The Incredible Shrinking Computer
Room-sized computers weighing tons are the norm around the Second World War. But, like dinosaurs, huge computers will become fossils of a bygone era.
1939-1945
The War Years
World War II leads to huge technological advances. German engineer Konrad Zuse designs four binary electromechanical computers, culminating in the Z4, which handles floating point calculations (a function built into most Pentiums). British cryptographer Alan Turing and his team of mathematicians develop Colossus, an all-electronic computer designed to decrypt enemy codes. And the Moore School of Electronic Engineering in Philadelphia builds ENIAC--the first general-purpose electronic computer--to compute Army ballistics tables.
1947
Scientists Hate Vacuums, Too
Bell Labs physicists Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen create the first Germanium transistor--a device that sounds the death knell for the unreliable and energy-sucking vacuum tube that powered earlier computers.
1960s
The Original Gates
Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments begin mass-producing integrated circuits. Integrated circuits are the microprocessors of this time, cramming logical functions into a small circuit to perform math calculations. Because these circuits are not programmable, each application needs a specially designed integrated circuit, so the demand for fabrication and design is huge. Smelling opportunity, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore leave Fairchild to begin their own semiconductor company, later known as Intel.
1965
Eeek!
Douglas Englebart patents a device to reposition a cursor on a computer screen that measures its own movement along X- and Y-coordinates and feeds that information to a computer processor. The cute little data cable attached to the device leads him to nickname it "the mouse."
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| Intel's 4004: The first microprocessor |
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1970
Chips Ahoy!
Intel visionary Marcian ("Ted") Hoff receives an order to design 12 integrated circuits for a Japanese calculator company. Instead, he invents the first microprocessor: the 4004, which is a 2,300-transistor, 4-bit chip that can handle 60,000 operations per second. The advantage to this chip is that it is a programmable, general-purpose system, whose descendants will include the Pentium processor.
1973
A Walk in the PARC
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) builds a computer using Engelbart's mouse and a funky operating system that has little windows, icons, and menus in it. Since Research is PARC's middle name, Xerox doesn't actually develop the computer into a product, but they do later show off the windowing operating system to a fellow called Jobs...who shows his copy off to a fellow called Gates...
1974-1976
The Ham Computer
Ed Roberts develops the first personal computer and sells it as a kit via mail order. The Altair appears on the cover of Popular Electronics, and 2,000 people send in their checks to Roberts's company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Smelling the money all the way from their dorm rooms at Harvard, Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a programming language for the Altair, drop out, and form Microsoft. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs form their own company, Apple, and sell their own kit computer, the Apple I. The $666 computer ships 175 units in ten months.
1981-1984
The Prefab PC
IBM decides the cute Apple desktop computers are kind of fun and introduce their own, the cleverly named IBM PC. It runs PC-DOS, an operating system developed by Microsoft. Apple decides that IBM is Big Brother, and introduces a system using an Englebart-style mouse, a Xerox-style windowing operating system, and a trademark fruity name--the Macintosh.
At this point, the history of computing pretty much winds up. Oh, sure, the final 15 years of the 20th century marked a few technological advances (such as the Internet), but when it comes to basic computing, it's mostly the same thing, smaller size. However, if your lust for recent history is insatiable, check out our "30 Years of Windows" retrospective.
