Computer & Calculator Industry Timeline

In 1628 Adriaan Vlacq, a bookseller, publisher, and human computer, computed and issued the first complete set of modern logarithms in Gouda through Petrus Rammaseyn printers. Four years earlier, in 1624, English mathematician Henry Briggs had published Arithmetica logarithma sive logarithmorum chiliades triginta, pro numeris naturali serie crescentibus ab unitate 20,000 et a 90,000 ad 100,000 changing the original logarithms invented by John Napier into common (base 10) logarithms. In 1626 Dutch surveyer and teacher of mathematics Ezechiel de Decker contracted with Vlacq for the publication of several translations of books by John Napier, Edmund Gunter and Henry Briggs. A first book was published in 1626, with several translations done by Vlacq. A second book was made of the logarithms of the first 10000 numbers from Briggs' Arithmetica logarithmica published in 1624. The logarithms were shortened to 10 places. In 1627, De Decker's Het Tweede deel van de Nieuwe telkonst  was published, containing the logarithms of all numbers from 1 to 100000, to 10 places, much of which had been computed by Vlacq. Only very few copies of this book are known and its publication was apparently stopped or delayed.This Tweede deel of 1627 was the first complete table of decimal logarithms. 

In 1628 Vlacq republished the 10 decimal place logarithm tables as Arithmetica logarithma sive logarithmorum chiliades tentum, pro numeris naturali serie crescentibus ab unitate ad 100000. He appears to have had a connection with the Gouda firm of Petrus Rammaseyn and it is this firm that published the work, this time under Vlacq's name. A French translation, Arithmetique logarithmetique, ou, La construction et usage d'une table contenant les logarithms de tous les nombres depuis l'unité jusque 100000 by Vlacq was also published by Petrus Rammaseyn at almost the same time.

In 1820 Charles Xavier Thomas of Alsace, an entrepreneur in the insurance industry, invented the arithmometer, the first commercially produced adding machine, presumably to speed up and make more accurate, the enormous amount of daily computation insurance companies required. Remarkably, according to the Wikipedia, Thomas received almost immediate acknowledgement for this invention, as he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor only one year later, in 1821.  At this time he changed his name to Charles Xavier Thomas, de Colmar, later abbreviated to Thomas de Colmar.

"Initially Thomas spent all of his time and energy on his insurance business, therefore there is a hiatus of more than thirty years in between the first model of the Arithmometer introduced in 1820 and its true commercialization in 1852. By the time of his death in 1870, his manufacturing facility had built around 1,000 Arithmometers, making it the first mass produced mechanical calculator in the world, and at the time, the only mechanical calculator reliable and dependable enough to be used in places like government agencies, banks, insurance companies and observatories just to name a few. The manufacturing of the Arithmometer went on for another 40 years until around 1914" (Wikipedia article on Charles Xavier Thomas, accessed 10-10-2011).

The success of the Arithmometer, which to a certain extent paralleled Thomas's success in the insurance industry, was, of course, in complete contrast to the problems that Charles Babbage faced with producing and gaining any acceptance for his vastly more sophisticated, complex, ambitious and expensive calculating engines during roughly the same time frame. Thomas, of course, produced an affordable product that succeeded in speeding up basic arithmetical operations essential to the insurance industry while Babbage's scientific and engineering goals initially of making mathematical tables more accurate, and later, of automating mathematical operations in general, did not attempt to meet a recognized industrial demand. 

"The [Arithmometer] mechanism has three parts, concerned with setting, counting, and recording respectively. Any number up to 999,999 may be set by moving the pointers to the numbers 0 to 9 engraved next to the six slots on the fixed cover plate. The movement of any of these pointers slides a small pinion with ten teeth along a square axle, underneath and to the left of which is a Leibniz stepped wheel.  

"The Leibniz wheel, a cylinder having nine teeth of increasing length, is driven from the main shaft by means of a bevel wheel, and the small pinion is thus rotated by as many teeth as the cylinder bears in the plane corresponding to the digit set. This amount of rotation is transferred through one of a pair of bevel wheels, carried on a sleeve on the same axis, to the ‘results’ figure wheel on the back row on the hinged plate. This plate also carried the figure wheel recording the number of turns of the driving crank for each position of the hinged plate. The pair of bevel wheels is placed in proper gear by setting a lever at the top left-hand cover to either "Addition and Multiplication" or "Subtraction and Division." The ‘results’ figure wheel is thereby rotated anti-clockwise or clockwise respectively.  

"Use. Multiplying 2432 by 598 may be performed as follows: Lift the hinged plate, turn and release the two milled knobs to bring all the figure wheels to show zero; lower the hinged plate in its position to the extreme left; set the number 2432 on the four slots on the fixed plate; set the lever on the left to "multiplication" and turn the handle eight times; lift the hinged plate, slide it one step to the right, and lower it into position; turn the handle nine times; step the plate one point to the right again and the turn the handle five times. The product 1,454,336 will then appear on the top row, and the multiplier 598 on the next row of figures" (From Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

About 1875 engineer Frank S. Baldwin of Philadelphia and Willgot Theophil Odhner, a Swedish engineer and entrepreneur working in St. Petersburg, Russia, independently invented calculators using a true variable-toothed gear. This was the first real advance in mechanical calculating technology since Gottfried Leibniz's stepped drum (1673). These calculators were called "pinwheel calculators."

The greater ease of use of this technology, its general reliability, and the compact size of the equipment incorporating it caused an explosion of sales in the calculator industry.

The earliest international exposition exclusively of scientific instruments was held at the South Kensington Museum, London.  As a record of the exhibition the South Kensington Museum published a Handbook to the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus 1876 (London 1876).  

The section on calculating machines on pages 23-34 was written by H. J. S. Smith and included those of Babbage, Scheutz, Thomas de Colmar, and Grohmann. None were illustrated. James Clerk Maxwell contributed two chapters in this guide, Peter Guthrie Tait wrote one, and Thomas Henry Huxley wrote one.  A French translation of this work was published in Paris also in 1876.

The South Kensington Museum was later merged into the Science Museum in London.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace 369.

In 1892 American inventor William Seward Burroughs of St. Louis, Missouri, founder of the American Arithmometer Company (1886; (Burroughs Adding Machine Company 1904) began commercial production of his dependable key-driven printing adding machine.

The "Millionaire" mechanical calculator, about the size of a small desk top, was introduced in Switzerland.

The "Millionaire" was the first commercially successful calculator that could perform multiplication directly, rather than by repeated addition. It was designed by Otto Steiger, a Swiss engineer and was first patented in Germany in 1892. Patents were issued in France, Switzerland, Canada and the USA in 1893. Production by Hans W. Egli of Zurich started in 1893, and continued to 1935. Most models were driven by hand-crank but some were electrified.

Roughly 4000-5000 Millionaires were sold. 

Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, the world's first electric tabulating and accounting machine company.

This eventually evolved into IBM.

To improve data processing of the 1900 census, American statistician and inventor Herman Hollerith added an automatic card feed to his electric punched card tabulating machine. 

In 1911 Herman Hollerith sold his Tabulating Machine Company to Charles R. Flint.

Russian-born James Powers, an engineer hired by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1907 to help the government avoid what were perceived as excessive charges by Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, managed to avoid patent infringement and created a faster, cheaper electric punched card tabulating machine that was compatible with Hollerith's punched card format. Powers then formed a corporation in Newark, New Jersey to manufacture and sell his device. Originally known as the Powers Tabulating Machine Company, the company changed its name to Powers Accounting Machine Company in order to target a wider market.  

In 1927 Powers' company was merged with the Remington Typewriter Company and Rand Kardex to form Remington Rand.

Charles R. Flint, a noted trust organizer, merged Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company with the Computing Scale Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Bundy Manufacturing Company to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), producing and selling Hollerith tabulating equipment, time clocks, and other business machinery. The new company was based in Endicott, New York and had 1300 employees.

In 1924 CTR became International Business Machines (IBM).

Brunsviga of Braunschweig, Germany boasted that they sold twenty thousand calculators based on the variable-toothed gear technology.

The Napier Tercentenary Celebration  marking the three hundredth anniversary of the publication of Napier's Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (1614), was held at the Royal Society of Edinburgh from July 24 to July 27, 1914 — just five days before the start of World War I. Participants in the exhibition included individuals and companies from Scotland, England, France, and Germany. The meeting was intended to include a colloquium on the mathematics of computation, but that was canceled because war was considered imminent.

A celebration of Napier's pivotal role in the history of calculation, the exhibition featured displays of many different types of calculating machines, as well as exhibits of other aids to calculation such as mathematical tables, the abacus and slide rules, planimeters and other integrating devices, and ruled papers and nomograms. These were described in the Napier Tercentenary Celebration. Handbook to the Exhibition, which contained separate sections, with chapters by various contributors, devoted to each type of calculating device. Among the notable chapters is Percy E. Ludgate's "Automatic Calculating Machines" (pp. 124-27): apart from Ludgate's "On a proposed analytical machine" (Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society 12 [1909]: 77-91), this chapter contains the only discussion of his improvements to Babbage's Analytical Engine (none of which was ever realized). Also of note is W. G. Smith's "Notes on the Special Development of Calculating Ability" (pp. 60-68), discussing human "lightning calculators" and mathematically gifted "idiot savants," such as were employed by Gauss. Prior to the advent of electronic digital computers, these human computers were often faster than their mechanical counterparts.

The most widely used tools for calculation at the time of the Napier tercentenary were mathematical tables, which are thoroughly surveyed, explained, and described in the Handbook (bibliographical descriptions of the rare mathematical tables exhibited were published the following year in the Napier Tercentenary Memorial Volume. The Handbook also contains a large illustrated section on calculating machines, which were divided into four types: (1) stepped-gear machines based on the Leibnitz wheel, such as those of Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar; (2) machines with variable-toothed gears, such as the Brunsviga; (3) key-set machines like those made by Burroughs; and (4) key-driven machines such as those made by Felt and Tarrant.

The Handbook was published in two forms: a softcover version presented to those who registered for the exhibition; and a hardcover version issued for sale under the title Modern Instruments and Methods of Calculation. Relatively few copies of the softcover version seem to have been distributed at the exhibition, partly because the exhibition took place in Edinburgh, but mainly because war broke out just after it began. Most copies were bound in cloth and sold in London.

"The events of the First World War caused no less upheaval in the world of computing than in the rest of society. A great many technical changes, such as the ever-increasing use of punched-card accounting machines, were to cause computing to assume a different character in the time between the two World Wars. Thus the Handbook should be viewed as a report on the state of the art just before these changes were to begin taking place" (Williams 1982, [x]).  

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) no. 322.

800,000 Burroughs calculating machines were sold worldwide by 1919.

Thomas J. Watson, president of CTR (Computer Tabulating Recording Corporation), of Endicott, New York, changed the name of the company to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

"Encouraged by George F. Johnson, who saw Endicott as the world's first industrial 'park' with a 'Square Deal' for everyone, IBM began building a factory complex in Endicott just to the east of the Endicott-Johnson factories. The original Bundy building (a Binghamton company) was erected on North Street as early as 1906 and stands to this day. Many of the IBM factory buildings, including Factory #1 and the IBM Schoolhouse, still stand to this day. Endicott was the original location of all IBM manufacturing, research, and development from the early 1920s through World War II" (Wikipedia article on Endicott, New York, accessed 02-18-2012).

IBM adopted the eighty-column punched card, the standard for about the next fifty years, and one of IBM's most profitable products.

Astronomer and mechanical computation pioneer Leslie J. Comrie working in London discovered how to use a commercial accounting machine as a difference engine.

With this technique Comrie reformed the production of the Nautical Almanac.

On May 16, 1930 John Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott founded Geophysical Service in Newark, New Jersey. This was the origin of Texas Instruments. Geophysical Service was the first independent contractor specializing in the reflection seismograph method of exploration of oil fields in Texas.

In 1931 IBM of Endicott, New York began manufacture of the 601 multiplying punch.

"It read two factors up to eight decimal digits in length from a card and punched their product onto a blank field of the same card. It could subtract and add as well as multiply. It had no printing capacity, so was generally used as an offline assistant for a tabulator or accounting machine."

IBM’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen (Dehomag) introduced the Dehomag D11 tabulator, the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator, incorporating internal instructions programmed with a plug board.

Kistermann, "The way to the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator: The 1935 DEHOMAG D 11 tabulator," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing XVII (1995): 33-49.

Claude Shannon, in his master’s thesis entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, submitted to MIT on August 10, 1937, and published in a revised and abridged version in 1938, showed that the two-valued algebra developed by Boole could be used as a basis for the design of electrical circuits.

This thesis became the theoretical basis for the electronics and computer industries that were developed after World War II. Shannon wrote the thesis while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City. As examples of circuits that could be built using relays, Shannon appended to the thesis theoretical descriptions of "An Electric Adder to the Base Two," and "A Factor Table Machine." The "Factor Table Machine" was not included in the published version.

Shannon's thesis was later characterized as the most significant master's thesis of the 20th century, (See Reading 12.1.)

Shannon's thesis was first published in Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938) 713-23.

IBM started construction of Howard Aiken ’s Harvard Mark I electromechanical computer in Endicott, New York.

IBM produced the Pluggable Sequence Relay Calculator (PSRC) for the United States Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground. This special-purpose punched-card calculator, developed for calculating artillery firing trajectories, was capable of performing a sequence of up to fifty arithmetic steps.

For the rest of the war these punched-card calculators, programmed with plug boards, remained the fastest digital calculators in the United States.

“These are the fastest relay calculators in operation; they perform six multiplications a second together with a great deal of addition, subtraction, reading, writing and consulting tables. They are not as elaborate as the Sequence Calculator at Harvard in that they have less storage capacity and less sequencing facilities; however, they are about twenty times as fast. Consequently, for those problems which can be handled in this way, they will do in one day what the Sequence Calculator will do in twenty days” (W.J. Eckert, 1947).

Because the ENIAC did not become operational until 1945, and stored-program computers following the EDVAC design were a later development, the PSRC has sometimes been called "the missing link between punched card equipment and stored program computers."

"As late as 1947, the Aberdeen machines still had the fastest calculating unit in existence. Their basic operations included addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, and column shift. These were the first punched-card machines to support division and square root. There were 36 storage and computing registers, and certain parallel processing capabilities, including the ability to read and process four input card streams simultaneously."

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly left the Moore School,of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and establish their own firm, Electronic Control Company in Philadelphia.

Electronic Control Company was the first electronic computer company in the world. Eckert and Mauchly's business plan stated that they expected to sell an electronic computer for between $5000 and $30,000.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly's Electronic Control Company, the world's first electronic computer company, obtained a grant of $75,000 from the National Bureau of Standards for a research project involving Eckert's mercury delay line memory system and tape input/output devices.

"With the prospect of receiving some money," the company rented their first offices at 1215 Walnut Street in Philadelphia and began to hire employees.

The Curta Model 1 pocket mechanical calculator was produced by Contina Ltd in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

The most advanced small mechanical calculator ever built, the Curta was designed by Curt Hertzstark, a calculating machine manufacturer, while he was a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1943 to 1945. The Nazis operating the concentration camp encouraged Hertzstark to complete the design while he was in Buchenwald, and produced a prototype by the end of the war. The Curta calculator was manufactured until 1973.

The first large conference on electronic and electromechanical digital computers was held at Cambridge, Massachusetts. About 250 people attended. At the conference Samuel H. Caldwell suggested the formation of an organization of people engaged in this new field. This organization was later named the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery. It was the predecessor of the ACM.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly learned from a patent lawyer that John von Neumann’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC was a publication barring their patenting the ENIAC because it was issued more than a year before they planned to apply for a patent.

The Electronic Control Company's planned “Statistical EDVAC” was renamed the UNIVAC.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly applied for the broad ENIAC patent, essentially a patent on the stored-program electronic digital computer. They based their description of the machine to a large extent on the government report they issued on November 30, 1945. (See Reading 8.10.)

The Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, predecessor of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), held its first meeting at Columbia University in New York. Seventy-eight people attended. John H. Curtiss was elected president, John Mauchly, vice president, and Edmund Berkeley, secretary.

Northrop Aircraft, Inc. of Hawthorne, California, placed the contract for the BINAC (BINary Automatic Computer) with Pres Eckert and John Mauchly’s Electronic Control Company in Philadelphia. The BINAC consisted of two identical serial computers operating in parallel, with mercury delay-line memories, and magnetic tape as secondary memories and auxiliary input devices.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly of Philadelphia applied for a U.S. patent on the mercury acoustic delay-line electronic memory system. This was the "first device to gain widespread acceptance as a reliable computer memory system." (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace [2002] 1191). The patent 2,629,827 was granted in 1953.

The first brochure advertising the UNIVAC was issued by Pres Eckert and John Mauchly’s Electronic Control Company in Philadelphia. This was the first sales brochure ever issued for an electronic digital computer. A special characteristic of this brochure was that it did not show the product, since at this time the product was not yet fully conceptualized either in design or external appearance.

A contract was drawn up between Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and the United States Census Bureau for the production of the UNIVAC.

IBM produced the 604 Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator (CPC). Based on vacuum-tube technology, and programmed by making wired connections on a plugboard, the mass-produced CPC 604 featured the industry’s first assemblage of digital electronics replaceable as a unit.

The second module of the BINAC (the first was completed in August), was completed in Philadelphia. Among its numerous innovations were germanium diodes in the logic processing hardware—probably the first application of semiconductors in computers. Until its delivery to Northrop Aircraft in September 1949, the BINAC remained in Philadelphia for use in numerous sales demonstrations.

Albert A. Auerbach, one of the designers of the BINAC CPU at Pres Eckert and John Mauchly's Electronic Control Company, ran a small test routine for filling memory from the A register. This was the first program run on the first stored-program electronic computer produced in the United States.

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation of Philadelphia issued a press release describing the sale of the BINAC. This was the first press release ever issued for the sale of an electronic computer.

Engineering Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, published High-Speed Computing Devices, the first textbook on how to build an electronic digital computer. Written in the form of a “cookbook,” the book described available computer components and how they worked. It included extensive bibliographies of the American computing literature and some of the English, and contained a brief reference to Vannevar Bush's Rapid Selector information retrieval device then under development. The device was in operation by 1951.

Between 1950 and 1954 IBM developed and built at Columbia University's Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, 612 West 115th Street location, the Naval Ordnance Research Computer (NORC)—for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance.

The NORC was the "first supercomputer," and "the most powerful computer on earth from 1954 to about 1963." The NORC’s multiplication unit remains the fastest ever built with vacuum tube technology.

IBM introduced the input-output channel as a feature on the NORC. This innovation synchronized the flow of data into and out of the computer while computation was in progress, relieving the central processor of that task.

The Diners Club issued the first "general purpose" credit card, invented by Diners Club founder Frank X. McNamara. The card allowed members to charge the cost of restaurant bills only.

"The first credit card charge was made on February 8, 1950, by Frank McNamara, Ralph Schneider and Matty Simmons at Major's Cabin Grill, a restaurant adjacent to their offices in the Empire State Building" (Wikipedia article on Diners Club International, accessed 02-28-2012).

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, the world's first electronic computer company, was sold to Remington Rand.

Edmund Berkeley's "Simon," which has been called the first personal computer, developed out of his book, Giant Brains, or Machines That Think, published in November 1949, in which he wrote,

 “We shall now consider how we can design a very simple machine that will think.. Let us call it Simon, because of its predecessor, Simple Simon... Simon is so simple and so small in fact that it could be built to fill up less space than a grocery-store box; about four cubic feet. . . . It may seem that a simple model of a mechanical brain like Simon is of no great practical use. On the contrary, Simon has the same use in instruction as a set of simple chemical experiments has: to stimulate thinking and understanding, and to produce training and skill. A training course on mechanical brains could very well include the construction of a simple model mechanical brain, as an exercise."

One year later in an article published in Scientific American about “Simon,” Berkeley predicted that “some day we may even have small computers in our homes, drawing energy from electric power lines like refrigerators or radios.”

"Simon I was built by William A. Porter and two Columbia University graduate students of electrical engineering. Simon is a simple mechanical "brain" that can transfer information automatically from any one of its "registers" to any other, and it can perform reasoning operations of indefinite length. Its relays basic functions are programming, storage, computation, input, and output" (Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

"The Simon's architecture was based on relays. The programs were run from a standard paper tape with five rows of holes for data. The registers and ALU could store only 2 bit. The data entry was made through the punched paper or by five keys on the front panel of the machine. The output was provided by five lamps. The punched tape served not only for data entry, but also as a memory for the machine. The instructions were carried out in sequence, as they were read from the tape. The machine was able to perform four operations: addition, negation, greater than, and selection" (Wikipedia article on Simon (computer) accessed 10-10-2011).

In his 1956 article, "Small Robots-Report," Berkeley stated that he had spent $4000 developing Simon.  He built only one machine, preserved at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. Berkeley also marketed engineering plans for Simon, of which 400 copies were sold.

IBM decided to produce their first electronic computer, the 701. It was a machine for scientific applications based on the Princeton IAS design.

In February 1951 the first Ferranti Mark I version of the Manchester University machine was delivered to the University of Manchester in England.

With the exception of the unique BINAC delivered to Northrop Aircraft in the United States, the Ferranti Mark I was the first commercially produced electronic digital computer delivered to a customer.

UNIVAC I, serial 1, was signed over to the United States Census Bureau on March 31, 1951.

The official dedication of the machine at the government offices occurred on June 14, 1951. Excluding the unique BINAC, the UNIVAC I was the first electronic computer to be commercially manufactured in the United States. Its development preceded the British Ferranti Mark 1; however, the British machine was actually delivered to its first customer one month earlier than the UNIVAC I.

Though the United States Census Bureau owned UNIVAC I, serial 1, the Eckert -Mauchly division of Remington Rand retained it in Philadelphia for sales demonstration purposes, and did not actually install it at government offices until twenty-one months later.

Bertram V. Bowden, the first computer salesman in England, discussed “The application of calculating machines to business and commerce” at the second English electronic computer conference held at the University of Manchester. (See Reading 10.2.)

LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office) ran a program to "evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week's baked output" at tea shop operator J. Lyons and Company in England.  The LEO adaptation of the EDSAC was the first stored-program electronic computer to run business programs on a routine basis. “LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer.”

Manufacturers began producing vacuum tubes especially designed for use in digital circuits.

Compagnie des Machines Bull, the first French electronic computer manufacturer, produced its Gamma 3 electronic calculator. It was not a stored-program computer.

The first electronic computer symposium on the west coast of the United States was held at UCLA. The proceeds appeared later that year as  Proceedings of the Electronic Computer Symposium . . .  at University of California, Los Angeles.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 842.

The ACM held a special meeting in Toronto in honor of the installation of the first electronic digital computer in Canada, installed at the University of Toronto. It was a Ferranti Mark I, known as the FERUT computer

IBM introduced the 701, their first stored-program electronic computer for commercial production.

Designed by Nathaniel Rochester, and based on the IAS machine at Princeton, the IBM 701 was intended for scientific use. Feeling that the word "computer" was too closely associated with UNIVAC, IBM called the 701 an “electronic data processing machine.” IBM eventually sold nineteen of these machines. (See Reading 8.9.)

English scientist and educationist Bertram V. Bowden, who for a time worked as a computer salesman for Ferranti Limited, and was later made a life peer as Baron Bowden, edited Faster than Thought, the first widely read English book on electronic digital computing.

Reflective of the slow speed of advances in computing at this time, the book remained in print without change until 1968.

Richard W. Appel and other students at Harvard Business school issued Electronic Business Mchines: A New Tool for Management.

This was the first report on the application of electronic computers to business. The report was issued before any electronic computer was delivered to an American corporation. (See Reading 10.4.)

IBM announced the development of the 702, a version of the 701 designed for business rather than scientific applications.

English Electric constructed a commercial version of Alan Turing’s Pilot ACE called DEUCE.

Thirty-three of the DEUCE machines were sold, the last in 1962.

IBM announced the 704. It was the first commercially available computer to incorporate indexing and floating point arithmetic as standard features. The 704 also featured a magnetic core memory, far more reliable than its predecessors’ cathode ray tube memories. A commercial success, IBM produced one hundred twenty-three 704s between 1955 and 1960.

UNIVAC I, serial 8, was installed at General Electric Appliance Park, Louisville, Kentucky. Serial 8 was the first electronic computer sold to a nongovernmental customer in the United States. It ran the "first successful industrial payroll application."

Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery began publication. At this time the ACM had twelve hundred members.

IBM introduced the IBM 608 transistor calculator, the first all solid-state computer commercially marketed.

Compagnie des Machines Bull launched the first stored-program electronic computer produced for commercial sale in France-- the Gamma ET.

Elmer C. Kubie and John W. Sheldon founded Computer Usage Company, the first independent company to specialize in software.  It declared bankrupcy in 1986.

Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, began the computerization of the banking industry by demonstrating a prototype electronic accounting machine using its ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) system.

ETL-Mark-2, the first full-scale programmable computer in Japan, was produced by the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Roppongi, Tokyo. It was built from 21,000 relays, and did not store a program.

FUJIC, the first Japanese stored-program electronic computer, was designed and built by essentially one person—Dr. Okazaki Bunji—for the Fuji Photo Film Company in Odawara, western Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. The project began in 1949.

"Originally designed to perform calculations for lens design by Fuji, the ultimate goal of FUJIC's construction was to achieve a speed 1,000 times that of human calculation for the same purpose – amazingly, the actual performance achieved was double that number.

"Employing approximately 1,700 vacuum tubes, the computer's word length was 33 bits. It had an ultrasonic mercury delay line memory of 255 words, with an average access time of 500 microseconds. An addition or subtraction was clocked at 100 microseconds, multiplication at 1,600 microseconds, and division at 2,100 microseconds."

FUJIC is preserved in The National Museum Of Nature and Science in Tokyo.

Sperry Rand agreed to cross-license patents with IBM, thereby turning over strategic technology.

The first Italian computer conference was held in Rome.

The first Japanese conference on electronic computers was held at Waseda University, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  

Commercial transistorized computers, including the UNIVAC Solid State 80 and the Philco TRANSAC S-2000, were introduced. These inaugurated the so-called second generation of electronic computers.

". . . in 1957 there were only 40 computers on unversity campuses across the country [the United States]" (Bowles (ed.), Computers in Humanistic Research [1967] v).

Konrad Zuse produced the Z22, the first commercial electronic digital computer in Germany. The Z22 used vacuum tubes, a relatively late date for that technology.

Zuse KG was the first independent German electronic computer company. It was eventually purchased by Siemens.

Seymour Cray of Control Data Corporation, Minneapolis, Minnesota, built the first transistorized supercomputer, the CDC 1604.

IBM announced their 1401, a relatively inexpensive computer that proved very popular with businesses, and which began to compete seriously with existing punched-card equipment.

IBM began production of the the AN/FSQ-7, a military grade version of the Whirlwind.

"The AN/FSQ-7 used 55,000 vaccuum tubes, about 1/2 acre (2,000 m²) of floor space, weighed 275 tons and used up to three megawatts of power. Although the failure rate of an individual tube was low due to efforts in quality control. So many were used that the daily failure rate was in the hundreds. Each center had staff dedicated to replacing dead tubes by running up and down the racks of machinery with shopping carts filled with replacements. The AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built, and will likely hold that record in the future. Each SAGE site included two computers for redundancy, with one processor on "hot standby" at all times. In spite of the poor reliability of the tubes, this dual-processor design made for remarkably high overall system uptime. 99% availability was not unusual."

Independently of Jack Kilby, Robert N. Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, Mountain View, California, invented a process that made it practical to manufacture integrated circuits. Based on the "planar" technology, an ealier Fairchild breakthrough, Noyce's invention consisted of a complete electronic circuit inside a small silicon chip. Noyce filed for a patent on "Semiconductor Device-and -Lead Structure" on July 30, 1959.  U.S. patent 2,981,877 was granted on April 25, 1961.

Based on technology originally developed at the Stanford Research Institute, General Electric delivered the first 32 ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) computing systems to the Bank of America.

The system used MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Reading.) ERMA served as the Bank’s accounting computer and check handling system until 1970.

At the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts, demonstrated the prototype of its first computer, the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1), designed by a team headed by Ben Gurley.

"The launch of the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) computer in 1959 marked a radical shift in the philosophy of computer design: it was the first commercial computer that focused on interaction with the user rather than the efficient use of computer cycles" (http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/decpdp-1/, accessed 06-25-2009).

Selling for $120,000, the PDP-1 was a commercialization of the TX-O and TX-2 computers designed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. On advice from the venture-capital firm that financed the company, DEC did not call it a “computer,” but instead called the machine a “programmed data processor.” The PDP-1 was credited as being the most important in the creation of hacker culture. Some references identified this machine as the first minicomputer; however DEC gave that designation to either the PDP-5 introduced in 1963 or the PDP-8 introduced in 1965.

Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/Digital/timeline/1959-2.htm, accessed 08-25-2009.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Defense Department increased funding for research on computing.

IBM introduced a transistorized version of its vacuum-tube-logic 709 computer, the 7090.

The 7090 was the first commercially available general purpose computer with transistor logic. It became the most popular large computer of the early 1960s.

In 1960 about six thousand computers were operational in the United States, and perhaps ten thousand were operational worldwide.

On December 6 and 7, 1960  essentially the same COBOL program was run on two different makes of computers— an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer— demonstrating for the first time that compatibility between computers produced by different manufacturers could be achieved.

in 1961 over seven thousand people belonged to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

Wesley A. Clark, a computer scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, started building the LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer).  This machine, which some later called both the first mini-computer and a forerunner of  the personal computer, was first used in 1962. It had small table-top size, “low cost” ($43,000), keyboard and display, file system and an interactive operating system. It's design was placed in the public domain. Eventually fifty of the machines were sold by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Texas Instruments delivered the first integrated circuit computer to the U.S. Air Force.

“The advanced experimental equipment has a total volume of only 6.3 cubic inches and weighs only 10 ounces. It provides the identical electrical functions of a computer using conventional components which is 150 times its size and 48 times its weight and which also was demonstrated for purposes of comparison. It uses 587 digital circuits (Solid Circuit™ semiconductor net works) each formed within a minute bar of silicon material. The larger computer uses 8500 conventional components and has a volume of 1000 cubic inches and weight of 480 ounces.”

John W. Haanstra, Chairman, Bob O. Evans, Vice Chairman, and others at IBM issued as a confidential internal document Processor Products—Final Report of SPREAD Task Group.

In the period from 1952 through 1962, IBM produced seven families of systems—the 140, 1620, 7030 (Stretch), 7040, 7070, 7080, and 7090 groups. They were incompatible with one another, and both users and IBM staff recognized problems caused by this incompatibility. The SPREAD report, as adopted by IBM, led to the development of the IBM System/360 family of compatible computers and peripherals, and essentially reformed the company.

"IBM's public commitment to the SPREAD plan was embodied in the System/360, announced in Poughkeepsie on April 7, 1964. Six machines were announced: the 360 Model 30, 40, 50, 60, 62 and 70. Over the next few years, a number of additional systems were added to the 360 family.

"The SPREAD plan eventually allowed IBM to direct substantial resources toward the development of the full system—peripherals, programming, communications, and new applications. The success of System/360 is perhaps best measured by IBM's financial performance. In the six years from January 1, 1966 to December 31, 1971, IBM's gross income increased 2.3 times, from $3.6 billion to $8.3 billion, and net earnings after taxes increrased 2.3 times, from $477 million to $1.1 billion. In 1982 direct descendants of System/360 accounted for more than half of IBM's gross income and earnings.

"Perhaps most important, the SPREAD Report permitted IBM to focus on an excellence not possible with multiple architectures. It resulted in powerful new peripherals, programming, terminals, high-volume applications, and complementary diversifications whose future can only be imagined" (Bob O. Evans, "Introduction to SPREAD Report," Annals of the History of Computing 5 [1983] 5).  The text of the report was reprinted in the same journal issue on pp. 6-26.

Nearly all copies of this confidential report were destroyed. An original copy, donated by one of the authors, Jerome Svigals, is preserved in the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard was promulgated, specifying the pattern of seven bits to represent letters, numbers, punctuation, and control signals in computers.

"Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published during 1963, a major revision during 1967, and the most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (now mostly obsolete) that affect how text and space is processed; 94 are printable characters, and the space is considered an invisible graphic. The most commonly used character encoding on the World Wide Web was US-ASCII until 2008, when it was surpassed by UTF-8" (Wikipedia article on ASCII, accessed 01-29-2010).

Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts introduced the PDP-5, DEC’s first 12 bit computer.

This was later called “the world’s first commercially produced mini computer.” The PDP-8 introduced in 1965 was also given this designation.

In 1963 Compugraphic of Brookline, Massachusetts introduced the Linasec I and II, the first general typesetting computers. These automated tape processors produced justified tapes to drive the Linotype machines used in the newspaper industry.

Net production of the Linasec— in excess of 3,600 lines per hour compared to the manually-set 600 lines per hour— enabled newspapers to carry more detailed, late breaking news stories.

RCA announced the Spectra series of computers, which could run the same software as IBM’s 360 machines. The Spectra computers were also the first commercial computers to use integrated circuits.

IBM introduced the Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST).

"With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects.

"This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today. It also introduced word processing as a definite idea and concept. The term was first used in IBM's marketing of the MT/ST as a 'word processing' machine. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer. He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing. IBM redefined it 'to describe electronic ways of handling a standard set of office activities -- composing, revising, printing, and filing written documents.' "

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly received U.S. patent no. 3,120,606 for the ENIAC— a general patent on the stored-program electronic computer, roughly 18 years after their application. Sperry Rand Univac, owner of the patent, charged a 1.5 percent royalty for all electronic computers sold by all companies except IBM, with which it had previously cross-licensed patents.  Since IBM manufactured the majority of computers produced at this time, the royalties on the patent were not as large as they could have been.

Texas Instruments in partnership with Zenith Radio introduced the first consumer product containing an integrated circuit— a hearing aid.

IBM announced the System/360 family of compatible machines.  All IBM System/360 products ran the same operating system—OS/360. Previously products developed by different divisions of IBM were incompatible.

IBM System/360 products were the first IBM computers capable of both commercial and scientific applications that were offered at what was considered a “reasonable price.” Their architecture incorporated Microprogramming.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts, introduced the PDP-8, the first “production model minicomputer.” “Small in physical size, selling in minimum configuration for under $20,000.”

Honeywell attempted to open the home computer market with its Kitchen Computer.

The H316 was the first under-$10,000 16-bit machine from a major computer manufacturer. It was the smallest addition to the Honeywell "Series 16" line, and was available in three versions: table-top, rack-mountable, and self-standing pedestal. The pedestal version, complete with cutting board, was marketed by Neiman Marcus as "The Kitchen Computer.” It came with some built-in recipes, two weeks' worth of programming, a cook book, and an apron.

There is no evidence that any examples were sold.

Co-founder and Chairman of Intel Corporation Gordon Moore published "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits," Electronics Magazine,  April 19, 1965. In this article he observed that the the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, and predicted that this trend would continue. The press called this “Moore’s Law.”

"The term "Moore's law" was coined around 1970 by the Caltech professor, VLSI pioneer, and entrepreneur Carver Mead. Predictions of similar increases in computer power had existed years prior. Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" had predicted that by the turn of the millennium, we would have "computers with a storage capacity of about 10^9", what today we would call "128 megabytes." Moore may have heard Douglas Engelbart, a co-inventor of today's mechanical computer mouse, discuss the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in a 1960 lecture. A New York Times article published August 31, 2009, credits Engelbart as having made the prediction in 1959. . . .

"Moore slightly altered the formulation of the law over time, in retrospect bolstering the perceived accuracy of his law. Most notably, in 1975, Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years. Despite popular misconception, he is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months". However, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months." (Wikipedia article on Moore' Law, accessed 11-19-2011).

Semiconductor memory began to replace magnetic-core memory.

Texas Instruments filed the patent for the first hand-held electronic calculator, invented by Jack S. Kilby, Jerry Merryman, and Jim Van Tassel. The patent (Number 3,819,921) was awarded on June 25, 1974.

This miniature calculator employed a large-scale integrated semiconductor array containing the equivalent of thousands of discrete semiconductor devices.

In 1967 there were 35,000 computers operating in the United States.

Bowles (ed.) Computers in Humanistic Research (1967) v,

Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, California, introduced the programmable desk calculator, the HP 9100A.

 "HP called it a desktop calculator, because, as Bill Hewlett said, 'If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared.' An engineering triumph at the time, the logic circuit was produced without any integrated circuits; the assembly of the CPU having been entirely executed in discrete components. With CRT display, magnetic-card storage, and printer, the price was around $5000. The machine's keyboard was a cross between that of a scientific calculator and an adding machine. There was no alphabetic keyboard" (Wikipedia article on Hewlett-Packard, accessed 03-10-2010).

IBM adopted a new marketing policy of charging separately for most systems engineering activities, future computer programs, and customer education courses. This “unbundling” gave rise to the software and services industry.

Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove founded Intel. The company's first property was purchased in Santa Clara, California.

The company was originally incorporated under the name of NM Electronics.

The term “software engineering” was coined at a NATO conference, in Garmisch, Germany, in response to the perception that computer programming had not kept up with advances in computer hardware.

In 1969 or 1970 the first automatic teller machine (ATM) was installed. Dates conflict as to whether this was in 1969 or slightly later. The first machine installed at Chemical Bank in New York may have been only a cash dispenser.

In 1971 Phil Ray and Gus Roche of Computer Terminal Corporation of San Antonio, Texas, later known as Datapoint Corporation, began shipping the Datapoint 2200, a mass-produced programmable terminal, which could be used as a simple stand-alone personal computer.

"It was intended by its designers simply to be a versatile, cost-efficient terminal for connecting to a wide variety of mainframes by loading various terminal emulations from tape rather than being hardwired as most terminals were. However, enterprising users in the business sector (including Pillsbury Foods) realized that this so-called 'programmable terminal' was equipped to perform any task a simple computer could, and exploited this fact by using their 2200s as standalone computer systems. Equally significant is the fact that the terminal's multi-chip CPU (processor) became the embryo of the x86 architecture upon which the original IBM PC and its descendants are based.

"Aside from being one of the first personal computers, the Datapoint 2200 has another connection to computer history. Its original design called for a single-chip 8-bit microprocessor for the CPU, rather than a conventional processor built from discrete TTL modules. In 1969, CTC contracted two companies, Intel and Texas Instruments, to make the chip. TI was unable to make a reliable part and dropped out. Intel was unable to make CTC's deadline. Intel and CTC renegotiated their contract, ending up with CTC keeping its money and Intel keeping the eventually completed processor.

"CTC released the Datapoint 2200 using about 100 discrete TTL components (SSI/MSI chips) instead of a microprocessor, while Intel's single-chip design, eventually designated the Intel 8008, was finally released in April 1972. The 8008's seminal importance lies in its becoming the ancestor of Intel's other 8-bit CPUs, which were followed by their assembly language compatible 16-bit CPU's—the first members of the x86-family, as the instruction set was later to be known. Thus, CTC's engineers may be said to have fathered the world's most commonly used and emulated instruction set architecture from the mid-1980s to date" (Wikipedia article on Datapoint 2200, accessed 09-12-2012).

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was founded by Jerry Sanders and seven others from Fairchild Semiconductor. It began operations as a producer of logic chips.

In 1970 DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) of Maynard, Massachusetts, introduced the PDP-11 minicomputer, which popularized the notion of a “bus” (i.e.“Unibus”) onto which a variety of additional circuit boards or peripheral products could be placed. DEC sold 20,000 PDP-11s by 1975.

In 1970 Xerox opened the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC became the incubator of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer, the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment, Interpress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScript), and Ethernet.

In 1970 Intel of Santa Clara, California, announced the Intel 1103, the world's first commercially available Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chip (1K bit pMOS dynamic RAM ICs).

The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, published the classified report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Computer Security, Security Controls for Computer Systems.

Security Controls for Computer Systems was the first systematic review of computer security problems.

IBM announced the System/370, an upgrade for the 360, using semiconductor memory in place of magnetic cores.

Gilbert Hyatt filed a patent application entitled Single Chip Integrated Circuit Computer Architecture based on work begun in 1968.

Hyatt's patent was the first general patent on the microprocessor. Twenty years later, in 1990, the U.S. Patent Office awarded the patent to Hyatt, but was overturned in 1995.

Intel of Santa Clara, California, announced the first microprocessor: the 4004 four-bit central processor logic chip designed by Federico Faggin. 

IBM’s first operational application of speech recognition enabled customer engineers servicing equipment to “talk” to and receive “spoken” answers from a computer that could recognize about 5,000 words.

Intel of Santa Clara, California, announced the 8008 microprocessor, the first 8-bit microprocessor.

"The 8086 was originally intended as a temporary substitute for the ambitious iAPX 432 project in an attempt to draw attention from the less-delayed 16 and 32-bit processors of other manufacturers (such as Motorola, Zilog, and National Semiconductor) and at the same time to top the successful Z80 (designed by former Intel employees). Both the architecture and the physical chip were therefore developed quickly (in a little more than two years, using the same basic microarchitecture elements and physical implementation techniques as employed by the older 8085, and for which it also functioned as its continuation. Marketed as source compatible, it was designed so that assembly language for the 8085, 8080, or 8008 could be automatically converted into equivalent (sub-optimal) 8086 source code, with little or no hand-editing. This was possible because the programming model and instruction set was (loosely) based on the 8080. However, the 8086 design was expanded to support full 16-bit processing, instead of the fairly basic 16-bit capabilities of the 8080/8085. New kinds of instructions were added as well; self-repeating operations and instructions to better support nested ALGOL-family languages such as Pascal, among others.

"The 8086 was sequenced using a mix of random logic and microcode and was implemented using depletion load nMOS circuitry with approximately 20,000 active transistors (29,000 counting all ROM and PLA sites). It was soon moved to a new refined nMOS manufacturing process called HMOS (for High performance MOS) that Intel originally developed for manufacturing of fast static RAM products. This was followed by HMOS-II, HMOS-III versions, and, eventually, a fully static version designed in CMOS and manufactured in CHMOS. The original chip measured 33 mm² and minimum feature size was 3.2 μm.

"The architecture was defined by Stephen P. Morse and Bruce Ravenel. Jim McKevitt and John Bayliss were the lead engineers of the development team and William Pohlman the manager. While less known than the 8088 chip, the legacy of the 8086 is enduring; references to it can still be found on most modern computers in the form of the Vendor ID entry for all Intel devices, which is 8086H (hexadecimal). It also lent its last two digits to Intel's later extended versions of the design, such as the 286 and the 386, all of which eventually became known as the x86 family" (Wikipedia article on Intel 8086, accessed 02-06-2010).

“A new standard one-chip MOS/LSI calculator logic circuit has been announced by Texas Instruments. This single chip may make full electronic calculators available to everyone at prices that can put a calculator into every kitchen or businessman’s pocket. The chip incorporates all of the logic and memory circuits to perform complete 8-digit 3-register calculator functions, including full precision add, subtract, multiply, and divide operations.” In large quantities the chip was priced less than $20.00.

Inexpensive electronic calculators flood the market.

In 1973 the Alto computer system was operational at Xerox PARC. Conceptually the first personal computer system, the Alto eventually featured the first WYSYWG (What You See is What You Get) editor, a graphic user interface (GUI), networking through Ethernet, and a mouse. The system was priced $32,000.

Atex, founded in Massachusetts in 1973, worked with the Minneapolis Star newspaper to develop the first electronic pagination system that allowed the creation and output of full editorial pages, eliminating the need for manual paste-up of strips of film.

The Atex system featured "Atex Messaging" which is widely believed to be the forerunner of both email and instant messenger applications. Atex publishing systems were "based on highly modified Dec PDP-11 minicomputers, designed to produce news sections of newspapers. The systems included clustered CPUs, a distributed file system and dumb terminals that displayed memory-mapped video and featured keyboards with up to 140 keys: Distinctively, the cursor keys were on the left-hand side. A custom operating system tied everything together."

American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur Gary Kildall, one of the first people to view microprocessors as full-featured computers rather than equipment controllers, developed the operating system, CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) through his company, Digital Research, in Pacific Grove, California.

". . .Kildall originally developed CP/M during 1973-74, as an operating system to run on an Intel Intellec-8 development system, equipped with an Shugart Associates 8-inch floppy disk drive interfaced via a custom floppy disk controller. It was written in Kildall's own PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers). Various aspects of CP/M were influenced by the TOPS-10 operating system of the DECsystem-10 [PDP-10] mainframe computer, which Kildall had used as a development environment" (Wikipedia article on CP/M, accessed 02-06-2010).

"By 1981, at the peak of its popularity, CP/M ran on 3,000 different computer models and DRI had $5.4 million in yearly revenues" (Wikipedia article on Gary Kildall, accessed 02-06-2010).

In Seattle, Washington, high school students Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Paul Gilbert founded a partnership called Traf-O-Data. 

The objective was to read the raw data from roadway traffic counters and create reports for traffic engineers. Even though this initial project was not a success, the experience that Gates and Allen gained in writing software for a non-existent computer they applied shortly thereafter in writing software for the MITS Altair, leading to the creation of Microsoft.

"Bill Gates and Paul Allen were high school students at Lakeside School in Seattle. The Lakeside Programmers Group got free computer time on various computers in exchange for writing computer programs. Gates and Allen thought they could process the traffic data cheaper and faster than the local companies. They recruited classmates to manually read the hole-patterns in the paper tape and transcribe the data onto computer cards. Gates then used a computer at the University of Washington to produce the traffic flow charts. (Paul Allen's father was a librarian at UW.) This was the beginning of Traf-O-Data.

"The next step was to build a device to read the traffic tapes directly and eliminate the tedious manual work. The Intel 8008 microprocessor was announced in 1972 and they realized it could read the tapes and process the data. Allen had graduated and was enrolled at Washington State University. Since neither Gates nor Allen had any hardware design experience they were initially stumped. The computer community in Seattle at that time was relatively small. Gates and Allen had a friend, Paul Wennberg who like them had hung around CDC Corporation near the University of Washington cadging open time on the mainframe. Wennberg, founder of the Triakis Corporation, was then an electrical engineering student at the University of Washington. In the course of events Gates and Allen mentioned they were looking for somebody to build them a computer for free. They needed somebody good enough to build a computer from parts and the diagrams found in a computer magazine. It was Wennberg who came up with the man to do just that. After discussion with another friend, Wes Prichard, Prichard suggested to Wennberg that Gates and Allen head over UW Physics building to where Gilbert, another EE student worked in the high-energy tracking lab. It was there that Paul Gilbert was approached by the duo to become a partner in Traf-O-Data. That year Gilbert, piece by piece, wire wrapped, soldered and, assembled from electrical components the (world's first?) working microcomputer. Miles Gilbert, Paul Gilbert's brother, a graphic designer and draftsman, helped the fledgling company by designing the company's logo. Gates and Allen started writing the software. To test the software while the computer was being designed, Paul Allen wrote a computer program on WSU's IBM 360 that would emulate the 8008 microprocessor.

"The computer system was completed and Traf-O-Data produced a few thousand dollars of revenue. Later the State of Washington offered free traffic processing services to cities, ending the need for private contractors, and all three principals moved on to other projects. The real contribution of Traf-O-Data was the experience that Gates and Allen gained developing software for computer hardware that did not exist. Paul Gilbert, sometimes referred to as "the hardware guy", was the man who made Traf-O-Data work. Without his efforts in the construction of this computer, and the day-to-day running of this pioneering company, the rise of what became Microsoft might have been delayed" (Wikipedia article on Traf-O-Data, accessed 07-13-2011).

My thanks to Chris Morgan for drawing my attention to this precursor venture to Microsoft.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly’s ENIAC patent — a patent on the stored-program electronic digital computer — was ruled invalid in the case of Honeywell Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corporation et al. (See Reading 8.12.)

The term “mainframe” was first used in a Scientific American article to distinguish the main computer in a laboratory from other computers.

Intel, Santa Clara, California, announced the 8080 eight-bit microprocessor.

The 8080 powered the MITS Altair 8800 designed by H. Edward Roberts, the first truly inexpensive personal computer. Within a year the 8800 was designed into hundreds of different products.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit for the breakup of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), alleging anticompetitive behavior.

Bill Gates, Paul G. Allen, and Monte Davidoff wrote a version of the Basic programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800.

"After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.  In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC." (Wikipedia article on Bill Gates, accessed 07-13-2011).

Called Altair Basic, or in its first iteration, MITS 4K Basic, the program was written without access to an Altair computer or even an 8080 CPU.

Altair Basic was the first computer language written for a personal computer, and the first product of "Micro-Soft," which in 1976 was renamed Microsoft.

It was estimated that 200,000 computers were operating in the United States in 1975. Nearly all of these were mainframes and minicomputers.

H. Edward Roberts, working in Albuquerque, New Mexico, announced the MITS (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) Altair personal computer kit in an article in Popular Electronics magazine.

The first personal computer to be offered for sale, the MITS Altair had an “open architecture.”

The basic Altair 8800 sold for $397.

The Homebrew Computer Club held its first meeting at a garage in Menlo Park, California. At this and other informal meetings of "tech-type" people Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak learned about computing. The first issue of the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter was published on March 15, 1975. It continued through several designs, ending after 21 issues in December 1977. The newsletter was published from a variety of addresses in the early days, but later submissions went to a P.O. box address in Mountain View, California.

"The Apple I and II were designed strictly on a hobby, for-fun basis, not to be a product for a company. They were meant to bring down to the club and put on the table during the random access period and demonstrate: Look at this, it uses very few chips. It's got a video screen. You can type stuff on it. Personal computer keyboards and video screens were not well established then. There was a lot of showing off to other members of the club. Schematics of the Apple I were passed around freely, and I'd even go over to people's houses and help them build their own" (Wozniak).

Bill Gates and Paul Allen officially founded Micro-Soft (Microsoft) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with Gates as CEO. Allen invented the original  company name, "Micro-Soft." 

"Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico." (Wikipedia article on Bill Gates, accessed 07-13-2011).

The Federal Government’s antitrust suit against IBM went to trial. The complaint for the case U.S. v. IBM was filed in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York on January 17, 1969 by the Justice Department. The suit alleged that IBM violated the Section 2 of the Sherman Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business.

IBM introduced the 5100 Portable Computer for corporate users.

More luggable than portable, the machine weighed 50 pounds. The price, fully configured, was $19,975.

Raymond Kurzweil introduced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first practical application of OCR technology.

The Kurzweil Reading Machine combined omni-font OCR, a flat-bed scanner, and text-to-speech synthesis to create the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. It was the first computer to transform random text into computer-spoken words, enabling blind and visually impaired people to read any printed materials. 

William Henry Gates III (Bill Gates), in his role as "General Partner Micro-Soft", Alubquerque, New Mexico, wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists, making the distinction between proprietary and open-source software.

The first (and only) World Altair Computer Convention, organized by David Bunnell of MITS, took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  The world's first personal computer conference, it was an overwhelming success; with 700 people from 46 states and seven countries attending.

Steve Jobs, Steve "The Woz" Wozniak and Ronald G. Wayne signed the contract founding Apple Computer, then designated as Apple Computer Company.

Wayne relinquished his 10% stake in the company for $800, only 12 days later, on April 12, 1976.

In an interview done in the mid-1980s Steve Wozniak and the late Steve Jobs recalled how they named their upstart computer company some 35 years ago.

" 'I remember driving down Highway 85,' Wozniak says. 'We're on the freeway, and Steve mentions, 'I've got a name: Apple Computer.' We kept thinking of other alternatives to that name, and we couldn't think of anything better.'

"Adds Jobs: 'And also remember that I worked at Atari, and it got us ahead of Atari in the phonebook.' " (http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=52707, accessed 12-30-2011).

In November 1997 Stanford University acquired the historical archives for the early history of Apple Computer.

♦ On December 13, 2011 Sotheby's sold as lot 244 in their Fine Books and Manuscripts sale in New York Wayne's copy of the original contract document for $1,594,500, including buyer's premium, to Cisneros Corporation CEO Eduardo Cisneros. This was the highest price paid to date for anything related to the history of computing.

The first Apple Computer, designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak, and known retrospectively as the Apple I (Apple 1) was demonstrated at the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California in July 1976. Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs had the idea of manufacturing the computer for sale. Together they founded the Apple Computer Company, and to finance the production of their first product Jobs sold his only means of transportation, a VW van, and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500. They built the Apple I in the garage of Jobs's parents' house in Palo Alto.  

"The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 at a price of US$666.66, because Wozniak liked the repeating digits and because they originally sold it to a local shop for $500 for the one-third markup. About 200 units were produced. Unlike other hobbyist computers of its day, which were sold as kits, the Apple I was a fully assembled circuit board containing about 60+ chips. However, to make a working computer, users still had to add a case, power supply transformers, power switch, ASCII keyboard, and composite video display. An optional board providing a cassette interface for storage was later released at a cost of $75" (Wikipedia article on Apple I, accessed 11-26-2011).

♦ Of the approximately 200 Apple 1s built, 43 were thought to survive in 2012.  Of those six were then thought to be in working order. In July 2012 a working example sold for $310,000 at Sotheby's, New York.  In November 2012 a working example complete with all peripherals, including monitor, tape drive and manuals, sold for amost €500,000 including premium (about $630,000) at Auction Team Breker in Cologne, Germany.

Intel introduced the 8086 sixteen-bit microprocessor.

Apple introduced the Apple II, the first personal computer sold as a fully assembled product, and the first with color graphics.

Wang Laboratories, Lowell, Massachusetts, introduced its VS minicomputer system, which became, for a time, one of the most popular office systems, "inaugurating the concept of office automation."

Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a low-cost version of the 8086 using an eight-bit external bus.

IBM hired Paul Allen and Bill Gates of Microsoft, then in Bellevue, Washington, to create an operating system (OS) for the new IBM personal computer under development.

Because Microsoft had no OS at the time, they purchased a non-exclusive license to sell a CP/M clone called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") from Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products for $25,000.

Xerox introduced the 8010 Star Information System, the first commercial system to incorporate a bitmapped display, a windows-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, printer servers and e-mail.

Xerox's 8010 Star was developed at Xerox's Systems Development Department (SDD) in El Segundo, California. A section of SDD ("SDD North") was located in Palo Alto, California, and included some people borrowed from Xerox's PARC. SDD's mission was to design the "Office of the Future"— a system, easy to use, that would incorporate the best features of the Xerox Alto, and could automate many office tasks.

Writer and computer entrepreneur Adam Osborne and Osborne Computer Corporation, Hayward, California, produced the first commercially successful "portable" computer, the Osborne 1. It weighed twenty-three pounds, ran the CP/M operating system, and sold for $1795, with $2000 worth of software included. Its main deficiencies were a tiny 5 inch (13 cm) display screen and use of single sided, single density floppy disk drives which could not contain sufficient data for practical business applications. Its 23 pound weight meant that the computer was more "luggable" than portable.

Microsoft bought all rights to 86-DOS, otherwise known as QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System, from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000 or $75,000, depending on how the cost is calculated. They renamed it MS-DOS. 

"IBM PC-DOS (and the separately sold MS-DOS, which was licensed therefrom), and its predecessor, 86-DOS, were loosely inspired by CP/M (Control Program / [for] Microcomputers) from Digital Research, which was the dominant disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 based microcomputers. However, PC-DOS never ran on less than an 8088 (16-bit).

"When IBM introduced their first microcomputer in 1980, built with the Intel 8088 microprocessor, they needed an operating system. Seeking an 8088-compatible build of CP/M, IBM initially approached Microsoft CEO Bill Gates (possibly believing that Microsoft owned CP/M due to the Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard, which allowed CP/M to run on an Apple II. IBM was sent to Digital Research, and a meeting was set up. However, the initial negotiations for the use of CP/M broke down—Digital Research wished to sell CP/M on a royalty basis, while IBM sought a single license, and to change the name to 'PC DOS'. DR founder Gary Kildall refused, and IBM withdrew.

"IBM again approached Bill Gates. Gates in turn approached Seattle Computer Products. There, programmer Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80, intended as an internal product for testing SCP's new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus. The system was initially named "QDOS" (Quick and Dirty Operating System), before being made commercially available as 86-DOS. Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. This became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981.

"Microsoft also licensed their system to multiple computer companies, who supplied MS-DOS for their own hardware, sometimes under their own names. Microsoft later required the use of the MS-DOS name, with the exception of the IBM variant. IBM continued to develop their version, PC DOS, for the IBM PC. Digital Research became aware that an operating system similar to CP/M was being sold by IBM (under the same name that IBM insisted upon for CP/M), and threatened legal action. IBM responded by offering an agreement: they would give PC consumers a choice of PC DOS or CP/M-86, Kildall's 8086 version. Side-by-side, CP/M cost almost $200 more than PC DOS, and sales were low. CP/M faded, with MS-DOS and PC DOS becoming the marketed operating system for PCs and PC compatibles" (Wikipedia article on DOS, accessed 02-05-2010).

On August 12, 1981 IBM introduced their open architecture personal computer (PC) based on the Intel 8088 processor. The IBM PC  ran PC-DOS, the IBM-branded version of the 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS, provided by Microsoft. The machine was originally designated as the IBM 5150, putting it in the "5100" series, though its architecture was not directly descended from the IBM 5100.

On August 1, 1981 a review of the IBM PC appeared on USENET (accessed 10-16-2009).

Mitchell Kapor, previously head of development at Visicorp, and Jonathan Sachs, with backing from Ben Rosen, founded Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kapor, who had been a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, named the company after 'The Lotus Position' or "Padmasana.''

The GRiD Compass 1100, introduced by Grid Systems Corporation, was probably the first commercial computer created in a "clamshell" laptop format, and one of the first truly portable machines.

The 1100 included a magnesium clamshell case with a screen that folded flat over the keyboard, a switching power supply, electro-luminescent display, non-volatile bubble memory, and a built-in modem.

After thousands of hours of testimony (testimony of over 950 witnesses, 87 in court, the remainder by deposition) and the submission of tens of thousands of exhibits, the anti-trust case U.S. v. IBM was withdrawn on the grounds that the case is "without merit."

30,000,000 pages of documents were generated in the course of this anti-trust case.

SUN Microsystems, founded on February 24, 1982 by Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy— students at Stanford who worked on the Stanford University Network, announced its first UNIX workstation, the Sun 1. The company headquarters was in Santa Clara, California.

"The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation,  was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed as a 3M computer: 1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte and 1 Megapixel. It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced Memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses" (Wikipedia article on Sun Microsystems, accessed 06-12-2009).

In June 1982 Columbia Data Products (CDP) of Columbia, Maryland, introduced the MPC 1600 "Multi Personal Computer," an exact functional copy of the IBM PC model 5150 except for the BIOS, which was developed by a "clean room" reverse engineering process, thus avoiding copyright infringement. IBM had published the bus and BIOS specifications, wrongly assuming that this would be enough to encourage the add-on market, and prevent unlicensed copying of the design.

"As the first IBM PC clone, the MPC was actually superior to the IBM original. It came with 128 KiB RAM standard, compared to the IBM's 64 KiB maximum. The MPC had eight PC expansion slots, with one filled by its video card. Its floppy disk drive interface was built into the motherboard. The IBM PC, in contrast, had only five expansion slots, with the video card and floppy disk controller taking two of them. The MPC also included two floppy disk drives, one parallel and two serial ports, which were all optional on the original IBM PC. The MPC was followed up with a portable PC, the 32 pound (15 kg) "luggable" Columbia VP in 1983" (Wikipedia article on Columbia Data Products, accessed 01-01-2013).

Commodore International, West Chester, Pennsylvania, issued the Commodore 64 — "the first cheap home computer" at the price of $595.

The Commodore 64 looked like a bulky keyboard, but included color graphics, and excelled at playing early video games. Between 1982 and 1984 30,000,000 units were sold, making it the best-selling personal computer model of this era. Roughly 10,000 commercial programs were produced for this computer.

IBM introduced the Scanmaster 1, a mainframe computer terminal designed to scan, transmit and store images of documents electronically.

The TRS-80, Model 100, made by Kyocera, Kyoto, Japan, and marketed in the U.S. in Radio Shack stores owned by Tandy Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas, introduced the concept of a "notebook" computer.

More than 6,000,000 TRS-80s were sold; the introductory price was $1099.00.

Lawrence Ellison's Relational Software, Menlo Park, California, renamed itself Oracle Systems to align itself with its flagship relational database management system (DBMS), Oracle version 3. This was the first RDBMS with a portable codebase that allowed companies to run their DBMSs on a range of hardware and operating systems, including mainframes, mincomputers, workstations and personal computers.

IN 1983 six million personal computers were sold in the United States.

During 1983 and the first part of 1984 Phoenix Technologies, then in Boston, Massachusetts, created the first commercially available IBM PC compatible ROM Bios. Licensability of this firmware interface, which would allow a computer to run the same operating system and the same applications as the IBM PC, enabled the rapid expansion of the IBM PC compatible computer industry. 

To defend against the inevitable copyright infringement suits expected to be brought by IBM, Phoenix engineers reverse-engineered the Bios using clean-room design, in which the software engineers had never read IBM's reference manuals: 

"Phoenix developed a 'clean room' technique that isolated the engineers who had been contaminated by reading the IBM source listings in the IBM Technical Reference Manuals. The contaminated engineers wrote specifications for the BIOS APIs and provided the specifications to 'clean' engineers who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. Those 'clean' engineers developed code from scratch to mimic the BIOS APIs. This technique provided Phoenix with a defensibly non-infringing IBM PC-compatible ROM BIOS. Because the programmers who wrote the Phoenix code had never read IBM's reference manuals, nothing they wrote could have been copied from IBM's code, no matter how closely the two matched" (Wikipedia article on Phoenix Technologies, accessed 01-01-2013).

In Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F.2d 1240 (3d Cir. 1983) an appellate level court in the United States held for the first time that a computer's operating system could be protected by copyright.

"Franklin Computer Corporation [Burlington, New Jersey] introduced the Franklin Ace 100, a clone of Apple Computer's Apple II, in 1982. Apple quickly determined that substantial portions of the Franklin ROM and operating system had been copied directly from Apple's versions, and on May 12, 1982, filed suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. It cited the presence of some of the same embedded strings, such as the name "James Huston" (an Apple programmer), and "Applesoft," on both the Apple and Franklin system disks.

"Franklin admitted that it had copied Apple's software but argued that it would have been impractical to independently write its own versions of the software and maintain compatibility, although it said it had written its own version of Apple's copy utility and was working on its own versions of other software. Franklin argued that because Apple's software existed only in machine-readable form, and not in printed form, and because some of the software did not contain copyright notices, it could be freely copied. The Apple II firmware was likened to a machine part whose form was dictated entirely by the requirements of compatibility (that is, an exact copy of Apple's ROM was the only part that would "fit" in an Apple-compatible computer and enable its intended function), and was therefore not copyrightable.

"The district court found in favor of Franklin. However, Apple appealed the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit which, in a separate case decided three days after Franklin won at the lower level, determined that both a program existing only in a written form unreadable to humans (e.g. object code) and one embedded on a ROM were protected by copyright. (See Williams Elec., Inc., v. Artic Int'l, Inc., 685 F.2d 870 (1982)). The Court of Appeals overturned the district court's ruling in Franklin by applying its holdings in Williams and going further to hold that operating systems were also copyrightable" (Wikipedia article on Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., accessed 01-01-2013).

Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh ("Mac"), with a graphical user interface based on the Xerox Star system.

At the age of 19 Michael Dell founded a company called "PC's Limited," building PC clones out of his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1987 the company changed its name to Dell Computer Corporation.

Computer scientists Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner from Stanford University founded Cisco Systems. They named the company for San Francisco, gateway to the Pacific Rim. Beginning to experiment with connecting detached networks, Bosack and Lerner ran network cables between two different buildings on the Stanford campus, connecting them first with bridges, and then with routers.

Intel introduced the 32-bit 386 microprocessor. It featured 275,000 transistors— more than 100 times as many as the first Intel microprocessor, the 4004, developed in 1971.

Apple, Cupertino, California, introduced the LaserWriter laser printer. It cost $6,995. The Mac's ability to run PageMaker for "desktop publishing" in association with Apple's LaserWriter printer caused sales of the Mac to take off.

Microsoft, Bellevue, Washington, introduced Windows 1.0 for the PC. Windows 1.0 was a graphical user interface (GUI) multi-tasking operating environment extension of MS-DOS rather than a completely new operating system.

Franklin Computer Corporation, Burlington, New Jersey, introduced Spelling Ace, an electronic spelling corrector. This may be considered the first handheld electronic book or e-book (eBook).

By 1987 25,000,000 PC’s were sold in the United States.

Lotus Development, Cambridge, Massachusetts, introduced Lotus Notes developed by Ray Ozzie at Iris Associates. Lotus Notes was the first commercial networked-based communications and collaboration, or groupware, program. Ozzie derived the Notes concept from his experience working with PLATO Notes at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

One of the first U.S. cases related to Cyberspace law was decided: Cubby v. CompuServe, 776 F. Supp. 135 (1991). It "suggested that online companies would not be liable for the acts of their customers. CompuServe exerted no control whatsoever over the presumably false and defamatory statements which were the subject of the suit; their forum sysops were independent entrepreneurs. Prior to this decision, the liability risk was largely undecided."

IBM developed scalable parallel systems, joining multiple computer processors and breaking down complex, data-intensive jobs to speed their completion.

The dot-com bubble, thought to have begun with the IPO of Netscape on August 9, 1995, reached its climax on March 10, 2000 with the NASDAQ peaking at 5132.52.

After this date the dot-com bubble began to burst.

The ASCI White supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California became operational on June 29, 2000. An IBM system, it covered a space the size of two basketball courts and weighed 106 tons. It contained six trillion bytes (TB) of memory, almost 50,000 times greater than the average personal computer at the time, and had more than 160 TB of Serial Disk System storage capacity—enough to hold six times the information stored in the 29 million books in the Library of Congress.

IBM formed a Life Sciences Solutions division, incorporating its Computational Biology Center.

In 2001 Edwin Black issued IBM and the Holocaust.

This book documents

"how IBM's New York headquarters and CEO Thomas J. Watson acted through its overseas subsidiaries to provide the Third Reich with punch card machines that could help the Nazis to track down the European Jewry (especially in newly conquered territory). The book quotes extensively from numerous IBM and government memos and letters that describe how IBM in New York, IBM's Geneva office and Dehomag, its German subsidiary, were intimately involved in supporting Nazi oppression. The book also includes IBM's internal reports that admit that these machines made the Nazis much more efficient in their efforts. Several documentaries, including the 2003 film The Corporation Screened, C-SPAN broadcast and The Times, the Village Voice, the JTA and numerous other publications published close-ups of several documents demonstrating IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. These included IBM code sheets for concentration camps taken from the files of the National Archives. For example, IBM's Prisoner Code listed 8 for a Jew and Code 11 for a Gypsy. Camp Code 001 was Auschwitz, Code 002 was Buchenwald. Status Code 5 was executed by order, code 6 was gas chamber. One extensively quoted IBM report written by the company's European manager during WWII declared “in Germany a campaign started for, what has been termed … ‘organization of the second front.’ ” The memo added, “In military literature and in newspapers, the importance and necessity of having in all phases of life, behind the front, an organization which would remain intact and would function with ‘Blitzkrieg’ efficiency … was brought out. What we had been preaching in vain for years all at once began to be realized.”

"The book documents IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson as being an active Nazi supporter. Watson made numerous statements in numerous venues that the international community ought to give Nazi Germany a break from the economic sanctions. As head of the International Chamber of Commerce, Watson engineered an annual meeting to be held in Berlin, where he was witnessed to publicly give a Nazi salute to Hitler in the infamous "Seig, Heil" fashion. Watson traveled to Germany numerous times after the Nazis took power in 1933, but it was on the Commerce trip that he received an honor medal from Hitler himself. Watson also dined privately with Hitler, and attended lavish dinners with many infamous Nazi officials at the same time that Jews were being officially robbed and driven from their homes.

"There was an IBM customer site, the Hollerith Abteilung, in almost every concentration camp, that either ran machines, sorted cards or prepared documents for IBM processing. The Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number.

"Although IBM actively worked with the Hitler regime from its inception in 1933 to its demise in 1945, IBM has asserted that since their German subsidiary came under temporary receivership by the Nazi authorities from 1941 to 1945, the main company was not responsible for its role in the latter years of the holocaust. Shortly after the war, the company worked aggressively to recover the profits made from the many Hollerith departments in the concentration camps, the printing of millions of punchcards used to keep track of the prisoners, the custom-built punchcard systems, and its servicing of the Extermination through labour program. The company also paid its employees special bonuses based on high sales volume to the Nazis and collaborator regimes. As in many corporate cases, when the US entered the war, the Third Reich left in place the original IBM managers who continued their contacts via Geneva, thus company activities continued without interruption" (Wikipedia article on IBM and the Holocaust, accessed 05-23-2009).

Microsoft launched the Xbox game console, its first entry into the gaming console market.

"According to the book Smartbomb, by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, the remarkable success of the upstart Sony PlayStation worried Microsoft in late 1990s. The growing video game market seemed to threaten the PC market which Microsoft had dominated and relied upon for most of its revenues. Additionally, a venture into the gaming console market would diversify Microsoft's product line, which up to that time had been heavily concentrated on software."

PC Magazine announced that the January 2009 issue (Volume 28, Issue 1) would be the last printed edition of this "venerable publication," after which it moved to an online only format.

"While most magazines make most of their money from print advertising, PC Magazine derives most of its profit from its Web site. More than 80 percent of the profit and about 70 percent of the revenue come from the digital business, Mr. Young said, and all of the writers and editors have been counted as part of the digital budget for two years." quoted from NY Times online 11-19-08).

Steve Jobs of Apple introduced the iPad, one-half inch thick, with a 9.7 inch, high resolution color touchscreen (multi-touch) diagonal display, powered by a 1-gigahertz Apple A4 chip and 16 to 64 gigabytes of flash storage, weighing 1.5 pounds and capable of running all iPhone applications, except presumably, the phone. The battery life was supposed to be 10 hours, and the device was supposed to hold a charge for 1 month in standby. The price started at $499.00.

"The new device will have to be far better than the laptop and smartphone at doing important things: browsing the Web, doing e-mail, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying your music collection, playing games, reading e-books. Otherwise, 'it has no reason for being.'" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/live-blogging-the-apple-product-announcement/?hp, accessed 01-27-2010).

Link to iPad on Apple website: http://www.apple.com/ipad/

An original Apple 1 personal computer in excellent condition but with a few later modifications, sold for 110,000 pounds or $174,000 hammer at a Christie's book and manuscript auction in London. (Christie's sale 7882, lot 65).

Associated Press reported that the purchaser was businessman and collector Marco Boglione of Torino, Italy, who bid by phone. His total cost came to 133,250 pounds or about $210,000 after the buyer's premium. Prior to the auction, Christie's estimated the computer would sell for between $160,000-$240,000. When it was released in 1976, the Apple I sold for $666.66.

Only about 200 Apple 1's were built, of which perhaps "30 to 50" remain in existence. The auctioned example came in its original box with a signed letter from Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who hand-built each of the Apple 1's, attended the auction, and offered to autograph the computer.  

See also: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_16695428?source=rss&nclick_check=1, accessed 11-23-2010.

In U.S. Federal Court in Oakland, California Oracle Corporation, based in Redwood Shores, California, won a $1,300,000,000 copyright infringement judgment against SAP AG, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany.

The judgment—an indication of the size and scale of the software industry— was a result of a lawsuit filed by Oracle in 2007 claiming that a unit of SAP U.S. made hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads and several thousand copies of Oracle’s software to avoid paying licensing fees, and in an attempt to steal customers. 

"The verdict, which came after one day of deliberations, is the biggest ever for copyright infringement and the largest U.S. jury award of 2010, according to Bloomberg data. The award is about equal to SAP’s forecasted net income for the fourth quarter, excluding some costs, according to the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. . . .

"The verdict is the 23rd-biggest jury award of all time, according to Bloomberg data. The largest jury award in a copyright-infringement case previously was $136 million verdict by a Los Angeles jury in 2002 in a Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit against Media Group Inc. for copying and distributing 1,500 songs by artists including Elvis Presley, Madonna and James Brown, according to Bloomberg data" (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-11-24/oracle-wins-1-3-billion-from-sap-in-downloading-case.html, accessed 11-24-2010).

On July 13, 2011, SAP filed a motion seeking judgment that actual damages should not be based on hypothetical licenses, and for a new trial for the amount of damages.

"On September 1, 2011, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton granted the judgment as a matter of law on the hypothetical license damages, and vacated the $1.3 billion award amount. In her ruling Judge Hamilton stated:

" 'Oracle’s suggestion – that upon proof of infringement, copyright plaintiffs are automatically entitled to seek “hypothetical” license damages because they are presumed to have suffered harm in the form of lost license fees – has no support in the law.'

"SAP's motion for a new trial was granted, conditioned on Oracle rejecting a remittitur of $272 million, the 'maximum amount of lost profits and infringer’s profits sustainable by the proof.' Judge Hamilton further stated:

" 'Determining a hypothetical license price requires an 'objective, not a subjective” analysis, and '[e]xcessively speculative' claims must be rejected.' " (Wikipedia article on Oracle Corporation v. SAP AG, accessed 04-24-2013).

On January 22, 2011 the Apple App Store completed its countdown for its Ten Billionth App downloaded from the Apple App Store.

Steve Jobs, one of the most influential and daring innovators in the history of media, and arguably the most innovative and influential figure in the computer industry since the development of the personal computer, died at the age of 55 after a well-publicized battle with pancreatic cancer. Responsible, as inspirational leader, for building the first commercially successful personal computer (Apple II), for developing and popularizing the graphical user interface (Macintosh) which made personal computers user friendly, for developing desktop publishing, for making music truly portable (iPod, iTunes), for bringing all the elements of the personal computer to cell phones (iPhone), for causing the widespread acceptance of tablet computers (iPad), Jobs not only rescued Apple Computer from near failure and made it for a time the most valuable company in the S&P 500, but also achieved great success through his ownership of Pixar Animation Studios, which he eventually sold to The Walt Disney Company. Characteristics of Jobs' style were exceptional boldness in the conception of products, high quality and ease of use, and elegance of industrial design.

"Mr. Jobs even failed well. NeXT, a computer company he founded during his years in exile from Apple, was never a commercial success. But it was a technology pioneer. The World Wide Web was created on a NeXT computer, and NeXT software is the core of Apple’s operating systems today" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/business/steve-jobs-and-the-power-of-taking-the-big-chance.html?hp).

An article published in The New York Times on October 8, 2011 compared and contrasted the lives and achievements of Steve Jobs with that earlier great American inventor and innovator, Thomas Alva Edison.

"For what appears to be the first time ever, information technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks are paying more in dividends than companies in any other sector, S.&P. reported this week. Multimedia

"Off the Charts: High Tech, High Dividends S.&P. Dow Jones Indices reported that in 2012 the technology sector accounted for 14.7 percent of all dividends paid to investors in the 500 companies, up from 10.3 percent in 2011 and from a little over 5 percent back in 2004. It replaced the consumer staples sector, which had been the largest payer of dividends for the previous three years.  

"The change was largely because of the decision by Apple, now the most valuable company in the world, to begin paying dividends last year. The company had been public for more than three decades before it announced plans in March to begin making payouts. Four other technology companies in the index — all but one of which had been public for more than two decades without paying a dividend — later joined in making payments to shareholders.  

"With those changes, 60 percent — 42 — of the 70 technology stocks in the index are now dividend payers. The dividends from many technology companies are relatively small, however, and of the other sectors, only health care comes close to having as large a share of companies that do not pay dividends" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/business/information-technology-dividends-surge-past-consumer-staples-sector.html, accessed 01-12-2013).

A much-anticipated new smartphone by Samsung, the South Korean multinational conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, purports to incorporate a radically new interactive reading device:

"Samsung’s next big smartphone, to be introduced this month, will have a strong focus on software. A person who has tried the phone, called the Galaxy S IV, described one feature as particularly new and exciting: Eye scrolling.

"The phone will track a user’s eyes to determine where to scroll, said a Samsung employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. For example, when users read articles and their eyes reach the bottom of the page, the software will automatically scroll down to reveal the next paragraphs of text.

"The source would not explain what technology was being used to track eye movements, nor did he say whether the feature would be demonstrated at the Galaxy S IV press conference, which will be held in New York on March 14. The Samsung employee said that over all, the software features of the new phone outweighed the importance of the hardware.

"Samsung’s booth at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Indeed, Samsung in January filed for a trademark in Europe for the name “Eye Scroll” (No. 011510674). It filed for the “Samsung Eye Scroll” trademark in the United States in February, where it described the service as “Computer application software having a feature of sensing eye movements and scrolling displays of mobile devices, namely, mobile phones, smartphones and tablet computers according to eye movements; digital cameras; mobile telephones; smartphones; tablet computers" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/samsungs-new-smartphone-will-track-eyes-to-scroll-pages/?hp, accessed 03-05-2013).

When I wrote this entry in March 2013 the Wikipedia article on Samsung stated that Samsung Electronics was the "world's largest information technology company" measured by 2012 revenues. It had retained the number one position since 2009. It was also the world's largest producer of mobile phones, and the world's second largest semiconductor producer after Intel Corporation.