Research

The Gopher protocol is a TCP/IP application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet. Strongly oriented towards a menu-document design, the Gopher protocol was a predecessor of (and later, an alternative to) the World Wide Web.

In 1971, M.E. Hoff Jr. (right), an engineer at Intel, invented the first programmable chip, the 4004, for a Japanese client of Intel's.

In the Beginning DOS - 1981 In 1981 when the original IBM Personal Computer was announced, IBM released three operating systems for it. How many of you remember that? Since I wrote the first IBM course on how to fix this original PC, I had to know at least a little about all three of them. IBM decided early in the development process of the PC that they did not want to hire a bunch of programmers to write software for it - especially an operating system. IBM wanted the hardware business and did not care about the software. Since there was no clear-cut contender for an operating system at the time, IBM approached three organizations about writing one for the PC.

Welcome to The Freeman PC Museum collection. The following is a complete list of vintage computer systems in the museum. Feel free to scroll through the list, view details of the system, see related links and advertisements, and join in on the mini forums for each of the systems.

The first computers looked nothing like what we use today, but the technology used back then paved the way for the modern computer. This article will provide you with a look at the history behind the personal computer- an invention that many of us would be lost without.

Back in 1976 there were no iPods, iPhones, iPads, or internet. In fact, there were no PCs. True, there were computers – the giant room- size variety then found at universities, big companies, and the Pentagon. Back then, it was still pretty much the punch-card era. For the most part, desk-top calculators did the math, and typewriters the word processing. But two young guys from California named Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were about to change that. Within five years of attaching an assembly of microprocessing chips to a piece of plywood and calling it a personal computer, these two guys would be sitting atop a major new company named Apple worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Their inventive moment and entre- preneurial follow-through set off a process that would dramatically change the world.

Although many believe that personal computer did not appear until the mid 1970's, there were a number of electromechanical devices prior to that aimed at hobbyists and capable of performing digital computations. The first of these was the Simon Mechanical Brain which was described by inventor Edmund Berkeley in his 1949 book "Giant Brains, or Machines That Think." Plans to build the Simon were published in a series of Radio-Electronics articles in 1950 and 1951. Development of electromechanical computers continued into the 1960's. The Minivac 601 was a model introduced in 1961 with its name derived from the Sperry Rand Univac computer.

Computer technology has developed rapidly. It is interesting to study personal computer history and first computer invented.

In 1969 Intel was commissioned by a Japanese calculator company to produce an integrated circuit, a computer chip, for its line of calculators. Ted Hoff, who was given the assignment, was troubled by the fact that if he utilized standard methods of design the Japanese calculators would be just about as expensive as one of the new minicomputers that were being marketed and it would not do nearly as much. Hoff decided he would have to use a new approach to the calculator chip. Instead of "hardwiring" the logic of the calculator into the chip he created what is now called a microprocessor, a chip that can be programmed to perform the operations of a calculator; i.e., a computer on a slice of silicon. It was called the 4004 because that was the number of transistors it would replace. The contract gave the Japanese calculator company exclusive rights to the 4004. Hoff realized that the 4004 was a significant technical breakthrough and was concerned that Intel should not give it away to the Japanese calculator company as part of a relatively small contract. Fortunately for Intel the Japanese company did not realize the significance of what they had obtained and traded away their exclusive rights to the 4004 for a price reduction and some modifications in the calculator specifications.

In Atari's early days, one of the video game designers and his rather odd friend worked many late nights on a new arcade game called "Breakout". While working on this new video game and playing other arcade games all through the night these two friends were busy on the side designing and building (from "borrowed" Atari parts) a personal computer system. They approached Nolan Bushnell with their new creation to see if it would be a product that Atari would sell and support.