From 1953 to 1983

1953: AK-SAR-BEN Chapter of the National Machine Accountants Association (NMAA) was formed. E. Stuart Johnson - President.

1953: Burroughs Corp. installs the Universal Digital Electronic Computer (UDEC) at Wayne State University.

1953: First high-speed printer is developed by Remington-Rand for use on the Univac.

1953: First magnetic tape device, the IBM 726, is introduced with 100 character-per-inch density and 75 inches-per-second speed.

1953: IBM ships its first stored-program computer, the 701 for United Nations in Korea. It is a vacuum tube, or first generation, computer.

1954: FORTRAN is created by John Backus at IBM. Harlan Herrick runs the first successful FORTRAN program.

1954: Gene Amdahl develops the first operating system, used on IBM 704.

1954 Texas Instruments announces start of commercial production on silicon transistors.

1954 Commodore is founded by Jack Traimel as a "typewriter repair service"

1955: The Lincoln -CORNHUSKER Chapter of NMAA, the National Machine Accountants Association was formed. J. Max Hoffmann - Pres. 14 persons / companies attended the first meeting.

1955 The first transistor calculator, TRADIC, is built in the Bell Telephone Laboratories by J.H.Felker

1955: First SHARE users group meeting is held.

1955: Remington-Rand merges with Sperry Gyroscope to form Sperry-Rand.

1955 IBM 704 introduced. First commercial machine w/ floating point hardware. Gene Amdahl is chief architect. Also in 1955

February 24, 1955 - Mrs. Jobs names her baby boy - "Steven"

October 28, 1955 - Mrs. Gates names her baby boy - "William"

1956: APT (Automatic Programmed Tool) is developed by D.T. Ross.

1956: Burroughs acquires Electrodata and the Datatron computer, which becomes the Burroughs 205.

1956: Government antitrust suit against IBM is settled; consent decree requires IBM to sell as well as lease machines.

1956: A. Newell, D. Shaw and F. Simon invent IPL (Information Processing Language.)

1956: RCA ships the Bizmac.

1956: T.J. Watson, Jr. assumes presidency of IBM.

1956: The acronym artificial intelligence is coined by John McCarthy.

1957: Control Data Corporation is formed by William C. Norris and a group of engineers from Sperry-Rand.

During the latter half of the 50’s vacuum tube technology gave way to the transistor and the ‘first era of computers’ came to an end.

1957: DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation is founded by Ken Olsen.

1957

USSR launches Sputnuik. In response, U.S. forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to establish U.S. lead in military science & technology.

1957: First issue of Datamation is released.

1957: Honeywell joins with Raytheon to ship the Datamatic 1000.

1958: ALGOL, first called IAL (International Algebraic Language), is presented in Zurich.

1958: First virtual memory machine, Atlas, is installed in England by Feranti. It was developed at the University of Manchester by R.M. Kilburn.

1958: First electronic computers are built in Japan by NEC: the NEC-1101 and -1102.

1958: Frank Rosenblatt builds the Perceptron Mark I using a CRT as an output device.

1958: LISP is developed on the IBM 704 at MIT under John McCarthy.

1958: Seymour Cray builds the first fully transistorized supercomputer for Control Data Corp., the CDC 1604.

1958 - Jack St. Claire Kilby (Texas Instruments) conceives and proves idea of integrating transistors with resistors and capacitors on a single semi-conductor chip.

1958 - Whirlwind becomes reality as SAGE System for Air Defense

1959: COBOL is defined by the Conference on Data System Languages (Codasyl), based on Grace Hoppers Flow-Matic.

1959: First packaged program is sold by Computer Science Corporation.

1959: IBM introduces the 1401. Over 10,000 units will be delivered during its lifetime.

1959: IBM ships its first transistorized, or second generation, computers, the 1620 and 1790.

1959: General Electric develops machine to recognize Magnetic Ink Code Recognition (MICR) for Bank of America. Its a high water mark for GE computing.

1960: The NMAA sponsored a special meeting and established the "CERTIFICATE in DATA PROCESSING", a professional examination program.

1960: Benjamin Curley develops and ships the first minicomputer, the PDP-1, at Digital Equipment Corporation.

1960 - Grace Hopper, Joe Wegstein & an industry committee develop the Common Business Oriented Language -COBOL. (ALGOL 60 is also developed by committee, not widely adopted but influential in development of other languages.)

1960: COBOL runs on UNIVAC II and RCA 501.

1960: Control Data Corporation delivers its first product, a large scientific computer named the CDC 1604.

1960: First electronic switching central office becomes operational in Chicago.

1960: Removable disks first appear.

1961: AFIPS (American Federation of Information Processing Societies) forms.

1961: Multiprogramming runs on Stretch computer. Time-sharing runs at MIT on IBM 709 and 7090 computers by F. Corbato.

1961: IBM delivers the Stretch computer to Los Alamos. This transistorized computer with 64-bit data paths is the first to use eight-bit bytes; it remains operational until l971.

1961: Jack Kelley and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor develops the idea of a monolithic structure for integrated circuits. Noyce gets the patent.

1962: The first CDP examination was held in NEW YORK. George Abbot, of the AK-SAR-BEN Chapter in Omaha received CERTIFICATE # 1.

1962: NMAA elected to adopt a more progressive name to reflect the changing nature of information processing. DATA PROCESSING MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION (DPMA) was founded.

1962: APL (A Programming Language) is developed by Ken Iverson, Harvard University and IBM.

1962: First general-purpose simulation languages are proposed: (1) SIMSCRIPT by the Rand Corporation, and (2) GPSS by IBM.

1962: IBM markets 1311 using removable disks.

1962: IBM's U.S.-based annual revenues from computer products reaches $1 billion and for the first time surpasses its other revenue.

1962 - Atlas computer from Univ Manchester, England, is first to have virtual memory and paging. Capable of 200k FLOPS.

Teletype ships Model 33 keyboard / punch-tape terminal.

1962: H. Ross Perot founds EDS (Electronic Data Systems) in Dallas, TX.

1963 - ASCII is the result of early efforts to develop standardization between various brands of computers. 'A Standard Code for Information Interchange'

1963: Control Data acquires Bendix Corp. computer division.

1963: Conversational graphics consoles are developed by General Motors (DAC-1) and MIT Lincoln Laboratories (Sketchpad), resulting in computer-aided design (CAD). Sketchpad uses the first light-pen, developed by Ivan Sutherland.

1963: DEC ships the first PDP-5 minicomputer.

1963: Charles Tandy buys Radio Shack Corp. -- for free!

1964: Control Data Corporation introduces the CDC 6000, which uses 60-bit words and parallel processing. CDC ships the 6600, the most powerful computer for several years. It was designed by Seymour Cray.

1964: BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Language) is created by Tom Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth. First time-sharing BASIC program runs.

1964: Graphic tablet is developed by M.R. Davis and T.D. Ellis at Rand Corporation.

1964: Honeywell introduces the H-200 attacking IBM's installed base of 1400 systems.

1964: NCR introduces the 315/100.

1964: Douglas Engelbart, SRI, Automation Research Center, originates ideas for a number of modern computing concepts: hypertext, outline processor, video conference, the mouse, two-D editing, windows, cross-file editing, uniform syntax construction, remote procedure protocols, mixed text and graphics files, and others.

1964: IBM produces first large scale, real-time, on-line reservation system - SABRE - for American Airlines.

1964: IBM coins the term "word processing".

1964 - April - IBM announces the System 360, an upward compatible, combination - scientific / business computer(by the mid-80’s the IBM 360 will have generated over $100 billion in revenues).

1964 Paul Baron of the RAND Corporation, (America’s foremost Cold-War Think Tank) makes public his proposal for a totally decentralized network - no central point of authority or control, "a network designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters."

(THE INTERNET IS CONCEIVED)

1965: CDC founds the Control Data Institute to provide computer-related education.

1965: Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation introduce the DEC PDP-8, first true mini computer.

1965: First computer science Ph.D. is granted to Richard L. Wexelblat at the University of Pennsylvania.

1965: IBM ships the first System 360, its first integrated circuit-based, or third generation, computer.

1966: Honeywell acquires Computer Control Company, a minicomputer manufacturer.

1966: Scientific Data Systems (SDS) introduces Sigma 7.

1966: Texas Instruments offers the first solid-state hand-held calculator.

1966 - National Science Foundation (NSF) cuts funding to universities for the development of (new) computers. Encourages the use of commercially available machines.

1967 - The NSF "Pierce Report" provides impetus for developing computer science curriculum for higher education.

1967 - Niklaus Wirth begins development of PASCAL language in Zurich, Switzerland.

1967 - Seven years after Fairchild introduced the integrated circuit, the new 'third generation' computers adopt IC technology.

1967: DEC introduces the PDP-10 computer.

1967: A.H. Bobeck at Bell Laboratories develops bubble memory.

1967: Burroughs ships the B3200.

1967: First issue of Computerworld is published.

1968 - Edward Dijkstra begins move against the 'jump' instruction in software. Movement to reliable software development is underway.

"GOTO Statement
Considered Harmful."

1968: Dendral, the first medical diagnostic medical program, is created by Joshua Lederberg at Stanford University.

1968: Univac introduces the 9400 computer.

1968: Integrated Electronics (Intel) Corp. is founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce.

1968 - Arthur C. Clarke introduces HAL through the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey".

1969 - Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson, Bell Labs, withdraw from multi-vendor 'Multics' operating system program and begin work on a ‘single user’ operating systems. They call it UNIX.

1969: Edson deCastro leaves DEC to start Data General Corp. and introduces the Nova, the first 16-bit minicomputer.

1969: First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence is held.

1969: IBM unbundles hardware and software; introduces a minicomputer line, System/3.

1969: Lockheed Electronics ships the MAC-16.

1969: PASCAL compiler is written by Nicklaus Wirth and installed on the CDC 6400.

1969 - Intel announces the 1KB RAM chip - highest capacity ever.

1969 - Xerox opens Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

1969

Peace, Love, Music and

DoD commissions ARPAnet for research into networking also in 1969

Bill Gates and Paul Allen, calling themselves Lakeside Programming Club, sign an agreement with Computer Center Corporation to report bugs in PDP-10 software in exchange for free computer time.

1970: Computer Logic Systems ships SLS-18.

1970: DEC ships its first 16-bit minicomputer, the PDP-11/20.

1970: Data General ships SuperNova.

1970: First ACM Computer Chess tournament is held.

1970: Honeywell acquires General Electric's computer operations.

1970: IBM ships its first System 370, a fourth generation, computer.

1970: Xerox Data Systems introduces the CF-16A.

1970

Gilbert Hyatt files patent application for "Single Chip Integrated Circuit Computer Architecture" the first basic patent on the microprocessor.

First PASCAL compiler becomes operational.

Information Sciences contacts Gates and Allen, offering PDP-10 computer time for programming expertise.

Frederico Faggin, Intel, begins work on circuit design for 4004 microprocessor.

1971 - Marcian Ted Hoff, Intel, delivers the 4004 for ETI, a Japanese calculator company.

4-bit bus –
108 KHz,60,000 operations/sec, 2300 transistors,640 bytes addressable, US $200

Documentation manuals are written by Adam Osborne.

Alan Shugart, IBM, delivers practical use of the 8" floppy disk on the Displaywriter dedicated word processor.

Steve Wozniak and Bill Fernandez build a computer from rejected parts - call it ‘the Cream Soda Computer’.

Wang Labs introduces the Wang 1200 word processor.

15 nodes on ARPANET

(THE INTERNET BEGINS)

1971: Computer Automation introduces the Alpha-16.

1971: IBM introduces the 370/135 and 370/195 mainframe computers.

1971: Floppy disks are introduced to load the IBM 370 microcode.

1971: Intel Corporation announces the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, developed by a team headed by Marcian E. Hoff.

1971: John Blankenbaker builds the first personal computer, the Kenbak I.

1971: NCR introduces the Century 50.

1971: Sperry-Rand takes over the RCA computer product line.

1972: Cray Research is founded.

1972: First electronic pocket calculator is developed by Jack Kilby, Jerry Merryman, and Jim VanTassel of Texas Instruments.

1972: Gary Kildall at Naval Postgraduate School writes PL/1, the first programming language for the Intel 4004 microprocessor.

1972: Prime Computer is founded.

1972

Intel develops the 8008 chip for Computer Terminal Corp

8-bit bus

108 KHz,

3500 transistors,

16K bytes address space

Atari is founded by Nolan Bushnell - ships the first commercial video game - PONG

Bill Gates and Paul Allen form the ‘Traf-O-Data Company’ after developing an 8008-based turnkey system for recording automobile traffic flow on highways.

First 5.25 inch floppies appear

Edward Roberts, William Yates & Jim Bybee, Micro Instrumentation & Telemetry Systems, deliver the MITS 816 to computer hobby enthusiasts no display, no keyboard, no storage

1973

Based on the Intel 8008, the French built Micral, first non-kit microcomputer, is advertised unsuccessfully in the U.S. first reference of "microcomputer" in print

Donald Knuth promises 12 volumes of "The Art of Programming."

First three become the 'bible' of software engineering.

Univ College of London & Royal Radar of Norway are first international ARPANET nodes

Bob Metcalfe’s Harvard Thesis outlines the idea for Ethernet

Xerox builds the Alto workstation at PARC. Uses Smalltalk language, a mouse & Ethernet. Less than 2000 are built.

Stephen Wozniak joins Hewlett-Packard

Gary Kildall begins consulting work at Intel.

1973: First National Computer Conference (NCC) is held in New York City.

1973: IBM settles a lawsuit by Control Data, selling Service Bureau Corporation (SBC) to Control Data.

1973: PROLOG language is developed by Alain Comerauer at the University of Marseilles-Luminy, France.

1973: R2E markets the MICRAL, the first microcomputer in France.

1973: Winchester disk drives are first introduced by IBM, who uses the term as a code name for its Model 3340 direct-access storage device.

1974: Digital Equipment enters the Fortune 500 ranking of the largest industrial companies.

1974: DPMA helps establish the "INSTITUTE for the CERTIFICATION of COMPUTER PROFESSIONALS". This organization was formed to stimulate industry acceptance of the examinations. The ICCP begins administering DPMA's CDP program.

1974: Intel introduces the 8080, an 8 bit microprocessor that will be used in numerous personal computers.

8-bit bus

2 MHz,

6000 transistors,

64K bytes address space

1974: Zilog is formed.

1975: Homebrew Computer Club, considered the first personal computer users group, is formed.

1975: MITS introduces the Altair personal computer, named after a Star Trek episode, A Voyage to Altair. The kit cost $397 for a 256 byte computer. The I/O consisted of switches and lights. It was designed by Ed Roberts and Bill Yates.

1975: Microsoft is founded after Bill Gates and Paul Allen adapt and sell BASIC to MITS for the Altair PC.

1975: The first computer store opens in Santa Monica, CA.

1975: Xerox withdraws from the mainframe computer industry.

1975 has a few surprises

IBM announces the 5100 ‘educational’ computer

BASIC,

16KB Ram,

tape storage,

5" screen

Price: $9000

Weight: 55 pounds - sales are disappointing

Cray I Supercomputer announced by Seymour Cray

First issue of Byte magazine is published.

Steve Dompier uses his Altair and a radio to play "Fool on the Hill" & "Daisy" at the Homebrew Computer Club.

Gates and Allen change company name to Micro-Soft

1976: First fault-tolerant computer, the T/16, is introduced by Tandem.

1976: MYCIN, an expert system to diagnose and treat infectious blood diseases, is developed at Stanford University by E. Shortliffe.

1976: NEC System 800 and 900 general-purpose mainframes are introduced.

1976: Seymour Cray engineers and delivers Cray 1 with 200,000 freon-cooled ICs and 100 million floating point operations per second (MFLOP) performance.

1976: Super minicomputers are introduced by Perkin-Elmer and Gould SEL.

1976: Zilog Z-80 chip is introduced.

1977: Steve & Steve name a computer after a piece of fruit. Jobs ,Wozniak

Apple Computer is founded and introduces the Apple II personal computer.

1977: Apple, Commodore, and Tandy begin selling personal computers.

1977: DEC introduces its first 32-bit super minicomputer, the VAX-11/780.

1977: Datapoint introduces ARC system, the first local area network.

1977: First ComputerLand franchise store opens in Morristown, NJ under the name Computer Shack.

1977: Tradename ‘Microsoft’ is registered

1978: SPRINT business service is inaugurated.

1978: Texas Instruments introduces the Speak-and-Spell educational toy featuring digital speech synthesis.

Total computers in use in the U.S. exceed a half million units.

1978: The first COMDEX trade show is held.

1978 - Apple licenses BASIC from Microsoft as Applesoft

Microsoft sales reach $1 million for the year.

1978 - Daniel Bricklin and Bob Frankston introduce VISICALC - a new concept for application computing.

Scott Adams founds Adventure International

1978

Intel releases the 8086 chip

16-bit registers,

16-bit bus

29,000 transistors,

1M bytes address space

$360

follows with the 8088 as a stepping stone to 8086 16-bit internal, 8-bit to external devices

Moore's Law

The density of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months, thus increasing the price performance of compute power by a factor of two every 1 1/2 years.

Gordon Moore, Co-Founder, INTEL Corp.

1979: Ada language is developed by a team at CII-Honeywell Bull (France) directed by Jean Ichbiah.

1979: The Source and CompuServe Information Services go on-line.

1979: VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet software, is shown at the West Coast Computer Faire.

1979: Wordstar, one of the best-selling word processing programs for PCs, is released by Micropro (now called Wordstar International).

1979 - Taito introduces Space Invaders in Japan.

1980: Control Data Corporation introduces the Cyber 205 supercomputer.

1980: First issue of InfoWorld is published.

1980: Microsoft licenses UNIX operating system from Bell Laboratories and introduces its XENIX adaptation.

1980 - Tim Patterson begins writing a disk-based operating system for use with Seattle Computer Products(SCP) 8086-based computer.

Paul Allen contacts SCP asking for rights to sell Patterson’s DOS to an ‘unnamed client.’

Microsoft pays less than $100,000 for the rights.

1980 - Alan Shugart, after leaving IBM, introduces the Winchester hard drive for PCs. This changes everything. and

in exchange for MSC carrying the development costs.

IBM underestimates the revolution!!

1980: Total computers in use in the U.S. exceed one million units.

1981: Commodore introduces the VIC-20 home computer, which sells over one million units.

1981: IBM enters the PC arena with the IBM PC.

It is supported by the DOS operating system

from Microsoft Corporation, under an agreement that gives Microsoft all profits

IBM 5150 Personal Computer (PC)

4.77 MHz Intel 8088 CPU

4KB RAM,

40KB ROM

5.25 " floppy drive,

PC-DOS 1.0 (MS-DOS)

$3000 base price

$6000 fully expanded

Wall Street ad from Apple: "Welcome IBM... Seriously!"

Tandy President, John Roach, "I don’t think IBM’s entry into the microcomputer field is that significant."

Microsoft begins work on GUI a ‘Graphical User Interface’.

Apple Computer prohibits mail-order sales - claiming, "no provisions for customer education or support services."

Osborne Computer Co. begins marketing the first fully self-contained portable computer. (bankrupt in two years)

College professor, James Clark, founds Silicon Graphics

1981: Osborne Computer introduces the Osborne 1, the first portable computer.

THE INFORMATION AGE is Announced

1982

John Naisbitt, Megatrends - "The information age will collapse the information ‘float’.

#1 point of the 5 key points of the information age:

"The Information Society is an economic reality, not an intellectual abstraction."

1982

Justice Department throws out 13 year old antitrust lawsuit against IBM.

Disney’s TRON - special effects are computer generated.

Intel releases the 80286 chip

16-bit registers,

16-bit bus

134,000 transistors,

16M bytes address space

$360

Rod Canion, Jim Harris & Bill Murto, senior managers at Texas Instruments, leave to found Compaq Computer

and . . .

Commodore Super VIC

TI 99/4

Toshiba T-100

Radio Shack TRS-Model 16

Casio FX-9000P IBM-PC XT Epson KX-1

Sharp PC-1500 NEC 5200 Sinclair ZX81 Altos 8600 TRS Pocket Computer Atari 800 Astrovision ZGrass-32 IBM AT

Kaycomp II Coleco Vision Olivetti M20 Wang Professional Computer Victor 9000 Timex Sinclair 1000 PC-Clones Apple II Epson HX-20 Handheld Hitachi 16000 Digital Equipment Corporation Rainbow 100

Franklin Ace 1000 SordM23P Aval AVC-777J2 LISA

Apple is first PC company to hit $1 billion in sales

1982: AT&T agrees to give up 22 Bell System companies in settling a 13-year-old lawsuit brought by the Justice Department.

1982: Compaq Computer incorporates.

1982: Sun Microsystems is founded.

1982: Microsoft licenses MS-DOS to 50 microcomputer manufacturers in the first 16 months of availability.

1982: TIME magazine features the ‘PC’ as "Man of the Year".

1983: Compaq ships its first computer in January and sells $111M, the greatest first-year sales in the history of American business.

1983: Cray 2 computer introduced with one billion FLOPs (floating point operations per second) performance rating.

1983: Mitch Kapor introduces LOTUS 1-2-3 Lotus 1-2-3 replaces VisiCalc as the spreadsheet software of choice for microcomputers.

1983: NEC announces the SX-1 and SX-2 supercomputers.

1983: Total computers in use in the U.S. exceed ten million units.

US Dept of Defense announces the Ada language after five years of successive refinements - the high-order language is widely criticized for its complexity.

ARPANET spins off MILNET for Defense Network

Apple produces the 1,000,000th Apple II

IBM & Microsoft begin joint development of OS/2

Wang announces single in-line memory module (SIMM)

AT&T Bell Labs designs C++

MS Windows formally announced - IBM not interested, has Top View plans