The Computer over the Years: Remember your first?

As a tribute to the piece of technology most of us rely on day-in and day-out we decided to look at the computer over the years. We’ll start way back in 1940 and bring you all the way up to today and you can reflect back on your first PC.

Let’s start our trip down memory lane.

1940: We welcomed the Complex Number Calculator (CNC) as the world’s first electrical digital computer. According to AT&T, this “computer” provided the first demonstration of remote computing.

1944: At 51 feet long and eight feet tall the Harvard Mark-1 computer, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, was a sight to be seen. And it held the distinction as the United State’s first automatic digital calculator.

1965: Continuing its innovation push, DEC released the first commercially successful minicomputer called the PDP-8. It sold for the reasonable cost of $18,000, making it widely popular.

1975: The “first personal computer”, MITS Altair 8800, designed by Ed Roberts, was released. It featured LED lights and toggle switches on the front panel.  The entire Altair 8800 system is made of a metal case, a power supply, a front panel with switches, and a passive motherboard with expansion slots.

1976: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched Apple Computers and launch Apple I – the first computer with a single-circuit board. Apple II launches in 1977 offering color graphics and incorporates an audio cassette drive for storage.

1981: Welcome portability! The first portable computer, the Osborne I, came on the market. It included a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives. The price was around $1,800 and it weighted a mere 24 pounds.

1987: Rounding out the 80s, IBM released its PS/2 machines, making the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drive and video graphics array standard for IBM computers.

2007: Hello iPhone! The first iPhone is released allowing many computer-like functions to be hand held. Little did Apple and Steve Jobs know, this would explode into a worldwide phenomenon. 

2015: Apple launches the Apple Watch – a wearable computing device that combines the traditional wristwatch features with the iPhone/iPod.

2016: The first reprogrammable quantum computer was created. "Until now, there hasn't been any quantum-computing platform that had the capability to program new algorithms into their system. They're usually each tailored to attack a particular algorithm," said study lead author Shantanu Debnath.

We hope you enjoyed our brief walk down memory lane. Now we’d like to hear about your first computer.

Share your stories and memories with us on Twitter (@EzeCastleECI)!