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 [...]

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_ Today in History -August 7, 1944 – Largest electromechanical calculator ever built. The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) (also called the Harvard Mark I) was the largest electromechanical calculator ever built and the first automatic digital calculator in the United States. Its size was 51 feet wide and eight feet high and weighted [...]

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Today in History – July 30, 1959 – Noyce patents the integrated circuit – 50th anniversary. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at the small Fairchild Semiconductor start-up company were both working on the concept of an integrated circuit in 1958. Prior to this invention, only parts of a circuit – such as [...]

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Today in History – July 22, 1975 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen sign Microsoft’s first official contract licensing their BASIC to MITS, the makers of the Altair kit computer. The young entrepreneurs had hit upon a revolutionary new concept—the idea that a company could make money selling software for microcomputers. As Bill puts it [...]

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Today in History – July 13, 2006 – AI@50 celebrates the fifty year anniversay of the coining of “artificial intelligence” at Dartmouth. John McCarthy, in Dartmouth’s mathematics department in 1956, chose the name to make it clear that the objective of this new scientific field was to simulate human intelligence. Fifty years later, the 2006 [...]

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