A Brief History of Computing between 1960 and 1969

1960

ALGOL - first structured, procedural, language to be released.

1960

Tandy Corporation founded by Charles Tandy.

1961

APL programming language released by Kennth Iverson at IBM.

1963

The first Minicomputer was built, by Digital Equipment (DEC). Called the PDP-8.

1964

Computers built between 1964 and 1972 are often regarded as 'Third Generation' computers, they are based on the first integrated circuits - creating even smaller machines. Typical of such machines was the IBM 360 series mainframe, while smaller minicomputers began to open up computing to smaller businesses.

1964

Programming language PL/1 released by IBM.

1964

Launch of IBM 360 - the first series of compatible computers.

1964

DEC PDB-8 Mini Computer.

1965

Moore's law published by Gordon Moore in the 35th Anniversary edition of Electronics magazine Origionally suggesting processor comlexity every year the law was revised in 1975 to suggest a doubling in complexity every two years.

1965

Fuzzy Logic designed by Lofti Zadeh (University of Berkeley, California), it is used to process approximate data - such as 'about 100'.

1965

BASIC (Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) developed at Dartmouth College, USA, by Thomas E. Kurtz and John Kemeny. Not implemented on microcomputers until 1975. It is often used in education to teach programming, and also at home by beginners.

1965

Mouse conceived by Douglas Englebart, not to become popular until 1983 with the Apple computers and not adopted by IBM until 1987 - although compatible computers such as the Amstrad PC 1512 were fitted with mice before this date.

1965

The first supercomputer, the Control Data CD6600, was developed.

1967

Development on PASCAL started, to be finished in 1971. Based on ALGOL. Developed by Niklaus Wirth. It's use exploded after the introduction of Turbo Pascal, by Borland, in 1984 - a high speed and low cost compiler. It is used for a wide variety of tasks, it contains many features, is well structured and easy to learn. Borland Pascal v7.0 included an implementation of Object-Orientated programming (similar to C++).

1968

Intel founded by Robert Noyce and a few friends.

1968

LOGO programming language developed by Seymour Papert and team at MIT.

1968

"But what ... is it good for?" Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM commenting on the microchip.

1969

ARPANET Started by the US Dept. of Defense for research into networking. It is the origional basis for what now forms the Internet.

1969 - April 7

The first RFC, RFC0001 pubilshed. The RFCs (network working group, Request For Comment) are a series of papers which are used to develop and define protocals for networking, origionally the basis for ARPANET there are now thousands of them applying to all aspects of the Internet Collectively they document everything about the way the Internet and computers on it should behave, whether it's TCP/IP networking or how email headers should be written there will be a set of RFCs describing it.

1969

Introduction of RS-232 (serial interface) standard by EIA (Electronic Industries Association).