Introduction To Computers

View our project gallery — play some of the games or try out some of the apps that students have created. You can “remix” the project to make it your own, or build something new in App Lab, Game Lab, or Web Lab. In this series of eight short videos, you’ll learn how the internet was invented, what HTML is, and how search engines like Google work.

Curt Herzstark Designs Curta Calculator

In 1977, MITS was sold to Pertec, which continued producing Altairs in 1978. The Johnniac computer is one of 17 computers that followed the basic design of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study computer. It was named after John von Neumann, a world famous mathematician and computer pioneer of the day.

Powering Business Productivity

The motes were powered by a tiny battery and could gain light energy through a photocell, which was enough to feed the infinitesimally small amount of energy a mote consumes . Motes are also known as “smart dust,” since the intention is that their tiny size and low cost make them inexpensive enough to “sprinkle” in the real world to as sensors. An ecologist, for example, could sprinkle thousands of motes from the air onto a field and measure soil and air temperature, moisture, and sunlight, giving them accurate real-time data about the environment.

Computer Science Specializations

Such material can be letters, numbers, or facts like grades in a class, baseball batting averages, or light and dark areas in a photograph. Processed data becomes information, data that is organized, meaningful, and useful. In school, for instance, an instructor could enter various student grades , which can be processed to produce final grades and perhaps a class average . Data that is perhaps uninteresting on its own may become very interesting once it is converted to information. This architecture was first developed in the 1980s by Acorn Computer Group, which spun off Advanced RISC Machines Ltd., now known as ARM.

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Compaq beats IBM to the market when it announces the Deskpro 386, the first computer on the market to use Intel´s new chip, a 32-bit microprocessor with 275,000 transistors on each chip. At 4 million operations per second and 4 kilobytes of memory, the gave PCs as much speed and power as older mainframes and minicomputers. In 1984, Michael Dell creates PC's Limited while still a student of the University of Texas at Austin. The dorm-room headquartered company sold IBM PC-compatible computers built from stock components. Dell dropped out of school to focus on his business and in 1985, the company produced the first computer of its own design, the Turbo PC, which sold for $795.

The 1401 mainframe, the first in the series, replaces earlier vacuum tube technology with smaller, more reliable transistors. Demand called for more than 12,000 of the 1401 computers, and the machine´s success made a strong case for using general-purpose computers rather than specialized systems. By the mid-1960s, nearly half of all computers in the world were IBM 1401s. The TX-0 (“Transistor eXperimental - 0”) is the first general-purpose programmable computer built with transistors.