History of Computers By: Ethan Lehman

 Bombe (1941)  Allowed Allied forces to decipher Nazi codes during WWII  ERA 1101 (1950)  1 st marketable computer and stored 1 million bits on its magnetic drum (earliest storage device that used magnets)  701 (1953)  IBM’s first electronic computer that they shipped (only sold 19 total)

 Micral (1973)  First marketable computer established on a micro- processor  Apple II (1977)  Very successful due to its color graphics, printed circuit motherboard, and keyboard  Atari (1979)  Popularized the Model 400 and Model 800 and sold well

Grace Hopper(1945)  Sep. 9- created 1 st computer “bug” – a moth caught between relays  Admiral in U.S. Navy  Assisted in programming Harvard’s Mark I and II  Developed 1 st compiler (A-O) Alan Turing(1954)  Mathematical genius  Posed important questions about human intelligence  Helped break codes during WWII  Developed the theory of a “universal machine”

 Norbert Wiener  Presented “Cybernetics” which hugely influenced research in the future on artificial intelligence  Unimate  1 st industrial robot that worked at General Motors to stack pieces of hot metal  David Silver  Designed MIT, which assembled small-parts together  Stanford Cart  Hans Moravec built the Stanford Cart with a television camera to take pictures of things from different angles

o In 1952, magnetic tape was used for storage because it was not very expensive. It used a ‘vacuum channel’ process to rotate a circle of tape in between two points. o In the year of 1961, the IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit was released. It was sold for a whopping $115,500. o In 1971, an IBM team led by David Noble created an eight inch floppy diskette. It became widely popular because the floppy could be moved from one drive to another. o In the year 1994, Iomega Zip Disk was released. The first Zip Disk only held 100MB. Now a Disk can hold up to 2GB.

Computers have changed drastically over the years. From the Bombe to the Atari to our iPads now, many different discoveries in technology have made computers become easier and faster to use. There are still many changes to come, though.