Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
1946 ENIACisintroduced,anelectroniccomputingmachinebuiltbyJohnMauchlyand
J. Presper Eckert.
1947 On December 23, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen success-
fully test the point-contact transistor, setting off the semiconductor revolution.
1949 Maurice Wilkes assembles the EDSAC, the first practical stored-program com-
puter, at Cambridge University.
1950 Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis builds the ERA 1101, one of the
first commercially produced computers.
1952 The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau is the first commercial com-
puter to attract widespread public attention.
1953 IBM ships its first electronic computer, the 701.
1954 Asilicon-basedjunctiontransistor,perfectedbyGordonTealofTexasInstruments,
Inc., brings a tremendous reduction in costs.
1954 TheIBM650magneticdrumcalculatorestablishesitselfasthefirstmass-produced
computer, with the company selling 450 in one year.
1955 Bell Laboratories announces the first fully transistorized computer, TRADIC.
1956 MITresearchersbuildtheTX-0,thefirstgeneral-purpose,programmablecomputer
built with transistors.
1956 The era of magnetic disk storage dawns with IBM's shipment of a 305 RAMAC to
Zellerbach Paper in San Francisco.
1958 JackKilbycreatesthefirstintegratedcircuitatTexasInstrumentstoprovethatres-
istors and capacitors can exist on the same piece of semiconductor material.
1959 IBM's 7000 series mainframes are the company's first transistorized computers.
1959 Robert Noyce's practical integrated circuit, invented at Fairchild Camera and In-
strumentCorp.,allowsprintingofconductingchannelsdirectlyonthesiliconsur-
face.
1960 BellLabsdesignsitsDataphone,thefirstcommercial modem,specifically forcon-
verting digital computer data to analog signals for transmission across its long-
distance network.
1961 Accordingto
Datamation
magazine,IBMhasan81.2%shareofthecomputermar-
ket in 1961, the year in which it introduces the 1400 series.
1964 IBM announces System/360, a family of six mutually compatible computers and
40 peripherals that can work together.
