Research

Popular PC writings have it that a trackball is nothing more than "an upside down" mouse. This is, however, quite inaccurate revisionist history and, if anything, a mouse is an upside down trackball since development of the trackball pre-dates early development of the mouse by about 11 years. The history of both pointing devices intertwines with the development of the modern graphical user interfaces (GUI) now standard on virtually all computers.

The Technology Collection of Museum Victoria holds six early personal computers that trace important developments in the history of this remarkable area. There are three computers with separate components (an Altair 8800, a Microbee and an Atari 800) and three early portable computers (a Kaypro, an IBM ‘Cubie’ and an Osborne II).

Personal computers are now a very common item in many houses yet in 1955, there were only 250 computers in use throughout the world. In 1980, more than one million personal computers had been sold and by the mid-1980’s, this figure had risen to 30 million. How did this come about?

mechanical computers almost computers 1st generation PC 2nd generation PC portable computing home computers apple/next storage systems peripherals software

Welcome to Carl Friend's computer "museum". In reality, this is a private collection covering a range of calculating machines from slide rules to reasonably modern microcomputers and workstations; however, the "crown jewels" of my collection are the minicomputers.

History The early history of computing. If you want to begin at the beginning, then start here

I met my first computer, a DEC PDP-11/70, in 1981, and I've been hooked ever since. I got a computer of my own, an Atari 600XL, in 1982 or '83. I got my first Laptop, a Radio Shack Model 100 in 1984. When I made the formal decision to begin collecting computers, I decided to collect portables, and computers I had lusted after. After considering these criteria, and the computers that fit them, I realized they were pretty much the same. Here then, are some of those computers.

600's bc? The abacus is developed in China. It was later adopted by the Japanese and the Russians. 600's ad? Arabic numbers -- including the zero (represented by a dot) -- were invented in India. Arabic translations of Indian math texts brought these numbers to the attention of the Europeans. Arabic numbers entered Europe by means of Spain around 1000 ad and first became popular among Italian merchants around 1300. Until then, people used the Roman system in western Europe, and the Greek system in the east. The original numbers were similar to the modern Devanagari numbers used in northern India:

Situated about 50 miles to the north west of London at Bletchley Park is the former WW2 code breaking centre (also known as Station X). It was here that a dedicated team of talented mathematicians (including Alan Turing) worked to break the German Enigma codes and also the more complex codes used by Hitler and his high command.

The Abacus There is a long history detailing the invention of computing and calculating machines. The earliest recorded calculating device is the abacus. Used as a simple computing device for performing arithmetic, the abacus most likely appeared first in Babylonia (now Iraq) over 5000 years ago. Its more familiar form today is derived from the Chinese version pictured below.