- The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appears in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the 4004 had 2250 transistors and could perform up to 90,000 operations per second in four-bit chunks. Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture.
- One of the earliest personal computers, the Kenbak-1 is advertised for $750 in Scientific American magazine. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory. In 1973, after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors.
- HP-35. Initially designed for internal use by HP employees, co-founder Bill Hewlett issues a challenge to his engineers in 1971: fit all of the features of their desktop scientific calculator into a package small enough for his shirt pocket. They did.
- Xerox PARC physicist Gary Starkweather realizes in 1967 that exposing a copy machine’s light-sensitive drum to a paper original isn’t the only way to create an image. A computer could “write” it with a laser instead. Xerox wasn’t interested. So in 1971, Starkweather transferred to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), away from corporate oversight. Within a year, he had built the world’s first laser printer, launching a new era in computer printing, generating billions of dollars in revenue for Xerox.
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