What was the first desktop computer in the world

Operational by , it was not the first computerized reservation system, but it was well publicized and became very influential.

It was the world's first commercial bit minicomputer and systems were sold. This printing programmable calculator was made from discrete transistors and an acoustic delay-line memory. The Programma could do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, as well as calculate square roots. It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP's growing family of programmable test and measurement products. It interfaced with a wide number of standard laboratory instruments, allowing customers to computerize their instrument systems.

The A also marked HP's first use of integrated circuits in a commercial product. A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the lunar surface. Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes into the display and keyboard unit DSKY. The AGC was one of the earliest uses of integrated circuits, and used core memory, as well as read-only magnetic rope memory.

The astronauts were responsible for entering more than 10, commands into the AGC for each trip between Earth and the Moon. The Nova line of computers continued through the s, and influenced later systems like the Xerox Alto and Apple 1. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its byte memory. In , after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors.

Initially designed for internal use by HP employees, co-founder Bill Hewlett issues a challenge to his engineers in fit all of the features of their desktop scientific calculator into a package small enough for his shirt pocket. They did. The HP helped HP become one of the most dominant companies in the handheld calculator market for more than two decades. The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel , appears in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the had transistors and could perform up to 90, operations per second in four-bit chunks.

Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture. Under the direction of engineer Dr. Based on the Intel microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. Designer Thi Truong developed the computer while Philippe Kahn wrote the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that did not require high performance, such as process control and highway toll collection.

In , Truong sold R2E to Bull. Designed by Don Lancaster, the TV Typewriter is an easy-to-build kit that can display alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A cassette tape interface provided supplementary storage for text. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the s. Wang was a successful calculator manufacturer, then a successful word processor company.

The Wang makes it a successful computer company, too. Wang sold the primarily through Value Added Resellers, who added special software to solve specific customer problems. The first commercially advertised US computer based on a microprocessor the Intel , the Scelbi has 4 KB of internal memory and a cassette tape interface, as well as Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces.

Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. In , Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market.

The Alto is a groundbreaking computer with wide influence on the computer industry. It was based on a graphical user interface using windows, icons, and a mouse, and worked together with other Altos over a local area network. It could also share files and print out documents on an advanced Xerox laser printer. For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders.

Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor. The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications.

Southwest Technical Products is founded by Daniel Meyer as DEMCO in the s to provide a source for kit versions of projects published in electronics hobbyist magazines. Of the dozens of different SWTP kits available, the proved the most popular. Tailored for online transaction processing, the Tandem is one of the first commercial fault-tolerant computers. The banking industry rushed to adopt the machine, built to run during repair or expansion. The Video Display Module VDM marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers.

Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March , the visual display module enabled the use of personal computers for interactive games. The fastest machine of its day, The Cray-1's speed comes partly from its shape, a "C," which reduces the length of wires and thus the time signals need to travel across them.

High packaging density of integrated circuits and a novel Freon cooling system also contributed to its speed. Typical applications included US national defense work, including the design and simulation of nuclear weapons, and weather forecasting. Intel and Zilog introduced new microprocessors. Five times faster than its predecessor, the , the Intel could address four times as many bytes for a total of 64 kilobytes. The Zilog Z could run any program written for the and included twice as many built-in machine instructions.

Designed by Sunnyvale, California native Steve Wozniak, and marketed by his friend Steve Jobs, the Apple-1 is a single-board computer for hobbyists. With an order for 50 assembled systems from Mountain View, California computer store The Byte Shop in hand, the pair started a new company, naming it Apple Computer, Inc. In all, about of the boards were sold before Apple announced the follow-on Apple II a year later as a ready-to-use computer for consumers, a model which sold in the millions for nearly two decades.

When connected to a color television set, the Apple II produced brilliant color graphics for the time. Millions of Apple IIs were sold between and , making it one of the longest-lived lines of personal computers. Apple gave away thousands of Apple IIs to school, giving a new generation their first access to personal computers.

The TRS proved popular with schools, as well as for home use. The TRS line of computers later included color, portable, and handheld versions before being discontinued in the early s. The first of several personal computers released in , the PET comes fully assembled with either 4 or 8 KB of memory, a built-in cassette tape drive, and a membrane keyboard. The PET was popular with schools and for use as a home computer.

After the success of the PET, Commodore remained a major player in the personal computer market into the s. The success of the VAX family of computers transformed DEC into the second-largest computer company in the world, as VAX systems became the de facto standard computing system for industry, the sciences, engineering, and research.

Shortly after delivery of the Atari VCS game console, Atari designs two microcomputers with game capabilities: the Model and Model The served primarily as a game console, while the was more of a home computer.

Atari's 8-bit computers were influential in the arts, especially in the emerging DemoScene culture of the s and '90s. The Motorola microprocessor exhibited a processing speed far greater than its contemporaries.

This high performance processor found its place in powerful work stations intended for graphics-intensive programs common in engineering. Intended to be a less expensive alternative to the PET, the VIC was highly successful, becoming the first computer to sell more than a million units.

Commodore even used Star Trek television star William Shatner in advertisements. About 50, were sold in Britain, primarily to hobbyists, and initially there was a long waiting list for the system. The machine was expandable, with ports for cassette storage, serial interface and rudimentary networking.

The DN is based on the Motorola microprocessor, high-resolution display and built-in networking - the three basic features of all workstations. Apollo and its main competitor, Sun Microsystems, optimized their machines to run the computer-intensive graphics programs common in engineering and scientific applications. Apollo was a leading innovator in the workstation field for more than a decade, and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in IBM's brand recognition, along with a massive marketing campaign, ignites the fast growth of the personal computer market with the announcement of its own personal computer PC.

It featured a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, a modem, and two 5. Thousands of software titles were released over the lifespan of the C64 and by the time it was discontinued in , it had sold more than 22 million units.

It is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest selling single computer of all time. Franklin was able to undercut Apple's pricing even while offering some features not available on the original. Sun Microsystems grows out of this prototype. Sun helped cement the model of a workstation having an Ethernet interface as well as high-resolution graphics and the UNIX operating system.

Lisa is the first commercial personal computer with a graphical user interface GUI. It was thus an important milestone in computing as soon Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh would soon adopt the GUI as their user interface, making it the new paradigm for personal computing.

The success of the Portable inspired many other early IBM-compatible computers. Compaq's success launched a market for IBM-compatible computers that by had achieved an percent share of the personal computer market. The Macintosh was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface and was based on the Motorola microprocessor.

The PC Jr. While the PC Jr. It also included more memory and accommodated high-density 1. By the early s, Dell became one of the leading computer retailers. It developed a very loyal following while add-on components allowed it to be upgraded easily. The inside of the Amiga case is engraved with the signatures of the Amiga designers, including Jay Miner as well as the paw print of his dog Mitchy.

At 4 million operations per second and 4 kilobytes of memory, the gave PCs as much speed and power as older mainframes and minicomputers. The chip brought with it the introduction of a bit architecture, a significant improvement over the bit architecture of previous microprocessors. It had two operating modes, one that mirrored the segmented memory of older x86 chips, allowing full backward compatibility, and one that took full advantage of its more advanced technology.

It performed 2 million instructions per second, but other RISC-based computers worked significantly faster. Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corporation moves artificial intelligence a step forward when he develops the controversial concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine CM The machine used up to 65, one-bit processors and could complete several billion operations per second.

Each processor had its own small memory linked with others through a flexible network that users altered by reprogramming rather than rewiring. Using this system, the machine could work faster than any other at the time on a problem that could be parceled out among the many processors.

One of Britain's leading computer companies, Acorn continued the Archimedes line, which grew to nearly twenty different models, into the s. The computer he created, an all-black cube was an important innovation. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly was invalid. In the decision, Larson named Atanasoff the sole inventor. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in and was not completed until It occupied about 1, square feet and used about 18, vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons.

Although a judge later ruled the ABC computer was the first digital computer, many still consider the ENIAC to be the first digital computer because it was fully functional.

Kilburn wrote the first electronically-stored program, which finds the highest proper factor of an integer , using repeated subtraction rather than division. Kilburn's program was executed on June 21, It was also the first computer to run a graphical computer game, "OXO," an implementation of tic-tac-toe displayed on a 6-inch cathode ray tube.

Around the same time, the Manchester Mark 1 was another computer that could run stored programs. Built at the Victoria University of Manchester, the first version of the Mark 1 computer became operational in April Mark 1 was used to run a program to search for Mersenne primes for nine hours without error on June 16 and 17 that same year. The first computer company was Electronic Controls Company and was founded in by J.

In , Konrad Zuse began working on the Z4 that later became the first commercial computer. On April 7, , IBM publicly introduced the , its first commercial scientific computer. MIT introduces the Whirlwind machine on March 8, , a revolutionary computer that was the first digital computer with magnetic core RAM and real-time graphics.

The TX-0 Transistorized Experimental computer is the first transistorized computer to be demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in In , the first desktop computer, the Programma , was unveiled to the public at the New York World's Fair. It was invented by Pier Giorgio Perotto and manufactured by Olivetti.

In , Hewlett Packard began marketing the HP A , considered to be the first mass-marketed desktop computer. Although it was never sold, the first workstation is considered to be the Xerox Alto , introduced in The computer was revolutionary for its time and included a fully functional computer, display, and mouse.

The computer operated like many computers today utilizing windows , menus , and icons as an interface to its operating system. Intel introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel , on November 15, Considered as the first microcomputer, it used the Intel processor and was the first commercial non-assembly computer.

In , Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced the Altair The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights. The IBM is the first portable computer, which was released in September The computer weighed pounds and had a five-inch CRT display, tape drive , 1.

The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be the Osborne I , which was released in April and developed by Adam Osborne. The Osborne I weighed The computer kit was developed by Steve Wozniak in and contained a 8-bit processor and 4 kb of memory, which was expandable to 8 or 48 kb using expansion cards. Although the Apple I had a fully assembled circuit board, the kit required a power supply , display , keyboard , and case to be operational.

The Commodore 64 sold roughly 20 million units during its run. More: Can you afford that new vehicle? The Apple Lisa was one of the first commercially available personal computers with a graphical user interface. However, the Lisa's high cost ultimately doomed its chances of success.

The machine was inspired by the nearly decade old Xerox Alto, which also had a graphical user interface though was never made commercially available. The Macintosh is considered to be the first commercially successful computer to have a graphical user interface. Users could navigate by clicking through images with a mouse as opposed to the text-based commands used in earlier computers.

The Amiga was the world's first multimedia computer. It could run multiple tasks at once, and its superior graphics, sound, and video capabilities made it a favorite amongst graphic designers. The Amiga launch party also attracted artists and included the likes of Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, and musical group Blondie. The Compaq Portable II, though markedly lighter than its predecessors, is hardly portable by today's standards. Despite the machine's relatively small 9-inch monitor, it weighed 26 pounds and did not pack as neatly as modern laptops.

Like some of its predecessors, including the Commodore 64, the Commodore Amiga is one of the most popular computers in history, selling more than 6 million units. The Amiga was relatively affordable and was also the first commercially available machine capable of animation and graphic design work. Apple's first portable Macintosh computer, the Portable M had a crisper display and more processing power than most laptops available at the time.

While it was designed to be the first portable Apple computer, people were known to already carry Macintosh desktops under their arms or in carrying cases while traveling. At 16 pounds, the laptop weighed almost as much as the desktop that preceded it.

At the time of its release, the Poqet PC was the smallest computer on the market. It was powered by just two AA batteries and had innovative power management software that could make the batteries last for several weeks. Apple's first attempt at a portable laptop computer in resulted in the Macintosh Portable, which at 16 pounds nearly weighed as much as the desktop that had preceded it.

The PowerBook, however, weighed about 6 pounds and had all the processing power of the Portable. The PowerBook was also cheaper, and its keyboard position was considered an ergonomic innovation. In addition to a traditional keyboard system, users could touch the screen with a stylus to operate their computers. Watson, Sr. The device's flawed handwriting recognition software, however, led to poor sales and ultimately the product's discontinuation in While notebook computers were still far less popular than desktops, the innovation was an important step to wide public adoption of laptop computing.

The Gateway Solo was one such popular model. In the early days of laptop computing, computers were referred to by the number of spindles they had -- that is, the number of built-in storage drives. The Gateway Solo was the first three-spindle computer. More: 25 richest cities in America: Does your metro area make the list? Intel introduced the second generation of its popular Pentium processor in , the Pentium II.

Apple introduced in the next big thing in desktop PCs, combining both the monitor and components in a colorful case. The iMac, which offered one-click Internet access, also had considerably fewer previously used ports but two additional USB ports. This would become the standard input for most modern devices. The first computers with Pentium III processors became available in The first computers with Pentium 4 processors became available in The Gateway Performance was one of the most popular of the inaugural Pentium 4 computers.

In the history of Apple, was an important year. The company opened its first 25 Apple stores and released the Titanium PowerBook G4 to widespread acclaim. With its Pentium 4 processing power and detachable keyboard, the Toshiba Satellite was one of many advanced notebooks that heralded the public adoption of laptop computing.

More: Cost of living: The purchasing power of a dollar in every state. At the time of its release, the Power Mac G5 was the most powerful Macintosh computer.