History of Computing

History of Computers

IBM  helped launch the PC revolution in the 1980s.

The first hard disk drive running back in 1956

A 2,000-pound unit that cost $35,000 per year to operate.

It also held only 5 megabytes (MB).

The first microchip invented in 1958, by Jack Kilby, a Texas Instrument engineer.

Intel developed the 4004 chip in 1971.

In 1975,  Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft to make computer software. 

Gates was 20 years old. MSFT is worth $3 trillion dollars in 2024.

Apple was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Jobs was just 21. AAPL is worth $3.3 trillion dollars in 2024.

IBM introduced the first PC in 1981.

Apple’s first computer introduced in 1983.

The Computer architecture

Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the brains.

Hardware component that's the core computational unit in a server.

8008 was the first eight-bit processor produced by Intel, 

Intel - Intel's first 16-bit processor was the 8086.

Intel® Core™ Ultra processors and Intel® Core™ 14th gen processors.

Intel® Core™ processor N-Series. 

Intel® Processor—a new offering that will replace the Intel Pentium® d Intel Celeron® branding.

 Memory (RAM): This is where the computer stores data that is actively being used.

Storage Devices: These devices, such as hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs), are used to store data and programs permanently.

What it took to store data on a PC from the early days through today. 

A 5.25-inch floppy drive from an original IBM PC. IBM created the floppy drive as a means of read-only magnetic storage in 1972. 

Floppy disks originally came in a size of Steve Wozniak designed the first external

 Apple II disk drive in 1978; it used a 5.25-inch floppy disk. 

The original IBM PC 5150 that debuted in August 1981 offered the option of 

one or two internal 5.25-inch floppy drives. Each floppy diskette could hold 

160 kilobytes on one side, or 320KB 

You could use both (not Hard drives soon became the permanent, long-term 

data storage standard, and next-generation floppy disks would soon take over 

for portability,

3.5-inch floppy disks.

IBM made a 2.88MB double-sided extended-density diskette for the IBM PS/2, but that standard went nowhere.

Microsoft shipped a version of Windows 98 that required sequentially inserting 21 different floppy disks to install it on a hard drive.

The IBM PC's first HDD was the Seagate Technology Model ST-412

The interface between it and the motherboard became the de facto disk drive standard for several years.

The impact of spacious, local, re-writable storage on a platter changed everything. Hard drives continued to dominate system storage decades later due to their overall reliability and ever-increasing speed and capacity.

A USB drive in a Swiss army knife (Credit: René Ramos/Victorinox via Amazon)

2000 saw the first ever Universal Serial Bus (USB)-based flash-memory drive, 

mainstream USB port and non-volatile NAND flash memory, the ThumbDrive was among the first chips

 that didn’t require power to retain data. 

That initial 1.0 USB specification gave way to the 30x faster speeds of 2.0, which 

only helped flash memory drives. By 2004 the first 1GB flash drive shipped.

Using a CD-ROM with a laptop.

The read-only memory that changed the world. The fully-optical-and-digital compact 

disc full of data held up to 650MB on 1.2 mm of polycarbonate plastic with a reflective

 aluminum surface.

A CD-R and a CD-RW with a printable surface (Credit: René Ramos/Verbatim via Amazon)

The compact disc-recordable (CD-R) was originally called the CD-Write-Once and 

uses some of the same technology.

Solid-State Drive (SSD)

Samsung Solid State Drive (Credit: René Ramos/Zlata Ivleva)

The first SSD appeared in 1991, but it took a few decades for the tech to go

 mainstream. It's essentially like flash drive memory, on a grander scale of capacity,

and using semiconductor cells for non-volatile storage. SSDs work in a PC like HDDs, 

but without any of the moving parts that spell eventual doom. 

And SSDs are a lot faster, making them perfect for booting up an operating system.

SSDs often accompany HDDs in lower-cost PCs, and increasingly the SSD is the only

 drive on board.