... only a chip supplier.
29. National Museum of American History, calculator collections. A Bowmar was
even mentioned in the hit Broadway play ‘‘Same Time Next Year,’’ which was
about an accountant’s ... accountant’s once -a- year affair with a woman. The accountant (played
by Alan Alda in the movie version) used the Bowmar to keep track of the affair.
30. Electronics (April 17, 198...
... 7 090 series gave the
equivalent of ten decimal digits. That was adequate for most applica-
tions, but many assumed that customers would not want a machine that
could not handle at least that many.
Minicomputers ... controlled, managed, and channeled the chaos of
technical innovation into market dominance. Central to smooth opera-
tions at IBM was a character from a best-seller from...
... original ARPANET). By January 199 3
Andreessen and Bina had written an early version of a browser they
would later call Mosaic, and they released a version of it over the
Internet.
50
Mosaic married ... help of others at NCSA, Mosaic was rewritten to run on
Windows-based machines and Macintoshes as well as workstations. As a
product of a government-funded laboratory, Mosaic wa...
... 194 5– 195 6 13
2
Computing Comes of Age, 195 6– 196 4 47
3
The Early History of Software, 195 2– 196 8 79
4
From Mainframe to Minicomputer, 195 9– 196 9 1 09
5
The ‘‘Go-Go’’ Years and the System/360, 196 1– 197 5 143
6
The ... programmers, and soft-
ware specialists that had to be hired into the company to manage a
machine that was supposed to eliminate clerical workers. It was n...
... carried
Computing Comes of Age, 195 6– 196 4 71
quality of ‘‘random access’’: that any piece of data was as accessible as
any other, in contrast to the sequential retrieval of a datum from a deck
of ... two decades later, in
the form of automatic teller machines, bar-coded products scanned at
supermarket and retail check-out stations, and massive financial and
personal databa...
... the Navy ordered Grace Murray Hopper to the
Computation Lab to assist Howard Aiken with programming it.
Hopper had been a professor of mathematics at Vassar College and
had taken leave to attend ... same program (with a few minor changes)
ran on a UNIVAC II and an RCA 501. Whether COBOL was well
designed and capable is still a matter of debate, however.
Part of COBOL’s ancestry...
... later). For
large and small systems, time-sharing became an acceptable and
economical way of using a computer.
A key factor was the development of disk storage that offered rapid
and direct access ... a single printed circuit board about 15 inches square.
This board was larger than what was standard at the time and made for a
very compact package.
In mid- 197 1 the company introdu...
... from a company that made
oscilloscopes.
By 197 0 the first of a line of dramatically cheaper and smaller
calculators appeared that used integrated circuits.
28
They were about
the size of a paperback ... continuous
discussions of the advantages and drawbacks of each—the one machine
having the ability to evaluate complex mathematical expressions with
ease, the other more primiti...
... formal and
serious than those on Usenet, although they also had a wide range. After
about a decade and a half of parallel operations, all three of these
streams blended into a community of news, ... the
Internet out of its ARPA roots in the 199 0s.
Bell Laboratories, where UNIX was created, was a part of AT&T, a
regulated monopoly. Before it breakup in 198 1, AT&...
... originated with Donald Davies of the
National Physical Laboratory in the U.K. See Martin Campbell-Kelly, ‘‘Data
Communications at the National Physical Laboratory ( 196 5– 197 5),’’ Annals of
the History ... delete all
unnecessary spaces from your program.’’ (MITS Altair BASIC Reference Manual,
56; National Museum of American History, Altair Curatorial File.)
91 . Manes and Andrews,...