History of computers BY: J.T. TROTT

1958-ARPA  ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency)  In the late 1950's the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was founded in the United States with the primary focus of developing information technologies that could survive a nuclear attack.

1956-Byte  Werner Buchholz coins the term Byte in  A group of binary digits or bits (usually eight) operated on as a unit.  A byte considered as a unit of memory size.

RAMAC  On September 13, 1956 the IBM 305 RAMAC is the first computer to be shipped with a hard drive that contained inch platters and was capable of storing 5 million characters and weighed a ton.  Is a multiple-disk storage subsystem from IBM that emphasizes fault-tolerance and is intended for large enterprises.

1956-FORTRAN  The programming language FORTRAN is introduced to the public October 15,  One of the oldest programming languages, the FORTRAN was developed by a team of programmers at IBM led by John Backus, and was first published in The name FORTRAN is an acronym for FORmula TRANslation, because it was designed to allow easy translation of math formulas into code.

1956-FORTRAN Continued  FORTRAN was the first high-level language, using the first compiler ever developed.  Prior to the development of FORTRAN computer programmers were required to program in machine/assembly code, which was an extremely difficult and time consuming task, not to mention the dreadful chore of debugging the code.

1956-FORTRAN Continued  The objective during it's design was to create a programming language that would be: simple to learn, suitable for a wide variety of applications, machine independent, and would allow complex mathematical expressions to be stated similarly to regular algebraic notation. While still being almost as efficient in execution as assembly language.  Since FORTRAN was so much easier to code, programmers were able to write programs 500% faster than before, while execution efficiency was only reduced by 20%, this allowed them to focus more on the problem solving aspects of a problem, and less on coding.

1958-Integrated Circuit  The first integrated circuit is first developed by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments. The first IC is demonstrated on September 12,  an electronic circuit formed on a small piece of semiconducting material, performing the same function as a larger circuit made from discrete components.

1959-Panasonic  Net Sales*7,736.5 billion yen  Number of Employees*271,789  Number of Consolidated Companies*505 (including parent company)*as of March 31, 2014  Panasonic is ranked 105 th in the fortune 500 companies  Panasonic was founded by: Konosuke Matsushita