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John Blankenbaker
The Kenbak-1 is considered by the Computer History Museum, the Computer Museum of America and the American Computer Museum to be the world's first "personal computer", invented by John Blankenbaker (born 1929) of Kenbak Corporation in 1970, and first sold in early 1971. Less than 50 machines were ever built using Bud Industries enclosures as its housing. The system first sold for United States dollar, US$750. Today, only 14 machines are known to exist worldwide, in the hands of various collectors and museums. Production of the Kenbak-1 stopped in 1973 as Kenbak failed, and was taken over by CTI Education Products, Inc. CTI rebranded the inventory and renamed it the 5050, though sales remained elusive. Since the Kenbak-1 was invented before the first microprocessor, the machine didn't have a one-chip central processing unit, CPU but instead was based purely on small-scale integration transistor-transistor logic, TTL integrated circuit, chips. The 8-bit machine offered 256 b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Personal Computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or technician. Unlike large, costly minicomputers and mainframes, time-sharing by many people at the same time is not used with personal computers. Primarily in the late 1970s and 1980s, the term home computer was also used. Institutional or corporate computer owners in the 1960s had to write their own programs to do any useful work with the machines. While personal computer users may develop their own applications, usually these systems run commercial software, free-of-charge software (" freeware"), which is most often proprietary, or free and open-source software, which is provided in "ready-to-run", or binary, form. Software for personal computers is typically developed and distributed independently from the hardware or operating system ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silicon Gate
In semiconductor electronics fabrication technology, a self-aligned gate is a transistor manufacturing approach whereby the gate electrode of a MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) is used as a mask for the doping of the source and drain regions. This technique ensures that the gate is naturally and precisely aligned to the edges of the source and drain. The use of self-aligned gates in MOS transistors is one of the key innovations that led to the large increase in computing power in the 1970s. Self-aligned gates are still used in most modern integrated circuit processes. Introduction IC construction Integrated circuits (ICs, or "chips") are produced in a multi-step process that builds up multiple layers on the surface of a disk of silicon known as a "wafer". Each layer is patterned by coating the wafer in photoresist and then exposing it to ultraviolet light being shone through a stencil-like "mask". Depending on the process, the photoresist th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Early Microcomputers
Early may refer to: History * The beginning or oldest part of a defined historical period, as opposed to middle or late periods, e.g.: ** Early Christianity ** Early modern Europe Places in the United States * Early, Iowa * Early, Texas * Early Branch, a stream in Missouri * Early County, Georgia Other uses * ''Early'' (Scritti Politti album), 2005 * ''Early'' (A Certain Ratio album), 2002 * Early (name) * Early effect, an effect in transistor physics * Early Records, a record label * the early part of the morning Morning is the period from sunrise to noon. There are no exact times for when morning begins (also true of evening and night) because it can vary according to one's lifestyle and the hours of daylight at each time of year. However, morning stric ... See also * Earley (other) {{disambiguation, geo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washington, United States. Its best-known software products are the Microsoft Windows, Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office Productivity software#Office suite, suite, and the Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's List of the largest software companies, largest software maker by revenue as of 2019. It is one of the Big Tech, Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Altair 8800
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in '' Radio-Electronics'', and in other hobbyist magazines. The Altair is widely recognized as the spark that ignited the microcomputer revolution as the first commercially successful personal computer. The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a ''de facto'' standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC. "This announcement ltair 8800ranks with IBM's announcement of the System/360 a decade earlier as one of the most significant in the history of computing." History While serving at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, Ed Roberts and Forrest M. Mims III decided to use their electronics background ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radio-Electronics
''Radio-Electronics'' was an American electronics magazine that was published under various titles from 1929 to 2003. Hugo Gernsback, sometimes called the father of science fiction, started it as ''Radio-Craft'' in July 1929. The title was changed to ''Radio-Electronics'' in October 1948 and again to ''Electronics Now'' in July 1992. In January 2000 it was merged with Gernsback's ''Popular Electronics'' to become '' Poptronics''. Gernsback Publications ceased operations in December 2002 and the January 2003 issue was the last. Over the years, ''Radio-Electronics'' featured audio, radio, television and computer technology. The most notable articles were the TV Typewriter (September 1973) and the Mark-8 computer (July 1974). These two issues are considered milestones in the home computer revolution. Earlier publications In 1905 Hugo Gernsback established Electro Importing Company to sell radio components and electrical supplies by mail order. The catalogs had detailed instructions ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mark-8
The Mark-8 is a microcomputer design from 1974, based on the Intel 8008 CPU (which was the world's first 8-bit microprocessor). The Mark-8 was designed by Jonathan Titus, a Virginia Tech graduate student in Chemistry. After building the machine, Titus decided to share its design with the community and reached out to '' Radio-Electronics'' and '' Popular Electronics''. He was turned down by ''Popular Electronics'', but ''Radio-Electronics'' was interested and announced the Mark-8 as a 'loose kit' in the July 1974 issue of ''Radio-Electronics'' magazine. Project kit The Mark-8 was introduced as a 'build it yourself' project in ''Radio-Electronicss July 1974 cover article, offering a US$5 booklet containing circuit board layouts and DIY construction project descriptions, with Titus himself arranging for $50 circuit board sets to be made by a New Jersey company for delivery to hobbyists. Prospective Mark-8 builders had to gather the various electronics parts themselves from var ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Datapoint 2200
The Datapoint 2200 was a mass-produced programmable computer terminal usable as a computer, designed by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) founders Phil Ray and Gus Roche and announced by CTC in June 1970 (with units shipping in 1971). It was initially presented by CTC as a versatile and cost-efficient terminal for connecting to a wide variety of mainframes by loading various terminal emulations from tape rather than being hardwired as most contemporary terminals, including their earlier Datapoint 3300. However, Dave Gust, a CTC salesman, realized that the 2200 could meet Pillsbury Foods's need for a small computer in the field, after which the 2200 was marketed as a stand-alone computer. Its industrial designer John "Jack" Frassanito has later claimed that Ray and Roche always intended the Datapoint 2200 to be a full-blown personal computer, but that they chose to keep quiet about this so as not to concern investors and others. Also significant is the fact that the terminal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Serial Computer
A serial computer is a computer typified by bit-serial architecture i.e., internally operating on one bit or digit for each clock cycle. Machines with serial main storage devices such as acoustic or magnetostrictive delay lines and rotating magnetic devices were usually serial computers. Serial computers require much less hardware than their parallel computing counterpart, but are much slower. There are modern variants of the serial computer available as a soft microprocessor which can serve niche purposes where size of the CPU is the main constraint. The first computer that was not serial (the first parallel computer) was the Whirlwind in 1951. A serial computer is not necessarily the same as a computer with a 1-bit architecture, which is a subset of the serial computer class. 1-bit computer instructions operate on data consisting of single bits, whereas a serial computer can operate on ''N''-bit data widths, but does so a single bit at a time. Serial machines * EDVA ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Machine Code
In computer programming, machine code is any low-level programming language, consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction causes the CPU to perform a very specific task, such as a load, a store, a jump, or an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) operation on one or more units of data in the CPU's registers or memory. Early CPUs had specific machine code that might break backwards compatibility with each new CPU released. The notion of an instruction set architecture (ISA) defines and specifies the behavior and encoding in memory of the instruction set of the system, without specifying its exact implementation. This acts as an abstraction layer, enabling compatibility within the same family of CPUs, so that machine code written or generated according to the ISA for the family will run on all CPUs in the family, including future CPUs. In general, each architecture family (e.g. x86, ARM) has it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Serial Memory
Serial may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media The presentation of works in sequential segments * Serial (literature), serialised literature in print * Serial (publishing), periodical publications and newspapers * Serial (radio and television), series of radio and television programs that rely on a continuing plot * Serial film, a series of short subjects, with a continuing story, originally shown in theaters, in conjunction with feature films, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s * Indian serial, a type of Indian television program Other uses in arts, entertainment, and media * ''Serial'' (1980 film), based on McFadden's novel, starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld * ''Serial'' (podcast), a podcast spinoff of the radio series ''This American Life'' * '' The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County'', a 1977 novel by Cyra McFadden Computing and technology * SerDes, a Serializer/Deserializer (pronounced sir-deez) * Serial ATA * Serial attached SCSI * Serial bus, e.g., * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Megahertz
The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one hertz is the reciprocal of one second. It is named after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–1894), the first person to provide conclusive proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves. Hertz are commonly expressed in multiples: kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz), gigahertz (GHz), terahertz (THz). Some of the unit's most common uses are in the description of periodic waveforms and musical tones, particularly those used in radio- and audio-related applications. It is also used to describe the clock speeds at which computers and other electronics are driven. The units are sometimes also used as a representation of the energy of a photon, via the Planck relation ''E'' = ''hν'', where ''E'' is the photon's energy, ''ν'' is its frequency, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
