17 Facts About Computer History You Didn't Know Before - Tech Mutants

 

17 Facts About Computer History You Didn't Know Before

WordStar, another word processing software, was released in 1975.

 

In 1975, Microsoft, the unofficial partnership of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, attained sales of $16,000.

 

In 1958, Chester Carlson invented the Xerox machine. The integrated circuit was invented at the same time, enabling the miniaturization of electronic devices.   

 

Edmund Gunter of England invented the slide rule as early as 1692

 

The EDSAC ran its first program on May 6,1949. It wasn't the first stored-program computer, but rather, the first practical one.

 

In the 1940s, Hungarian-American John von Neumann devised the von Neumann architecture for computers, which is the basic architecture that you see today in virtually every non-parallel-processing computer around, and ever to have been built.

 

The first von Neumann-architecture computer to be actually constructed and operated was the Manchester Mark l, designed and built at Manchester University in England.

 

In the summer of 1969, UNIX was developed. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was born the same year.

 

The first edition of the Unix Programmer's Manual, by K Thompson and D Ritchie, was released in 1971. 

 

In 1993, Intel released the Pentium processor. It was a 60 MHz processor, incorporating 3.2 million transistors. It sold for $878 apiece. 

 

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a student in Finland, introduced Linux. He posted the following words to the comp.os.minix newsgroup: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486 ) AT clones. 

 

In 1995, SCO acquired the UNIX Systems source technology business from Novell Corporation.

 

In August, 1995, Microsoft Windows 95 was released. It sold more than a million copies within the first four days of its launch.

 

In 2001, Microsoft filed a trademark suit against Lindows.com in December. It won the case in early 2004 .

 

Computers were sold commercially for the first time in 1951.

 

AT&T manufactured the first commercial modem, the Bell 103, in 1962. 

 

The world's first minicomputer, Digital Equipment's PDP-8, was introduced in 1965, and cost a phenomenal $18,000.