"Computer"

The term computer commonly refers to a multi-purpose, solid-state machine. Up through the 1940s, the term "computer" referred to a job description to describe the array of activities performed by people in calculating numerical answers by the use of tables and primitive calculators.
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Commodore

Commodore files for liquidation in April 1994, concluding a long, rich history that begins when Holocaust survivor Jack Tramiel starts a typewriter repair business in New York in 1954. By 1962, Commodore is selling adding machines and later electronic calculators. During the 1980s, Commodore produces several well-received PCs including the Vic-20, Commodore 64 and the Commodore PC.
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Gottfried von Leibniz

"It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation, which could be safely relegated to anyone else if machines were used." - Gottfried von Leibniz.
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First high-speed printer

Remington-Rand develops the first high-speed printer for use on the Univac computer in 1953. The high-speed printer is comprised of four cabinets: a power supply, the printing machine, a control and checking device, and a tape reader. The tape fed printer produces six hundred lines of type per minute.
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Robert N. Noyce

Robert N. Noyce of Intel Corp receives the National Medal of Technology in 1987. He is credited for his semiconductor inventions and for his leadership in the research and development of the microprocessor, which has led to wider use of more powerful computers. These accomplishments are cited as having profound consequences both in the United States and throughout the world.
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SABRE System

The Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment (SABRE) system goes online in 1960 to serve the travel industry. The system was created by American Airlines and IBM in the 1950s and features the debut of online transaction processing. By 1964, SABRE is the largest private data processing system in the world. Today, Travelocity serves as the web front-end interface to the system.
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Huffman Coding

MIT student David Huffman conceptualizes the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree algorithm for loss-less data compression in 1951. Huffman comes up with the idea in response to his professor's term paper assignment. Today, "Huffman Coding" is used within several notable data compression products such as PKZIP, as well as the JPEG and MP3 file coding formats.
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