Abstract
This chapter presents a brief history of computing including a discussion of the first digital computers, the first commercial computers, the SAGE air defence system, the invention of the transistor by William Shockley and others at Bell Labs, and early transistor computers, the invention of the integrated circuit by Jack Kirby at Texas Instruments, the development of the IBM System/360, and its influence on later computer development, later mainframes and minicomputers, including DEC’s minicomputers. We discuss the revolutionary invention of the microprocessor, and how it led to home computers such as the Apple I and II home computers, Commodore computers, Atari computers, the Sinclair ZX 81 and ZX spectrum computers, and the Apple Macintosh, which was released in 1984. Finally, we discuss the introduction of the IBM personal computer.
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Notes
- 1.
This meant that the program instructions were stored in memory and all that was required to carry out a new task was to load a new program into memory.
- 2.
The ABC was ruled to be the first electronic digital computer in the Sperry Rand versus Honeywell patent case in 1973. However, Zuse’s Z3 computer (completed in Germany in 1941) preceded it.
- 3.
ENIAC contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes and the AN/FSQ-7 computer used in SAGE contained 55,000 vacuum tubes.
- 4.
It was not a fully transistorised computer in that it employed a small number of vacuum tubes in its clock generator.
- 5.
1 nm (nm) is equal to 10−9 m.
- 6.
The number ‘360’ (the number of degrees in a circle) was chosen to represent the ability of each computer to handle all types of applications.
- 7.
Thomas Watson Jr. later stated, ‘The System/360 was the biggest, riskiest decision that I ever made, and I agonised about it for weeks, but deep down I believed that there was nothing that IBM couldn’t do’.
- 8.
IBM and its competitors were referred to as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
- 9.
Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975.
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O’Regan, G. (2018). A Concise History of Computing. In: World of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75844-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75844-2_3
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