Computer History in Pics

Osborne 1 Portable Computer, 1981.
The Osborne 1 was the first commercially successful portable microcomputer(but needs external power source), released in April, 1981 by Osborne Computer Corporation. It weighed 23.5 pounds (10.7 kg), cost US$1795, and ran the then-popular CP/M 2.2 operating system.

It have had a very small built-in screen (8.75 x 6.6 cm, which could display 128 columns!!). The first models couldn’t display more than 52 columns by line, so to access to the 76 other columns, the user had to scroll among the screen thanks to the cursor keys.

ENIAC, 1944.
ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems. ENIAC was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory.

It was constructed by the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering from July, 1943. It was unveiled on February 14, 1946 at Pennsylvania, having cost almost $500,000.

ENIAC Tubes

ENIAC Wiring

SAGE, 1954.
IBM’s SAGE(Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) is a large semi-automated air defense system from the Cold War era. It would analyze radar data in real-time to identify Soviet bombers.

The machine weighed 300 tons and occupied one floor of a concrete blockhouse. It have had Dual Processor: one on line and other trainning, maintenance and hot backup. It costed aproximately $10B (1954’s dollars :)).

JOHNNIAC, 1954.
The JOHNNIAC was an early computer built by RAND Corporation that was based on the von Neumann architecture that had been pioneered on the IAS machine. It was named in honor of von Neumann, short for John v. Neumann Integrator and Automatic Computer. JOHNNIAC cost $470,000 and was equipped with memory of 4K.

WISC, 1955.
The Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer (WISC) was an early digital computer designed and built at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

WISC had 1024 55-bit words of drum memory and an instruction rate of 60 operations per second, which was achieved by an early form of instruction pipeline. It was capable of both fixed and floating-point operation. Cost: $50,000.

NEAC 2203, 1959.
Manufactured by the Nippon Electric Company (NEC), the drum-based machine was one of the earliest transistorized Japanese computers.

Magnetic core memory was still expensive, so the memory unit had a 3-level hierarchical organization comprised of magnetic core (240 words), high-speed magnetic drum (2k words, 10,000 rpm) and magnetic drum (10k words, 1,500 rpm, up to 10 drums).

It was used for business, scientific and engineering applications.

IBM 7030 Stretch, 1961.
A precursor the System/360 the 7030 was IBM’s first try to create a supercomputer. It was developed for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Price: $13.5 million.

Even though the 7030 was much slower than expected, the 7030 was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until 1964.

CDC 6600, 1964.
For a time the fastest machine in the world, Control Data Corporation’s 6600 machine was designed by noted computer architect Seymour Cray. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times. It remained the world’s fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer, 1969.
The Honeywell Kitchen Computer or H316 pedestal model of 1969 was a short-lived product made by Honeywell and offered by Neiman Marcus. It sold for $10,600, weighs over 100 pounds, and is used for storing recipes (but reading or entering these recipes would have been very difficult for the average cook as the only “user interface” was the binary front panel lights and switches). It had a built in cutting board and had a few recipes built in. There is no evidence that any Honeywell Kitchen Computers were ever sold.

Apple I, 1976.
The Apple I, also known as the Apple-1, was an early personal computer. It was designed by Steve Wozniak for personal use. Wozniak’s friend Steve Jobs had the idea of selling the computer and they sold 50 pieces at a price of $666.66(because Wozniak liked repeating digits and because they originally sold it to a local shop for $500 and added a one-third markup).

Unlike other hobbyist computers of its day, which were sold as kits, the Apple I was a fully assembled circuit board containing about 30 chips. However, to make a working computer, users still had to add a case, power supply, keyboard, and display. An optional board providing a cassette interface for data storage was later released for $75.

Today an estimated 30 to 50 Apple Is are still known to exist, making it a collector’s item. An Apple I reportedly sold for $50,000 at auction in 1999; however, a more typical price for an Apple I is in the $14,000–$16,000 range.