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Computers are the most leading technology today. They are useful for browsing the internet or just typing up a document. Computers changed over time dramatically; from light bulbs to a simple handheld mouse and keyboard. The software inside a computer has changed as well. It was all controlled by light bulbs and switches (history of). When the switch was on, the light was on. When the light was on, it meant that bit was on (Rusch, Richard). Computer memory had a big upgrade as well. Space has upgraded from 6 kilobytes to a couple hundred gigabits (the digital). This is a big upgrade. Computers upgraded big time! It is amazing how technology changes from the biggest computer to the modern day size, and how memory and operating systems changed as well. There is not a first computer made because there are different types and classifications of a computer (history of). Some said a type writer was considered as a computer and others said it was not. There are categories as a computer. There were programmable computers which allowed someone to program on. The first programmable computer was the Z1 (history of). The Z1 was made by Konrad Zuse (The digital). He built the Z1 in his family living room in 19361938 (Interview-Research). The Z1 had mathematical functions. It could add, subtract, and even multiply and divide (history of). Later after Z1 was built, the Z2 and Z3 were follow-ups based on ideas from the Z1 (the digital). b The first digital computer was the ABC computer (history of). ABC stood for AtanasoffBerry Computer (history of). The ABC computer was made by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry (history of). This was started in 1937 and was continued to develop until 1942 at Iowa State University in the basement of the physics building (history of). Later the federal judge signed his decision that ENIAC was invalid and therefore it was not the first digital computer made (history of). So, Atanasoff was the inventor of the first electronic digital computer. But, some disagree and say the ENIAC was the first digital

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computer(history of). The ENIAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly (history of). It began construction at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943 (history of). They were not completed until 1946 (history of). Surprisingly, the ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed almost 50 tons (history of). Some people say that ENIAC was also considered the first digital computer. Although ABC was never functional, we consider the first functional digital computer to be the ENIAC (history of). The first stored program computer was the EDSAC (history of). This stood for Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (the preparation). It was an early British Computer (the preparation). It is known as the first computer to perform its first calculation on May 6, 1949 (history of). Not only did the computer perform its first calculation; it ran the first graphical computer game. When Ed Roberts made the term “personal computer”, he introduced Altair 8800 (history of). This computer relied on a series of switches for inputting and outputting data by turning on and off lights (history of). When the light was on, that meant the bit was on. Some people considered the first personal computer to be the Kenback-1 (history of). This computer was sold for $750 in 1971. The first computer workstation was considered to be the Xerox Alto, introduced in 1974 (history of). This computer was a full functional computer (history of). It had a full display. It had a monitor where you can see windows, menus, and icons. This was not a computer with lights and switches. It had an interface to its operating system. You can close and minimize windows, click menus, and move icons.

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The portable computer was considered as a laptop. That’s how we got the name laptop. When the first portable computer came out, they became smaller. You could actually hold and carry them. The first portable computer was the Osborne 1 (history of). It was invented by Adam Osborne (the digital). Adam Osborne was an author and software publisher. The Osborne 1 had everything the Xerox Alto had. It weighed 24 pounds; it had a 5 inch display, and 64 KB of memory (history of). It also had two floppy drives. At this time, this was the way of storing files and data. IBM PCD released IBM portable in 1984 (history of). It was IBM’s first portable computer which weighed in at 30 pounds (history of). It wasn’t much a difference to The Osborne, but still weighed more. After that, IBM PCD later announced The PC convertible (history of). The PC convertible weighed 12 pounds (history of). So, the PC convertible was more portable than the Osborne 1. About 8 years later, IBM introduced IBM Thinkpad 775CD. This was the first laptop with a CD-ROM (history of). The CD-ROM drive was introduced at this time. The first PC was the 701; IBM’s first shipped electric computer (history of). Later in 1981, they called it the IBM PC (history of). It got it’s name PC because IBM felt the computer was used by 1 user. Not by more than 1. So then they called personal. After that, they referred to it as a personal computer. It’s code name was sometimes referred to as Acorn (history of). It had a 8088 processor, 16 KB of memory (history of). It was expandable to 256 KB of memory. This computer used the well known operating system, MS-DOS (history of). The IBM PC was often mocked. Companies wanted to make a similar PC because IBM PC mad a lot of money. IBM PC was very popular at being a personal computer. So, Compaq cloned IBM PC and made the Compaq Portable. The Compaq portable was actually very

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portable for being its name. The ad released when the Compaq Portable was announced had 4 computers. From left to right it reads,“ Hard to Carry - Hard to Read – Hard to expand – Hard to Beat. Under Hard to beat it has the Compaq Portable. So, the Compaq portable was very portable and it was hard to beat. At it’s time, no computer was better than the Compaq Portable. It was a solid white case that had a handle attached, for being portable. There was a button to release the bottom part. Boom! A keyboard falls down. After that, a display and two floppy drives were visible. It was more portable than the IBM PC and it did over sell the IBM PC (Welcome to). The Compaq portable was announced in November 1982 and it shipped January 1983 for $3,590 (Welcome to). Apple is a leading computer company today. Although, without the Apple 1 invented there would be no Apple Company at this time. Steve Wozniak was the engineer of the Apple 1. Apple 1 was Apples’ very first computer. They were sold in kits (history of). It required users to add a case, power supply, keyboard, and display (Welcome to). The kit was at the price of $666.66 because Steve liked repeating digits (Welcome to). And this was his invention. He could do anything he wanted with it. In the ad, they said “No more switches, No more lights.” After Apple 1, there came Apple 2. Apple became popular and is now owned by Steve Jobs. Steve W and Steve J were in computer club in school. Apple has lead onto some wonderful computers. The first multimedia computer was the M2500 XL/2. It was based on the MPC standard. The company of the M2500 XL/2 was the Electronics Controls Company and was founded 1949 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Those were the same individuals who created the ENIAC computer. After that, the company was renamed to EMCC or Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.

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Ever wonder what an Operating System was(Moumina, Ayman)? An operating system is the interface between the computer hardware and the user(Moumina, Ayman). It is the manager of the resources inside the computer(Moumina, Ayman). This is storage, data, and memory, CPU, and Input/output devices. The operating system assigns system resources. It also manages scheduled jobs for the computer to run, as well as recording everything and putting it into a log. For instance, recording when a specific user signed on. Or when a user accessed something they shouldn’t, like security. (Moumina, Ayman) At first in 1940, it started with light bulbs and switches. One switch turned on one light. There were eight lights. Each light and switch represented a bit(Moumina, Ayman). When the switch was flipped on, the light bulb was on; and when the light bulb was on, it meant the bit was on. That was back then. Now, the operating systems changed as the needs of a user(Moumina, Ayman). Computers became more popular in the day, after light bulbs were used to represent bits. After being changed a little, they could only run one user at a time(Moumina, Ayman). This was bad, because what if someone else wanted to use the computer? There was nothing to keep tracked of when a user signed in or signed out. So what was done was they kept log sheets and looked at wall time. Before you do anything, you need to setup the computer for use. Setup consisted of turning on the computer, loading the operating system, and loading any storage you had(Moumina, Ayman). For instance, you would need to roll up the tape, or insert a big magnetic disk(Moumina, Ayman). Some users complained about the time required to setup. You couldn’t just push the power button and there you go (Moumina, Ayman). You have all your saved documents and everything. So, they said “Hey, if we can automate the task of setting up, we can get on the computer faster.” So, companies listened.

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IBM made the OS/360. OS stands for Operating System. It was an operating system mainly for programming. It consisted of one million lines of code. Users said it was everything they wanted, but could make it more user friendly. But, it was only used by programmers so it wasn’t very friendly. It was all code. No interface yet, meaning you had to type everything. In 1970, a real known operating system is developed. The internet was growing at this point. So, Unix is developed. People thought it was very hard and expensive to build (Moumina, Ayman). First Unix was build on assembly language. It could only be used on a certain machine. Unix was built for programming, research, and development. In the early 1970’s, Unix was working fine. Users have reported it was the best operating system at the time and it had everything to perform certain tasks (Moumina, Ayman). Unix is still out today. It’s an open source operating system. Meaning people are free to modify its code. In 1973 Ritchie designed a new language called “C.” (Moumina, Ayman) It was for writing programming systems. This can be used on any system which made it a portable Unix (Moumina, Ayman). Being portable Unix, it was the first time systems were written with anything BUT assembly language (Moumina, Ayman). Designers also expanded text processing capabilities. In 1973, Dennis Ritchie joined Unix which made a very big difference (Moumina, Ayman). After joining with Unix, he released a major update. In 1976, Gary Kildall developed an operating system called CP/M (Moumina, Ayman). It stood for Contro Program for Micros. He also developed the floppy drive. But, to use the floppy drive, it required special programming(Moumina, Ayman). This lead into the DOS (Disk Operating System) (Moumina, Ayman). Their were no worries about DOS. Only a few problems. They needed to have the data to be rapid(Moumina, Ayman)! The disk would have been separated in fragments. Wherever free space was, data would go there(Moumina, Ayman).

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Disk operating systems needed to be designed in a way that data can be found, free space could be located, data can be put on a disk, and it can be retrieved later. DOS had all this (Moumina, Ayman). While using the OS, he recognized that the floppy drive would be a good storage device. It had several advantages over magnetic or paper (Moumina, Ayman). After DOS, MS-DOS came into the picture. It was the same as DOS, but it was created by Microsoft. A leading computer and software company used today. It was about 10 million dollars to make MS-DOS (Moumina, Ayman). Their were over half a million copies sold at the end of 1993. After MS-DOS, Microsoft has finally made the wish of every user possible. This was to have a easy interface in Operating Systems. It was called a graphical user interface. Typing words to perform tasks took too long. So Microsoft made an interface. It looked like many computers today. It had menus, icons, and windows. After producing a graphical user interface, Microsoft released Windows 1.0(Moumina, Ayman). Since release of Windows 1.00, Microsoft released Windows 2.0, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and our popular used today, Windows XP. Operating systems have improved so much! Before DOS, users had to roll up tape for their storage. After that, they typed about 100 letters to save a text documents on the roll of tape. With technology today, it’s easier! All you do is open a text processing program, type your text, and within two clicks it’s saved inside your computer. This is a wonderful improvement in computers. Computer storage has upgraded big time. Storage was used to save data or documents so you can retrieve it later. Some ways of storage, data couldn’t be retrieved as fast as it can today. While using the computer in 1952, they had to roll up tape and put it on a tape system. Magnetic tape allowed for massive amount of data (Rusch, Richard). They used vacuum’s to keep the tape loop circulating (Rusch, Richard). It wasn’t the coolest and easiest, but it worked (Rusch, Richard). They were rented for about $850 a month (Rusch, Richard)! Next came the magnetic

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disk. It served as random access memory (Welcome to). Basically, it could allow more programs to run at a time. They were stacked up on top of each other and rotated with a drive shaft (Computer History). In 1961, IBM has released a storage unit (Computer History). They had disk drives inside the unit. It was used for mainframe computers. The maximum capacity was 28 million characters (Computer history). That is not a lot compared to today. The disks were rotated at 1,800 RPM (Computer History). The units were leased for $2,100 a month! OR they could be purchased for $115,500. It had a read and write arm for every disk. Those are still in use today. Next came virtual memory in 1962, from a team under the direction of Tom Kilburn at Univeristy of Manchester (Computer History). Virtual memory allowed users to switch to different programs. It used its disk storage to run multiple programs. It’s perfect for time sharing. Also, nothing had to be done to use it. It was… Well, virtual! There was no physical hardware involved. In 1980, hard drives start to come out. Seagate was first to create hard disk drives. The disk drives were 5 MB of data (Computer History). That is very small compared to drives today. But, 5 MB was 5 times as much as a standard floppy disk (Computer History). The hard disk drive fit in the space of a floppy disk drive (Computer History). So it was almost changeable with a floppy drive. If you wanted removable storage, you would pick floppy drive. If you wanted storage on your computer, and didn’t want to remove it, choose a hard disk drive. Popular storage today is all about CD-ROM. They were released in 1983. They were able to hold 550 megabytes of data. This could be music, or just files. The space was pretty large. Think about it like this. 9 million words in the encyclopedia took only 12 percent of the cd-rom

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(computer history). While that, all the computer companies tried to make disks for any computer so that any computer can access the information (computer history). Technology has changed so much! Over the time, computers have been getting smaller and smaller. Data is being transferred faster because it’s being enlarged. Before the DOS operating system, computers had light bulbs and light switches to represent bits turned on. It was more complicated when users had to setup a computer to be able to use them. They wasted time just to put tape on a roller to save and retrieve data. More users complained about the time taking tasks, and more companies listened to create a better way. So, Microsoft put out Windows 1.0. It was the first operating system to have windows, menus, and icons. After this, users were more happy with it because it created simplicity for users to perform special tasks that would usually take hours doing. Storage has changed as well. It’s been a hassle to load up magnetic tape when using a computer. It was also expensive renting these storage units. So, invented was a floppy drive; a drive that had 3 ½ inch diskettes. They were floppy material. They were removable so you can use them on any computer. After that, the CD-ROM was created. Those were plastic disks that were removable. They enlarged the size on them as well. Before, only a few files can fit. Now, 9 million words only take up 12 percent. That’s an improvement! Without several college students, there wouldn’t be technology like there is today. If Steve W. and Steve J. didn’t make the Apple 1, who would be the leading computer company now? If Ritchie never made the language “C”, what would happen? We wouldn’t be able to use operating systems on any computer only specific computers. Technology has changed. If it didn’t change, we would be typing and saving documents on magnetic disks. It would be such a hassle to retrieve data. Just what would happen with the world without computers and other leading technology? Where would we be without it all.

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“Computer History Museum” 14 Oct 2009. . “history of computers.” 14 Oct 2009. . Interview- Research department. . Moumina, Ayman. "History of Operating Systems." (2001): 38-1. Print. Rusch, Richard. Computers: Their history and how they work. 1st. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.

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Print. "The Digital Century." PC World (Dec 1999): NA. Student Resource Center Silver. Gale. Pen Argyl Area. High School Library. 14 Oct. 2009. . “The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer “ by Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler and Stanley Gill, Addison–Wesley, Edition 1, 1951.

"Welcome to the obsolete technology website." Old Computers- rare, vintage , and obsolete computers. The Sysop, Web. 14 Oct 2009. .