Computer Science

The computer had to be rugged and fast, with advanced circuit design and reliable packaging able to withstand the forces of a missile launch. The military’s high standards for its transistors pushed manufacturers to improve quality control. When the Minuteman I was decommissioned, some universities received these computers for use by students.

Ferranti Mark I Sold

Based on ideas from Alan Turing, Britain´s Pilot ACE computer is constructed at the National Physical Laboratory. The design packed 800 vacuum tubes into a relatively compact 12 square feet. This type of computer is useful in performing many of the mathematical equations scientists and engineers encounter in their work. It was originally created for a nuclear missile design project in 1949 by a team led by Fred Steele.

Steve Wozniak Completes The Apple

Typically, computer users of the time fed their programs into a computer using punched cards or paper tape. Ross contended that a Flexowriter -- an electrically-controlled typewriter -- connected to an MIT computer could function as a keyboard input device due to its low cost and flexibility. An experiment conducted five months later on the MIT Whirlwind computer confirmed how useful and convenient a keyboard input device could be. IBM establishes the 650 as its first mass-produced computer, with the company selling 450 in just one year. Spinning at 12,500 rpm, the 650´s magnetic data-storage drum allowed much faster access to stored information than other drum-based machines.

It used $120 worth of electronics components, as outlined in the September 1973 issue of hobbyist magazine Radio Electronics. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store 512 characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the 1990s. Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar!

Data General Corporation Introduces The Nova Minicomputer

For example, whenever you use the Internet, you're looking at something that's stored on a server. Many businesses also use local file servers to store and share files internally. The second type of computer you may be familiar with is a laptop computer, commonly called a laptop.

Reliable Hp Computers

Used for science and engineering as well as simple data processing, the LGP-30 was a “bargain” at less than $50,000 and an early example of a ‘personal computer,’ that is, a computer made for a single user. The first practical stored-program computer to provide a regular computing service, EDSAC is built at Cambridge University using vacuum tubes and mercury delay lines for memory. The EDSAC project was led by Cambridge professor and director of the Cambridge Computation Laboratory, Maurice Wilkes. Wilkes' ideas grew out of the Moore School lectures he had attended three years earlier. One major advance in programming was Wilkes' use of a library of short programs, called “subroutines,” stored on punched paper tapes and used for performing common repetitive calculations within a lager program.