The MacIntosh 'Lisa' was the first computer with a complete graphical user interface. Hanging off to the side of the Lisa was the first mouse to ever live outside the research lab.
Windows v1.0 was released by Microsoft in November 1985. Version 1.0 did not support overlapping windows. All of your applications were 'tiled' across the screen, each taking up the same amount of space.
Microsoft's formed their hardware group in 1982 and its first task was to build a mouse. The first Microsoft Mouse was introduced at the same time as Microsoft Word. About 100,000 mice were manufacturered, but only 5,000 were sold.
In the 1830's Charles Babbage developed a working calculating machine which worked with 6 digit numbers and was designed to solve second order difference equations.
Intel's codename for their latest processors, such as Klamath, Deschutes, and Merced are all taken from the names of rivers in California and Oregon.
IBM was founded in 1911 under the name 'Computer-Tabulating-Recording Co.'. It changed its name to International Business Machines Corp. in 1924.
The first IBM PC was introduced in 1981. Over 136,000 PCs were sold in its first 18 months of availablility. It came with 16K of memory and one or two 160K floppy diskettes. Prices started at $1,565.00!
In August 1982, Sinclair Research had sold half a million ZX81 personal computers, based chips by Zilog. At that time, IBM had only sold 200,000 PC, based on the Intel 8086 chip.
In October 1993, the IBM introduced the ill-fated PC Junior. William Bowman of Spinnaker Software said 'We're just sitting here trying to put our PCjrs in a pile and burn them. And the things won't burn. That's the only thing IBM did right with it - they made it flameproof.
Hewlett-Packard introduced the first HP Laser Jet in 1984. It printed at a resolution of 300 dots per inch and sold for $3,600.00.
The ENIAC computer, developed in 1946 by the University of Pennsylvania used over 18,000 vaccuum tubes.
The technology behind the modern day transistor was developed by John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain at AT&&T Laboratories in 1947. Transistors were the first practical replacement for vaccuum tubes in computers.
The Cray T3E-1200E supercomputer incorporates up to 2,048 microprocessors, each running at 600 megahertz. Intel's ASCI Red supercomputer has 9216 Pentium Pro processors and 584 gigabytes of RAM.
The Rover of the Mars Pathfinder mission used a standard, off-the-shelf 9600 baud radio modem from Motorola to communicate with the Pathfinder lander.
The high gain antenna on NASA's Galileo probe should have sent data back to Earth at 134,400 bits per second. When it failed to deploy properly, NASA was forced to used the low gain antenna which broadcasts at a rate of 16 bits per second.
Asymetric Digital Subscriber Lines (ADSL) are being rolled out in the U.S. and Canada and provide high-speed access to the Internet. For somtimes less than a $100 per month, ADSL users get performance equivalent to that of forty-two 56K baud modems!
In a typical computer configuration, the monitor accounts for 80% of the system's energy consumption. A monitor with power-saving features reduces the cost of operating a computer and is good for the environment.
The AltaVista web site is powered by 16 Alpha servers, each with 8 gigabytes of RAM, sharing a disk pack with 300 gigabytes of storage.
