Southern Illinoisan from Carbondale, Illinois • Page 114

MILLENNIUM MAGAZINE: TECHNOLOGY microcomputer hobbyist's club in French's garage, in Menlo Park, Calif. Thirty-two people meet, including Bob Albrect, Steve Dompier, and Steven Wozniak. Bob Albrect shows off an Altair, and Steve Dompier reports on MITS, and how they had 4000 orders for the Altair. April 1975. Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Micro-Soft.

July 1975. Dick Heiser opens Arrow Head Computer Company, subtitled "The Computer in Los Angeles, selling assembled Altairs, boards, peripherals, and magazines. This is the first retail computer store in the USA. graphics in the same document. At a starting price of the computer is not a commercial success.

During its lifetime, 100,000 units are produced. November 1981. Ashton-Tate ships dBase II, the early industry-standard database program. May 1982. Microsoft releases MS-DOS 1.1 to IBM, for the IBM PC.

It supports 320KB double-sided floppy disk drives. Microsoft also releases MS-DOS 1.25, similar to 1.1 but for IBM-compatible computers. June 1982. The first IBM PC clone, the MPC, is released by Columbia Data Products. November 1982.

Lotus Development announces the Lotus 1-2-3 September 1975. The first issue of Byte magazine is published. March 1976. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs finish work on a computer circuit board that they call the Apple I. 1964.

John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz develop the BASIC programming language at Dartmouth College. BASIC is an acronym for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. May 1966. Steven Gray founds the Amateur Computer Society, and begins publishing the ACS Newsletter. Some consider this to be the birth-date of personal computing.

1967. IBM builds the first floppy disk. 1968. Douglas C. Engelbart, of the Stanford Research Institute, demonstrates his system of keyboard, keypad, mouse, and windows at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco's Civic Center.

He demonstrates use of a word processor, a hypertext system, and remote collaborative work with colleagues. 1969. Intel announces a 1 KB RAM chip, which has a significantly larger capacity than any previously produced chip. 1969. At Bell Laboratories, a small group of people begin research that will lead to the deveolpment of UNIX.

1970. Intel creates the first 4004 microprocessor. Initial price is to be $200. Speed is 60,000 operations per second. 1971.

Intel announces the first microcomputer, the MCS4 system. It uses the 4004 microprocessor, 4001 ROM chip, 4002 RAM chip, and 4003 shift register chip. 1972. IBM introduces the "memory or "floppy an 8-inch floppy plastic disk coated with iron oxide. April 1972.

Intel introduces its 200-KHz 8008 chip, the first 8-bit I IIJIMI spreadsheet program at Comdex in Las Vegas. November 1982. Compaq Apple I Computer introduces the Compaq Portable PC. It cost Compaq $1 million to create an April 1976. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak form the Apple Computer Company, on April Fool's Day.

December 1976. Michael Shrayer completes writing Electric Pencil, the first popular word-processing program for microcomputers. Compaq Portaote PC IBM-compatible ROM BIOS that did not violate IBM's copyright. January 1983. Apple Computer officially unveils the Lisa computer.

It is the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). Its initial price is $10,000. The Lisa cost Apple Computer $50 million to develop. The software for it cost Apple Computer $100 APRIL 1977. Commodore Business Machines Inc.

shows its PET 2001 computer at the West Coast Computer Faire. The PET includes 4KB RAM, keyboard, Commodore PET 2001 display, and tape drive, for $600. April 1977. Also at the West Coast JTT: March 1987. Apple Computer introduces the open architecture Macintosh II.

It uses a 16-MHz 68020 processor. The basic system sells for $3900. A system with 1MB RAM, one 800K floppy drive, and a 40MB hard drive is priced at $5500. The system features a plug-and-play architecture for expansion cards. October 1987.

Microsoft unveils the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. 1989. Cray computer Corporation Introduces the Cray 3, a supercomputer capable of 4-5 gigaflops. April 1989. Intel announces the 25-MHz 486 microprocessor.

It uses 1.2 million transistors, employing 1-micron technology. Initial price is $900. May 1991. Apple Computer ships its System 7.0 Macintosh operating system, two years after its announcement, for $100. April 1992.

Microsoft ships Windows 3.1. 1 million copies of the new and upgrade versions are sold through retail channels within the first 50 days. March 1993. Intel introduces the Pentium processor. March 1994.

Apple Computer ships its first systems using the PowerPC processor. June 1994. Dr. Thomas R. Nicely of Lynchburg College notes that the Pentium processor sometimes produces flawed floating-point results, yielding only 4-8 decimals of precision.

1994. Iomega Corp. introduces its Zip drive and Zip disks, floppy disk sized removable storage in sizes of 25MB or 100MB. August 1995. Consent decree between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice will govern Microsoft's licensing practices of Windows for the next 6.5 years, barring it from linking unrelated software licenses.

The ruling comes after 4 years of investigation of monopolistic licensing practices. August 1995. Microsoft releases Windows 95. 1 million copies of the new and upgrade versions are sold through retail channels within the first 4 days. August 1996.

Microsoft releases Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0. November 11, 1996. Announcement by Cray Research that a CRAY T3E-900 broke the world record for a general-purpose supercomputer with an incredible 1.8 teraflops peak performance. August 1997. Steve Jobs of Apple announces an alliance with Microsoft.

October 1997. The U.S. justice department asks a federal court to hold Microsoft in contempt because it may be forcing PC makers to distribute Internet Explorer as a condition of selling Windows 95. Microsoft is formally charged with violating the terms of the 1995 Final Judgment. January 1998.

Intel releases the 333-MHz Pentium II, with a 66 MHz bus. May 1998. Apple Computer introduces the iMac. June 1998. Microsoft releases Windows 98.

August 1999. Apple Computer introduces the G4, a desktop computer as powerful as a supercomputer, the first microprocessor that can deliver a sustained performance of over one gigaflop, with a theoretical peak performance of 3.6 gigaflops. Computer Faire, Apple Computer introduces the Apple II for $1300. It is the first personal computer with color graphics. August 1977.

Radio Shack (a division of Tandy Corp.) announces the TRS-80 microcomputer, with Z80 CPU, 4KB RAM, 4KB ROM, keyboard, black-and-white video display, and tape cassette for $600. December 1978. Epson announces the MX-80 dot matrix printer, which established a new standard in high performance with low price for printers. 1979. MicroPro releases trie microprocessor.

It accesses 16KB of memory. 1972. 5 14 inch diskettes first appear. 1972. Xerox decides to build a personal computer.

Project "Alto" begins. 1972. Seymour Cray founds Cray Research to design and build the world's highest performance general-purpose supercomputers. April 1974. Intel releases its 2-MHz 8080 chip.

December 1974. MITS minion 10 aeveiop. uunng its Apple usa lifetime, 100,000 units are produced. January 1983. Lotus Development ships Lotus 1-2-3 Release 1.0 for MS-DOS.

It requires 256KB of RAM, more than any microcomputer program at the time. may 1983. Microsoft introduces its first mouse, "The Microsoft including card and software, for $200. November 1983. Microsoft officially releases Microsoft Word 1.0, for $375, or $475 with the Microsoft Mouse.

November 1983. Microsoft formally announces Microsoft Windows, at the Plaza Hotel in New York. It is promised for release in April, 1984. January 1984. Apple Computer runs its "1984" commercial during the NFL SuperBowl, introducing the Macintosh computer Price: $2500.

August 1984. Commodore purchases Amiga Corporation. July 1985. Commodore unveils the new Amiga 1000 in New York. It features a multitasking, windowing operating system, using a Motorola 68000 CPU, with 256KB RAM, and 880KB 3.5nnch disk drive, for $1300.

Aito WordStar word processor, written by Xerox announces the Altair 8800 computer for $439 in kit form. It uses the Intel 8080 processor. Altair 8800 Rob Bamaby. It is made available for Intel 8080A Zilog Z-80 based CPM-80 systems. September 1979.

Motorola's 68000 16-bit microprocessor appears. It uses 68,000 transistors, giving it its name. June 1980. Seagate Technologies announces the first Winchester 5.25-inch hard disk drive. It uses four platters, holds 5 MB, and costs $600.

July 1980. Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. It features a 24 character display, with 1.9KB of programmable memory. Price is $230. October 1980.

Microsoft's Paul Allen contacts Seattle Computer Products' Tim Patterson, asking for the rights to sell SCP's DOS to an unnamed client (IBM). Microsoft pays less than $100,000 for the right. May 1981. Xerox unveils the Star 8010, at the National Computer Conference. Many features that were developed on the Alto are incorporated.

It includes a bitmapped screen, WYSIWYG word processor, mouse, laser printer, Smalltalk language, Ethernet, and software for combining text and 1985. Introduction of the Cray-2, capable of 1-2 gigaflops (1-2 billion floating-point operations). The circuits of the Cray-2, which featured gallium arsenide instead of silicon chips, were submerged in a cooling bath of liquid fiuorocarbon to prevent the heat niir" 1974. Motorola introduces its 6800 chip, an early 8-bit microprocessor used in microcomputers and industrial and automotive control devices. The 6800 was designed by Chuck Peddle and Charlie Melear.

February 1975. Paul Allen meets with Ed Roberts to demonstrate the newly written BASIC interpreter for the Altair. Despite never having touched an Altair before, the BASIC works flawlessly. February 1975. Bill Gates and Paul Allen license the newly written BASIC to MITS, their first customer.

This is the first computer language program written for a personal computer. March 1975. Fred Moore and Gordon French hold the first meeting of a new generated by the gallium arsenide from melting the cray machine. November 1985. Microsoft ships Microsoft Windows 1.0, for $100.

1985. CD-ROM drives are introduced for computer use. Apple G4 Pago 12 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1999 The Southern IUinoisan.