Engineering Education “Today in History” Blog: IBM and the PC
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (877) · August 12th, 2012 · 1 Comment
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Today in History – August 12, 1981 – IBM introduces the first PC personal computer for $1,600 base price. The IBM PC was introduced only one year after Bill Lowe, Director of IBM’s Boca Raton division in Florida, was given the go ahead to begin operations. The project was controversial as few believed that an IBM PC would be a commercial success. Others questioned whehter IBM, as a company, had the agility to produce a consumer computer in a reasonable period of time. IBM’s website quotes one analyst with saying that “IBM bringing out a personal computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance.” Lowe was up to the challenge by putting together a development team that borke all of the rules at IBM. They operated like a small business and went ouside IBM’s traditional vendors and software developers. When they announced the IBM PC one year later, its delopemnt had been faster than any other product in IBM’s history. Customer response was overwhelming and PCs flew off of the shelves, leading to shortages and backlogs in most stores.
History has always pondered whether the future was propelled by the movement of the masses, the fine control of the elite, or the inevitable flow of society. However, before now no one ever questioned whether history was centered around people. Then comes the great electrical “thinking device”: The Computer. Matured beyond the initial fascinations with the Samuel’s Checkers Program and 2001′s Hal, personal computers finally made the power of computers familiar to the masses. The Apple II first made waves with the hobbyist and then IBM introduced them to world business. Soon the universality of computers became clear to everyone. On Dec 26th 1982, Time Magazine broadcast for the first time that computers, and not people, were controlling the future and named the computer their “Person of the Year” in 1982.
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For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on history of computing and personal computers and computation. For curricular resources, visit the Computer Science Education, the Computer Engineering Education or the Software Engineering Education community sites.
Tags: Computer Engineering · Computer Science · Computing · Electrical Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Industrial Engineering · Information Systems · Information Technology · Manufacturing Engineering · Mechanical Engineering
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1 trivago // Aug 31, 2012 at 3:21 pm
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