ITC 250.01 Exam 2

Arthur Samuel

(1959) IBM; Checkers playing program; First and best example of a self-learning program.

LISP

(1959) John McCarthy; IPL (the first AI-applicable language); List Processing; Church's lambda-calculus; First implemented on an IBM 704.

J.C.R. Licklider

(1960's) ARPANET related; Director of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)

Computer Space

(1971) Nolan Bushnell/Ted Danbey; Inspired by Spacewar!; sold rights to Nutting Associates. First appearance of a video game in a movie.

Alan Kay

(1972) A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages; outlined vision of a portable computer for educational purposes.

Atari

(1972) Bushnell/Danbey,; AI Alcorn; build and sold PONG, typically seen as the first commercially successful video game.

C

(1972) Dennis Ritchie; Building on the earlier language B; built to use a small but very powerful instruction set, and extremely portable.

Computer Animated Hand

(1972) Ed Catmull/Fred Parke; short film showing off animation possibilities.

Georgetown/IBM

(1954) Demonstration of machine translation; Used an IBM 701 to translate 60 Russian lines to English; Claimed to be solvable in 3-5 years.

Pegasus

(1956) Ferranti; 2 versions: Scientific/Business calculations; in 1957, Pegasus calculated 7480 digits of pi (Record at the time).

IBM 305 RAMAC

(1956) First commercial computer with a hard disk drive. Just under 5 MB. Weighed about a ton.

FORTRAN

(1956) Formula Translation; John Backus; high-level programming language using the IBM 704. First draft in 1954/Manual in 1956/Compiler available in 1957. First of a long list of programming languages. Math/Scientific calculations.

Fairchild Semiconductor

(1957) "Traitorous Eight"; tried to replace William Shockley and failed; Name of the new company.

Robert Kirsch

(1957) First Scanned Image; his young son, Walden.

Jack Killby

(1958) Built and demonstrated integrated circuit's; Used germanimum

Perceptron

(1958) Frank Rosenblatt; trial & error algorithm; Implemented first in IBM 704, then build in custom-made.

SAGE

(1958) Jay Forrester; Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system; Advanced bomber warning system.

AN/FSQ-7

(1958) Powered the SAGE; Improved version of the Whirlwind; Physically the largest computer ever built; 60k vacuum tubes/weighed 550,000 pounds

Algol

(1958-60) Structured control flow statements; Nestable variable scope; Recursion; User-defined data types; Multidimensional arrays.

LCD displays

(1960's) George Heilmeier; demonstrated the possibility of color displays. Not immediately practical because of the required constant high electricity flow. (1971) James Fergason; Used the twisted nematic effect in liquid crystals to create an energy-efficient and sharp looking display; controlled voltages could allow more/less light but also color filters allowed for any color to be generated.

Paul Baran

(1960's) Packet switching

ARPANET

(1960's-70's) J.C.R. Licklider envisioned computer networks potential; Idea was outlined in a 1963 memo addressed to "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network."; An envisioned network to connect computers; important source from Donald Davies' packet-switching model; Constructed in the late 1960's grew into the 1970's quickly, rapid number of IMPs/Interface Message Processors.

COBOL

(1960) Common Business-Oriented Language; Cross-platform language; 80% of the worlds software today; In-person purchases/ATM withdrawals/etc.

PDP-1

(1960) DEC; First commercial computer with a monitor and a keyboard, punched tape as storage.

SABRE

(1960) IBM; Semi-Automatic Business Research Enviornment; Inspired by SAGE; Designed for travel reservations for American Airlines. By mid-60's SABRE was the world's largest commercial system. 100,000 reservations daily.

Spacewar!

(1962) Steve Russell; First implementation of LISP for IBM 704; First known computer game for DEC PDP-1.

LINC

(1962) Wesley Clark/Charles Molnar; First example of a "Personal computer".

ASCII

(1963) American Standard Code for Information Interchange; Standardized widely.

TACT

(1964) Lewis Altfest/Robert Ross; Technical Automated Compatibility Testing; One of the first computer-driven dating services; eHarmony, Match.com, etc.

BASIC

(1964) Thomas Kurtz/John Kemeny; Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code language; Hello/Bye - Log on/off New - Begin to write a new program Old - Load an old program Run/Stop - Run/Stop a program Catalog - List all programs

ALPAC

(1964) US government; Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee; Consider the viability of further machine translation research funding.

Ted Nelson

(1965) Hypertext; coins the term to describe the idea for embedding links/menus; Light pen.

Gordon Moore

(1965) Moore's Law; Predicts that the transistor count on chips will double every two years.

Programma 101

(1965) Olivetti; calculator with all basic arithmetic functions; Store and run programmed tasks; Removable magnetic cards

PDP-10

(1966)

ELIZA

(1966) Joseph Weizenbaum; Computer study of communication between Man and Machine; Rogerian therapist/reflecting questions back to a patient.

Hewlett Packard/HP 2116A

(1966) One of the first 16-bit minicomputers

Shakey

(1966-1972) SRI; Mobile robot able to "see"; Hough transform for computer vision and the A* search algorithm for navigation; written in LISP and funded by ARPA. "First Electronic Person".

Brown Box

(1966/72) Ralph Baer; prototype in 1966; Play video games at home using a television; Released in 1972; 28 monochrome games for two players.

Floppy Disk

(1967) IBM; reliable and cheap medium to load software; Sony's 3 1/2" disk became the standard.

CDC 7600

(1967) Seymour Cray/Control Data Corp.; 10 MFLOPS, high as 36; Fastest computer in the world into the 70's.

Doug Engelbart

(1967/1940's) Mouse; the "X-Y position indicator for a display system"; Several military branches had prototyped (and classified) comparable devices. (1968) The Mother of All Demos: - The computer mouse - Resizable windows - Hypertext, text editing - Real-time online collaboration (via modem) - File version control

Nova Minicomputer

(1968) DGC; Data General Corp. (formed by former DEC employees); Nova, a 16-bit minicomputer; later influenced the Xerox Alto or Apple I.

Apollo

(1969) Apollo guidance computer; "rope memory"; woven by hand. Worked under Margaret Hamilton.

Joseph Weizenbaum

(1969) Computing Power and Human Reason; AI is possible but we must proceed with caution about turning over to it any kind of real responsibility for choices.

MITS

(1969) Ed Roberts/Forrest Mims; Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems; Electronic calculators and computers.

Margaret Hamilton

(1969) Insisted on error checking systems and emergency notification in the software, which saved the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Digital Research

(1970's) Gary Kildall; PL/M, a high-level language for the intel 8000-series microprocessors, and CP/M, an OS for those systems; Intel decided to market PL/M; Kildall started DRI in 1974 to sell CP/M to home users.

Xerox PARC

(1970's) Xerox never managed to secure a place of commercial prominence in computing; Ahead of their time.

UNIX

(1970) Dennis Ritchie/Ken Thomson; text-based, multiuser operating system; is, mv, cp, rm, cd, diff, grep; Originally written in assembly language on PDP-7 but later written in C on PDP-11. Portable across multiple platforms. Large impact on later OS development, influencing MINIX and Linux.

Artificial Intelligence

(1970) Marvin Minsky; "In 3 - 8 years, we will have a computer with the general intelligence of an average human."

Intel 4004

(1971) 16-pin, 4-bit microprocessor; "New era in integrated electronics."; First general-purpose, programmable processor, customizable for many purposes; Intell 4004 almost as much computing power as the ENIAC.

Honeywell vs. Sperry Rand

(1973) J. Presper Exckert/John Mauchly; patent for the ENIAC as a general-purpose electronic digital computer in 1947 and granted in 1964; Sperry Rand sued Honeywell for copyright infringement, Honeywell counter-sued; Finally in October 1973, the decision was that the patent was invalidated, legally establishing digital computers in public domain.

Ethernet

(1973) Robert Metcalfe/David Boggs; Xerox PARC; invented ethernet; became the modern standard; Patent in 1975, introductory paper in 1976.

Xerox Alto

(1973) Typically recognized as the first personal computer, with graphics, a mouse, networking, and WYSIWYG editing; Very expensive.

WYSIWYG

(1974) Charles Simonyi coined the term WYSIWYG,

SEQUEL/SQL

(1974) Edgar Codd; Relational database models; IBM built a team unfamiliar with his work.

Kaissa

(1974) First winner of the World Computer Chess Championship; Soviet Union.

Micro-Soft

(1975) Bill Gates/Paul Allen; Microcomputer and software; Initially wanted to write software for the Altair 8800; Adapted BASIC for the Altair.

Altair 8800

(1975) Ed Roberts; Popular Mechanics; Build-it-yourself kits; Built with Intel's 8080 chip; barely a computer, little memory, no keyboard, no printer, no monitor; switches to program LED light outputs.

Cray-1

(1975) Seymour Cray; Weather predictions to nuclear physics; Required Freon cooling.

Steve Wozniak

(1975) With Jobs, solt circuit boards for others to use to build computers.

Homebrew Computer Club

(1975-mid 1980's) Group of California computer enthusiasts; swap parts and talk computers.

Apple 1

(1976) About 200 Apple Computers were created; Hand built; Only needed a keyboard and television to use.

Little Professor

(1976) Texas Instruments; "The first electronic educational toy"; Instructional calculator to teach math skills.

Ken Olson

(1977) Chairman of DEC, "Nobody would want a computer in their home controlling the house."

Atari 2600

(1977) Introduced with removable game cartridges; Shipping games on cartridges (not pre-loaded) boosts the Atari; Becomes one of the best-selling video game systems of all time.

TRS-80

(1977) Tandy; Sold through Radio Shack; "All-In-One", computer with built in keyboard, monitor, and tape deck.

Apple II, Apple II Plus, Apple IIe

(1977) Wozniak; improved from the Apple I, same processor, new color display, keyboard, 8 internal expansion slots.

Software Arts

(1978) Bricklin/Franston briefly built a company but failed to ever reproduce success.

VisiCalc

(1978) Dan Bricklin/Bob Franston; The first WYSIWYG interactive spreadsheet application; Ted Nelson later observed, "VisiCalc represented a new idea of a way to use a computer". The real profit from VisiCalc's popularity went to Apple. $2000 Apple hardware to run the $100 VisiCalc software.

First Spam

(1978) Gary Thuerk; Sent a message to 400 of 2600 ARPANET users.

WordStar

(1978) Seymour Rubenstein; MicroPro; Word-processor origionally built for CP/M and later MS-DOS. By the Mid-1980's, WordStar was the dominant product in word processing.

RSA

(1978/1973) Ron Rivest/Adi Shamir/Leonard Adleman; encryption algorithm built on the idea of public key encription.

MUD (MUD1)

(1979) Richard Bartle/Roy Trubshaw; First multi-user dungeon game, text-interface adventure game.

GUI development

(1979) Xerox brought Steve Jobs in to tour the facility; after the tour/note taking, shamelessly recruited top talent from PARC to come work for Apple; Then later, built Macintosh.

Touchscreen

(Early 1970's) Bent Stumpe; for CERN; Model was capacitive (finger or something conductive).

Email

(Early 1970's) Ray Tomlinson; Created CPYNET through TENEX; Allowed users to transfer files through ARPANET to users at other computers; SNDMSG.

Samuel Hurst

(Early 1970's) Touchscreen; "Elograph"; transparent surface; Primary basis for much of our modern touchscreen technology (Not phones though).

PLATO IV

(Early 1970's) University of Illinois; infrared system to track touch on a 16x16 panel.

CSIRAC

1950

Programing Languages

1970: Pascal 1972: C, Smalltalk, Prolog 1975: Scheme 1978: SQL 1979: Ada (before, "DOD-1")

Claude Shannon

A chess machine/robot in 1950.

John McCarthy

Alongside Marvin Minsky, chaired the first conference about AI in 1956. Formed MIT's AI department in 1957.

Eckert and Mauchly

Builders of ENIAC, EDVAC, BINAC, and UNIVAC. Primary banker dies in 1951.

Remington Rand

Built UNIVAC and ERA systems.

Pilot ACE

Built by a British team, inspired by Alan Turing. One of the first stored-program computers. Early 1950's. Only 800 Vacuum tubes.

UNIVAC

Census Bureau hired Eck. and Mau. to develop a data analysis computer in 1952. Predicts presidential race almost perfectly in 1952.

Ken Thompson

Co-creator of UNIX (1971)

IBM 701

Competitor to UNIVAC/ERA. in 1953, nineteen of these were constructed. "Modern Abacus". Intended for scientific computing.

Alan Turing in 1952

Convicted of "Gross indecency" (Homosexual relationships). Lost all clearance. Died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning.

Marvin Minsky

Developed the useless box in 1952. Alongside John McCarthy, chaired the first conference about AI in 1956.

A-0

Grace Hopper in 1951-1959, produced one of the first compilers.

IBM 704

Improved model of the 701 in 1955.

IBM 702

Intended for business application. in 1953/55, this computer was built

Whirlwind

Jay Wright Forrester, built a flight simulator in 1951. First computer to introduce a graphical display.

New Companies

Oracle - Started by Larry Ellison and others 3Com - Started by Robert Metcalfe Activision - Started by former Atari developers Seagate - (Originally Shugart Technologies) Sierra On-Line Entertainment

William Shockley

Received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 with Bardeen and Brattain.

Thomas Watson, Jr.

Took over as president of IBM. Shifted towards mainframe computers in 1952.

Shockley Semiconductor Lab

William Shockley left Bell Labs to create this company in 1955-56.