 1988, a self-replicating program was released upon the Internet (1) This program (a worm) invaded VAX and Sun-3 computers running versions of Berkeley UNIX, and used their resources to attack still more computers (2). Within the space of hours this program had spread across the U.S., infecting hundreds or thousands of computers and making many of them unusable due to the burden of its activity. This paper provides a chronology for the outbreak and presents a detailed description of the internals of the worm, based on a C version produced by decompiling. —Donn Seeley In service for nearly 10 years, Disinfectant was probably the most popular Macintosh anti-viral program of all time. It was free, it was so perfectly programmed that it caused no extension conflicts, and it was updated promptly every time a new virus was discovered. Disinfectant was an application and a companion INIT, providing both ondemand and and on-access or background scanning. John Norstad retired Disinfectant on 6 May, 1998. —John Norstad Anti-virus software Graphics super computers Apollo, Ardent, Stellar, Cray CRAY-1 SuperComputer A broad term for one of the fastest computers currently available. Such computers are typically used for number crunching including scientific simulations, (animated) graphics, analysis of geological data (e.g. in petrochemical prospecting), structural analysis, computational fluid dynamics, physics, chemistry, electronic design, nuclear energy research and meteorology. Perhaps the best known supercomputer manufacturer is Cray Research. —Free On-line Dictionary of Computing Portable Macintosh 1989 Apple Office Microsoft Touch sensitive pad/touchpad My love affair with the T1100+ began in the early Summer of 2000. While perusing the offerings of an annual street wide garage sale in my neighbourhood, I spotted what appeared to be a old word processor for sale for $25. I looked it over. The owner pointed out rather flatly that it ran DOS and was fully functional. His spouse was much more enthusiastic about my investigations, adding how useful it had been — www.cyberus.ca/~pgillil/toshiba.htm l A twist on integrated software began with the introduction of Microsoft Office: a single box containing versions of Microsoft's word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs, along with a few alterations that let them work together in an integrated way. Like integrated programs, such "suites" are very popular. Other software suites have been offered by Lotus, Corel, and Sun. —Gareth Jones Touchpads are relative motion devices. That is, there is no isomorphism from the screen to the touchpad. Instead, relative motion of the user's fingers causes relative motion of the cursor. The buttons below or above the pad serve as mouse standard buttons. You can also click by tapping your finger on the touchpad, and drag with a tap following by a continuous pointing motion (a click-and-a-half). Some touchpads also have "hotspots": locations on the touchpad that indicate user intentions other than pointing. For example, on certain touchpads, moving your finger along the right edge of the touch pad will control the scrollbar and scroll the window that has the focus vertically. Moving the finger on the bottom of the touchpad often scrolls in horizontal direction. Some touchpads can emulate multiple mouse buttons by either tapping in a special corner of the pad, or by tapping with two or more fingers. —en.wilipedia.org.wiki/Touchpad Multi media platform specifications Object Management Group, including Microsoft, IBM, AT&T and others 1990 Photo Shop Adobe The Object Management Group (OMG) is an open membership, notfor-profit consortium that produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications. Our membership includes virtually every large company in the computer industry, and hundreds of smaller ones. Most of the companies that shape enterprise and Internet computing today are represented on our Board of Directors. —www.omg.org/ The story of one of the original "killer apps" begins in Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA) with a college professor named Glenn Knoll. Glenn was a photo enthusiast who maintained a darkroom in the family basement. He was also a technology aficionado intrigued by the emergence of the personal computer. His two sons, Thomas and John, inherited their father's inquisitive nature. And the vision for future greatness began with their exposure to Glenn's basement darkroom and with the Apple II Plus that he brought home for research projects. —Derrick Story 1992 Macromedia Personal Digital Assistant 1993 Apple In November of 1996, Macromedia was getting tired of hearing about our product when they worked with Disney to use Macromedia1s Shockwave product. So Macromedia approached us about working together. We had been running FutureWave for 4 years with a total investment of $500,000 and the idea of having access to the resources of a larger company to help us get FutureSplash established in a market that was full of competitors and growing slowly seemed like a good one. So in December of 1996, we sold FutureWave Software to Macromedia and FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia Flash 1.0 — Jonathan Gay In 1993, Apple Computer Inc. introduced the world to the first PDA, the Newton®. They were dubbed PDAs (personal digital assistants) by John Sculley, former chairman of Apple Computer Inc, and were sold as the ultimate information appliance. Sculley predicted PDAs would become ubiquitous tools that would hold telephone numbers, keep your calendar, store notes, plus send and receive data wirelessly. Although, the Newton was not able to deliver all of those features at the time it was released. For the next three years, PDA sales dwindled, and were almost off the charts. Then, in March 1996, Palm™, Inc. delivered the industry's first truly compelling handheld computer, the PalmPilot. A robust yet small goanywhere device that helped people manage and organize their personal and professional lives by providing instant, anytime access to schedules, important phone numbers, to-do lists and other key information. This new type of information management was met with tremendous acceptance. Mobile, busy people embraced the small and powerful Palm™ handhelds. — www.handango.com/PDAHistory.jsp ?siteId=1 QuickTake 100 camera 1994 Apple Zip disk and drive 1995 Iomega Apple sees the camera being used for business, education and "memories". It is fully automatic, with a built-in flash. A window at the rear of the camera is surrounded by four buttons which control the flash, picture resolution, self-timer, and delete functions. The camera can store up to 32 images at a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels - each a quarter of a 13 inch monitor screenful - or eight 640 x 480 pixel images - each a full 13 inch monitor screenful - for up to a year in its internal flash memory. The resolution can be changed on a shotby-shot basis if required —John Henshall inventors.about.com/library/invento rs/bldigitalcamera.htm In March 1995, Iomega launched the low-cost Iomega Zip 100MB drive for the consumer and small business market. It was an instant success that revolutionized the storage industry, becoming one of the fastest-selling and most successful peripherals in the history of computing. Today, Iomega has sold more than 55 million Zip drives and 350 million Zip disks Java Sun Microsystems To demonstrate what they saw as a possible future in digital devices, the Green Team locked themselves away in an anonymous office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, cut all regular communications with Sun, and worked around the clock for 18 months. In the summer of 1992, they emerged with a working demo, an interactive, handheld home-entertainment device controller with an animated touchscreen user interface. In the demo, the now familiar Java technology mascot, Duke, was shown waving and doing cartwheels on the screen. The device was called *7 ("StarSeven"), named after an "answer your phone from any extension" feature of the phone system in the Green Team office. Duke was actually a representation of the *7's "agent", a software entity that did tasks on behalf of the user. —Jon Byous Flat screen Sony The basic idea of a plasma screen is to illuminate tiny colored fluorescent lights to form an image. Each pixel is made up of three fluorescent lights -- a red light, a green light and a blue light. The plasma display varies the intensities of the different lights to produce a full range of colors In the early 90s—the dawn of history as far as the World Wide Web is concerned— relatively few users were communicating across this global network. They used an assortment of shareware and other software for Microsoft Windows® operating system. Internet Explorer In 1995, Microsoft hosted an Internet Strategy Day and announced its commitment to adding Internet capabilities to all its products. In fulfillment of that announcement, Microsoft Internet Explorer arrived as both a graphical Web browser and the name for a set of technologies. Microsoft —www.microsoft.com/windows 40 million people connected to the Internet, more that $1 billion commerce per year, rapidly growing internet companies like Netscape 1996 Internet's 25th anniversary Tim Berner-Lee 1997 Athlon processor This processor competes successfully with Pentium chips Advanced Micro Devices Giant MagnetoResistive heads A new technology used in IBM's Deskstar 16 GP, a 16.8 GB drive, bringing down the cost of memory to 25 cents per megabyte IBM Pentium II processor Pentium A 7.5 million transistor processor incorporates MMX technology, which is designed specifically to process video, audio, and graphics data efficiently 1998 DVD-RAM drive 2001 iPod Apple 5.2 GB rewriteable capacity on a doublesided cartridge, enough to hold a full length 2 hr movie (not be confused with DVDROM) iPod is not based on a new concept. Companies before Apple released hard drive based music players, but none had the charm and elegance in the Apple implementation. Unlike the competitors, the iPod used a high speed FireWire interface to transfer files on and off of it, and it used a tiny hard drive, that made the device a quarter of the size of comparable products. —Saad 2005 Wearable computer A person's computer should be worn, much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn, and interact with the user based on the context of the situation. With heads-up displays, unobtrusive input devices, personal wireless local area networks, and a host of other context sensing and communication tools, the wearable computer can act as an intelligent assistant, whether it be through a Remembrance Agent, augmented reality, or intellectual collectives. —Wearable Computing, MIR 2006 20th anniversary of the MacPlus things haven't changed as much as the hype would have it. I think that years from now, when the details have been washed away by the acid rains of time, four major commercial events will stand out in the history of personal computers: the advent of the microprocessor which drove prices of computers down to the point where individuals could buy them and led to the first flowering of the present computer revolution, the ascendancy of the software industry and the shift from "users will program them" to "users will run software packages", the Mac interface and its followers which brought the benefits of computers to a far broader audience and fundamentally changed the way we use computers of all sizes and software of all kinds, and (to tread on dangerous ground since the event is relatively recent) the blossoming of the Internet. To sum up the history: cheap hardware, application, software, human interface, & internet —Jef Raskin