Friday, December 31, 2010

“Man of the Year”

Time magazine names the Computer “Man of the Year” in 1982. "Computers were once regarded as distant, ominous abstractions, like Big Brother. In 1982, they truly became personalized, brought down to scale, so that people could hold, prod and play with them."
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Thursday, December 30, 2010

Cyberspace

Novelist William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in his award winning 1984 science fiction novel "Neuromancer." Gibson describes cyberspace as "a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where, since about the time of the Second World War, we've increasingly done so many of the things that we think of as civilization."
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Wednesday, December 29, 2010

IBM

International Business Machines, the largest computer company in the world, starts in New York in 1911 when the Computing Tabulating Recording Company is created by a merger of the Tabulating Machine Company, International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Company, and Bundy Manufacturing. Computing Tabulating Recording is renamed International Business Machines in 1924.
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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Manchester Mark I

The Manchester Mark I computer is built at the University of Manchester England in 1949. It is historically significant due to its pioneering inclusion of index registers in its architecture, as well as being the platform on which Autocode is developed, one of the first high-level computer languages. The Manchester Mark 1 was used for Riemann hypothesis and calculations in optics.
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Monday, December 27, 2010

Comptometer

Dorr Eugene Felt develops the Comptometer in 1886. The Comptometer is the first practical key-driven calculator with sufficient speed and reliability to bring significant economic benefits to the processing of business data. A largely unheralded pioneer of today's data processing business, many of Felt's machines were still in use some fifty years after his death.
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Sunday, December 26, 2010

UNIVAC I

The Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC I) is delivered to its first customer, the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1951. Developed by Remington-Rand, the first American computer designed for commercial business use weighs 8 tons and uses 5,000 vacuum tubes. The machine can perform about 1,000 calculations per second. Remington-Rand sells forty-six UNIVAC machines by 1957.
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Saturday, December 25, 2010

Opera browser

Two engineers at the Norwegian telecom company Telenor develop the MultiTorg Opera browser in 1994 for the company's intranet. In time, their economical and fast browser becomes a popular alternative to the Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers. The two engineers start the Opera Software Company in late 1995 after Telenor allows the pair to continue development of the browser on their own.
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