The History of Computers

By: Chandler Jones

The History of

Computers

1939

Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded the Hewlett-Packard company in a California garage. Their first product was HP 200A Audio Oscillator. This became hugely popular and helpful for engineers. It also became popular for Walt Disney in making their special effects for their movie Fantasia.

1946

ENIAC was a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. They created it 1,000 times better by creating plug board and switches, inside of the input and output creating lights, cards, switches and plugs. This process took over 3 years!

1957

The Engineering Research Association group was created by Bill Norris that was presented as brand new corporation. Later it released its new model the 1604 computer.

1963

Flecker and Harris program TRADIC was invented in a AT&T Bell Laboratory. It became the first fully transistorized

computer.

1975

Bill Gates and Paul Allen collaborated to create the licensed BASIC as the software language for Altair. The same year Ed Roberts invented the 8800 which was sold for $297 or $395. From then on they called it the “personal computer”

1986

The University of Colorado researchers created the all-optical computer which was capable of being programmed and of manipulating instructions inside.

1994Yahoo was founded by Stanford graduates, Jerry Yang and

David Filo . Yahoo was originally supposed to be called “Jerry’s Guide to the world wide web”. It was originally operated on two machines Akebono and Konishiki which was named after a famous sumo wrestler. From then on it became the most popular search engine of its time!