When was computers first used

The development of transistors led to the replacement of vacuum tubes, and resulted in significantly smaller computers. In the beginning, they were less reliable than the vacuum tubes they replaced, but they also consumed significantly less power. These transistors also led to developments in computer peripherals. Remote terminals also became more common with these second-generation computers.

The microchip or integrated circuit is one of the most important advances in computing technology. Many overlaps in history existed between microchip-based computers and transistor-based computers throughout the s, and even into the early s.

Micochips allowed the manufacturing of smaller computers. Photo by Ioan Sameli. The microchip spurred the production of minicomputers and microcomputers, which were small and inexpensive enough for small businesses and even individuals to own. The microchip also led to the microprocessor, another breakthrough technology that was important in the development of the personal computer. There were three microprocessor designs that came out at about the same time.

The first was produced by Intel the The first personal computers were built in the early s. Most of these were limited-production runs, and worked based on small-scale integrated circuits and multi-chip CPUs. The Commodore PET was a personal computer in the 70s. Photo by Tomislav Medak. The Altair was the first popular computer using a single-chip microprocessor. It was also sold in kit form to electronics hobbyists, meaning purchasers had to assemble their own computers. Clones of this machine quickly cropped up, and soon there was an entire market based on the design and architecture of the It also spawned a club based around hobbyist computer builders, the Homebrew Computer Club.

These three computer models eventually went on to sell millions. The Apple II was the only one with a full-color, graphics-capable display, and eventually became the best-seller among the trinity, with more than 4 million units sold. One particularly notable development in the s was the advent of the commercially available portable computer.

Osborne 1 was small and portable enough to transport. The first of these was the Osborne 1 , in Portable computers continued to develop, though, and eventually became streamlined and easily portable, as the notebooks we have today are.

These early portable computers were portable only in the most technical sense of the word. Generally, they were anywhere from the size of a large electric typewriter to the size of a suitcase. Early models had monochrome displays, though there were color displays available starting in the Commodore SX Laptops grew in popularity as they became smaller and lighter. By , displays had reached VGA resolution, and by they had color screens.

From there, resolutions and colors progressed quickly. Other hardware features added during the s and early s included high-capacity hard drives and optical drives. Laptops typically come in three categories, as shown by these Macbooks. Photo by Benjamin Nagel.

Many smartphones today have higher processor speeds and more memory than desktop PCs had even ten years ago. The Droid is a smartphone capable of basic computing tasks such as emailing and web browsing. Mobile computing really got its start in the s, with the pocket PCs of the era. These were something like a cross between a calculator, a small home computer and a PDA.

They largely fell out of favor by the s. A number of manufacturers had models, including Apple and Palm. Storage of all those vacuum tubes and the machinery required to keep the cool took up over square meters square feet of floor space. Nonetheless, it had punched-card input and output and arithmetically had 1 multiplier, 1 divider-square rooter, and 20 adders employing decimal "ring counters," which served as adders and also as quick-access 0.

The executable instructions composing a program were embodied in the separate units of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a route through the machine for the flow of computations.

These connections had to be redone for each different problem, together with presetting function tables and switches. The Institute of Advanced Study IAS computer is a multi-year research project conducted under the overall supervision of world-famous mathematician John von Neumann. The IAS computer was designed for scientific calculations and it performed essential work for the US atomic weapons program.

The bit machine used 92 point-contact transistors and diodes. During three years of production, IBM sells 19 s to research laboratories, aircraft companies, and the federal government. Programmer Arthur Samuels used the to write the first computer program designed to play checkers. It was named after John von Neumann, a world famous mathematician and computer pioneer of the day.

Johnniac was used for scientific and engineering calculations. It was also repeatedly expanded and improved throughout its year lifespan.

Many innovative programs were created for Johnniac, including the time-sharing system JOSS that allowed many users to simultaneously access the machine. IBM establishes the as its first mass-produced computer, with the company selling in just one year.

The Model was also highly popular in universities, where a generation of students first learned programming. Over 30 were completed, including one delivered to Australia. Typically, computer users of the time fed their programs into a computer using punched cards or paper tape. Doug Ross wrote a memo advocating direct access in February. 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. For easy replacement, designers placed each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube. DEC is founded initially to make electronic modules for test, measurement, prototyping and control markets. Headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts, Digital Equipment Corporation, took over 8, square foot leased space in a nineteenth century mill that once produced blankets and uniforms for soldiers who fought in the Civil War.

The mill is still in use today as an office park Clock Tower Place today. The is built on a 'building block' concept which allows it to be highly flexible for many different uses and could simultaneously control up to 63 tape drives—very useful for large databases of information.

For many business users, quick access to this huge storage capability outweighed its relatively slow processing speed. Customers included US military as well as industry. Its task was to detect incoming Soviet bombers and direct interceptor aircraft to destroy them. Operators directed actions by touching a light gun to the SAGE airspace display.

Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar! More than 50 PDP-1s were sold. It was sold exclusively in Japan, but could process alphabetic and Japanese kana characters. Only about thirty NEACs were sold. It managed Japan's first on-line, real-time reservation system for Kinki Nippon Railways in The last one was decommissioned in At the top of the line was the Model , also known as "Stretch.

The mainframe, the first in the series, replaces earlier vacuum tube technology with smaller, more reliable transistors. By the mids, nearly half of all computers in the world were IBM s. Minuteman missiles use transistorized computers to continuously calculate their position in flight. The computer had to be rugged and fast, with advanced circuit design and reliable packaging able to withstand the forces of a missile launch.

When the Minuteman I was decommissioned, some universities received these computers for use by students. The US Navy Tactical Data System uses computers to integrate and display shipboard radar, sonar and communications data. This real-time information system began operating in the early s. System control was provided through the Atlas Supervisor, which some consider to be the first true operating system. The Control Data Corporation CDC performs up to 3 million instructions per second —three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM supercomputer.

The retained the distinction of being the fastest computer in the world until surpassed by its successor, the CDC , in Instead of designing a custom controller, two young engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation DEC -- Gordon Bell and Edson de Castro -- do something unusual: they develop a small, general purpose computer and program it to do the job.

A later version of that machine became the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. Because of its speed, small size, and reasonable cost, the PDP-8 was sold by the thousands to manufacturing plants, small businesses, and scientific laboratories around the world. At the same press conference, IBM also announced 40 completely new peripherals for the new family.

Operational by , it was not the first computerized reservation system, but it was well publicized and became very influential.

It was the world's first commercial bit minicomputer and systems were sold. This printing programmable calculator was made from discrete transistors and an acoustic delay-line memory.

The Programma could do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, as well as calculate square roots. It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP's growing family of programmable test and measurement products. It interfaced with a wide number of standard laboratory instruments, allowing customers to computerize their instrument systems.

The A also marked HP's first use of integrated circuits in a commercial product. A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the lunar surface. Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes into the display and keyboard unit DSKY. The AGC was one of the earliest uses of integrated circuits, and used core memory, as well as read-only magnetic rope memory.

The astronauts were responsible for entering more than 10, commands into the AGC for each trip between Earth and the Moon. The Nova line of computers continued through the s, and influenced later systems like the Xerox Alto and Apple 1. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its byte memory.

In , after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors. Initially designed for internal use by HP employees, co-founder Bill Hewlett issues a challenge to his engineers in fit all of the features of their desktop scientific calculator into a package small enough for his shirt pocket. They did.

The HP helped HP become one of the most dominant companies in the handheld calculator market for more than two decades. The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel , appears in Electronic News.

Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the had transistors and could perform up to 90, operations per second in four-bit chunks.

Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture. Under the direction of engineer Dr. Based on the Intel microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers.

Designer Thi Truong developed the computer while Philippe Kahn wrote the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that did not require high performance, such as process control and highway toll collection.

In , Truong sold R2E to Bull. Designed by Don Lancaster, the TV Typewriter is an easy-to-build kit that can display alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A cassette tape interface provided supplementary storage for text. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the s. Wang was a successful calculator manufacturer, then a successful word processor company.

The Wang makes it a successful computer company, too. Wang sold the primarily through Value Added Resellers, who added special software to solve specific customer problems. The first commercially advertised US computer based on a microprocessor the Intel , the Scelbi has 4 KB of internal memory and a cassette tape interface, as well as Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces.

Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. In , Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market. The Alto is a groundbreaking computer with wide influence on the computer industry. It was based on a graphical user interface using windows, icons, and a mouse, and worked together with other Altos over a local area network.

It could also share files and print out documents on an advanced Xerox laser printer. For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders. Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor. The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications. Southwest Technical Products is founded by Daniel Meyer as DEMCO in the s to provide a source for kit versions of projects published in electronics hobbyist magazines.

Of the dozens of different SWTP kits available, the proved the most popular. Tailored for online transaction processing, the Tandem is one of the first commercial fault-tolerant computers. The banking industry rushed to adopt the machine, built to run during repair or expansion. The Video Display Module VDM marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers.

Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March , the visual display module enabled the use of personal computers for interactive games. The fastest machine of its day, The Cray-1's speed comes partly from its shape, a "C," which reduces the length of wires and thus the time signals need to travel across them.

High packaging density of integrated circuits and a novel Freon cooling system also contributed to its speed. Typical applications included US national defense work, including the design and simulation of nuclear weapons, and weather forecasting.

Intel and Zilog introduced new microprocessors. Five times faster than its predecessor, the , the Intel could address four times as many bytes for a total of 64 kilobytes.

The Zilog Z could run any program written for the and included twice as many built-in machine instructions. Designed by Sunnyvale, California native Steve Wozniak, and marketed by his friend Steve Jobs, the Apple-1 is a single-board computer for hobbyists. With an order for 50 assembled systems from Mountain View, California computer store The Byte Shop in hand, the pair started a new company, naming it Apple Computer, Inc.

In all, about of the boards were sold before Apple announced the follow-on Apple II a year later as a ready-to-use computer for consumers, a model which sold in the millions for nearly two decades. When connected to a color television set, the Apple II produced brilliant color graphics for the time. Millions of Apple IIs were sold between and , making it one of the longest-lived lines of personal computers. Apple gave away thousands of Apple IIs to school, giving a new generation their first access to personal computers.