The History of Computers

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 is the first comprehensive legislation in the U.S. to identify and provide for the prosecution of crimes committed through and against computer systems. In 1989, a Cornell University student becomes the first person prosecuted under the 1986 law for deploying a virus that shuts down computers at NASA, Purdue University and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
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The Mark 1

The Mark 1 computer is developed by Harvard graduate Howard H. Aiken at IBM in the early 1940s. Officially known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), the machine can add or subtract two numbers in three-tenths of a second, multiply them in four seconds, and divide them in ten seconds. The computer is 50 feet long, 8 feet tall, and weighs approximately 5 tons.
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The Internet

The Internet is born on October 29, 1969. UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock leads a team of engineers in sending the first message from one remote computer to another on ARPANET. The actual message sent from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute is the text "lo."
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Computer science

Purdue University establishes the first formal computer science department and degree program in October 1962. Computer science had been taught at many universities prior to 1962, but students received degrees in other disciplines, usually mathematics or electrical engineering. The first computer science related courses were offered by Harvard University in the late 1940s.
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Computer generated film

Bell Telephone scientist Edward Zajac creates the first computer generated film in 1963. The film "Simulation of a two-giro gravity attitude control system" shows how the path of a satellite could be altered as it orbits the Earth. The animation is created on an IBM 7090 mainframe computer. Soon after, other scientific researchers begin to develop computer generated films to graphically describe their activities.
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The laser printer

Xerox researcher Gary Starkweather invents the laser printer in 1969. Starkweather uses a laser beam with the xerography process to create a laser printer method. Remarkably, Xerox shows little initial interest in his invention. Starkweather persists and continues to refine the laser printer technology. He completes the first working laser printer in 1971.
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VAX

Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX computer is released on October 25, 1977 at the company's annual meeting of shareholders. VAX is an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension. It is the first commercially available 32 bit machine and a major milestone in computer history. The Vax is built from the ground-up along with its highly successful Virtual Memory System (VMS) operating system.
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