Brief History of Atari

It was in 1971 that Nolan Bushnbell got together with Ted Dabney and created the first coin-operated computer game for use in arcades. They called it “Computer Space.” It was based on Steve Russell’s earlier created game called “Spacewar!” Later in 1972 Bushnell and Al Alcorn would create the game “Pong,” which became an overnight sensation shortly after it came out. Later that same year both Bushnell and Ted Dabney began the company “Atari.”

Pong was released again in 1975 only this time it entered homes as a video game.  Approximately 150,000 of them found their way into U.S. households. With this great success, Bushnell made $28 million by selling his company to Warner Communications. This 1976 purchase ended up being a bargain for Warner Communications since total sales for the Atari home video systems reached $415 million by 1980. They also released their first edition of Atari personal computer. To ensure continued success, Bushnell had stayed on as president of the company.

Unfortunately, by 1983 Warner Communications dealt with losses of $533 million despite Atari’s new computer. They made the decision to unload Atari to the ex-CEO of Commodore, Jack Tramiel. He released a new version of the home computer called Atari St. This turned things around as sales of the new computer rose to $25 million by 1986.

In 1992 Atari released a new video game system called Jaguar. It was in direct competition to Nintendo. Though the gaming system was impressive it ended up being twice as expensive as Nintendo. Atari also faced an anti-trust lawsuit with Nintendo that same year which they lost.

The end of Atari as a company began in 1994. Sega game systems purchased all patent rights from Atari for $40 million. By 1998 JTS, the new owner of Atari sold its assets. Its final trademarks, patents and copyrights were purchased for $5 million by Hasbro Interactive.

Fathers of the Internet

Prior to the Internet the United States military had a department called Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) that worked on ways to successfully combat the cold war. This department wanted to be able to share information between its many computers which were located in various places. They came up with ARPAnet, which first created the TCP/IP communications standard, the means by which information is still shared currently on the Internet. This network system that linked computers together was quickly usurped by civilians who found many uses for it.

The man who is generally considered the father of the World Wide Web is Tim Berners-Lee. He led the development of important Internet innovations such as the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) the language used to write web pages, Universal Resource Locators (URLs), and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Without these developments there would be no Internet as we know it today, and he developed them between 1989 and 1991.

In 1976 Tim Berners-Lee received a Physics degree from Oxford University. Today he is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and plays a major role in setting technical standards for the Internet.  Another name worth noting as a founding father of the Internet is Vinton Cerf. In his case, 10 years after graduating from high school he was working on the protocols that would eventually create the structure of the Internet.

Though Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web along with HTML, HTTP and URLs in 1990, the basics that he used to do so were the results of the work of Vannevar Bush in 1945. His were the basics from which the foundation of HTML, URLs and HTTP emerged.

HTML is the acronym for HyperText Markup Language, which is what is used to created documents and pages on the Internet today. It defines the layout and structure of how a Web page should appear, including its look and the functions that will work on the page. HTML can do this because it uses makes use of “tags” which include attributes which can be manipulated. The language itself is not seen by the Web page viewer, but is translated by the browser which displays the page the way in which the author desired it to appear when he wrote the page code.

The First Word Processors

The concept of word processing includes the idea of creating computer generated text then being able to manipulate it by editing that text, storing it and then retrieving it later and when ready to do so, print it as a document. The first company to successfully create a word processing software program that met with commercial success was Micropro International back in 1979. Their program was called “WordStar” and became the best selling software program of the early 1980′s.

The earliest form of word processing was actually the programmers who used line editors – nothing more than a software-writing aid where programmers would work-out changes to programming codes. This first use of the line editor being used as a word processor started with Michael Shrayer, an Altair programmer, who realized he could write up the manuals for their computer programs they had created by using the same computers that ran the programs themselves. This led to his creating the first word processor called the Electric Pencil back in 1976.  Several other successful word processing programs emerged around this time, including: WordPerfect, Apple Write I, Scripsit and Samna III.

Seymour Rubenstein left IMSAI in 1978 deciding to start his own company, MicroPro International, with no more than $8,500. A software programmer from IMSAI named Rob Barnaby joined with him and wrote the first version of WordStar in 1979. It was originally scripted to work on CP/M. Barnaby’s assistant, Jim Fox, re-wrote the software so that it would work on a new operating system called MS/PC DOS. (This new operating system was introduced in 1981 by Bill Gates of MicroSoft)

In 1982 MicroPro International released version 3.0 of WordStar. This latest version of WordStar for the new DOS operating system quickly became the world’s more popular word processing program on the market. Then, in an incredible turn of fortunes, by the end of the 1980′s programs like WordPerfect surpassed WordStar in performance and completely knocked it out of the marketplace.

The Ethernet

8P8C modular crossover adapter

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The beginnings of the first Ethernet began in Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) with Robert Metcalf in 1973. PARC was one of the major locations creating personal computers at the time. Metcalf was part of the research staff working for Xerox at the time and was asked to create a network system that would connect all the computers at PARC. As it worked out, Xerox was working on the first laser printer and wanted all their computers to have access to this new device. Metcalf was assigned the duty of making that happen.

Metcalfe had his work cut out for him. He had to first build a network system that would be fast enough to function properly with the new, quicker laser printer. And on top of that the system had to connect hundreds of computers all in the same building. Hundreds of computers in the same building were unprecedented at the time. If a company had a computer there was either one perhaps as many as three operating on the same premises. This was a revolutionary concept he was undertaking to bring them all together into the same network.

This new Ethernet as he called it connected all these hundreds of computers in the same building making use of hardware that linked machine to machine. It was unlike the Internet in that it didn’t connect remote computers by telephone lines, but directly. It did, however, make use of some of the same software protocol and some hardware that was used by the new Internet system. It was the hardware that connected the computers that led to the new patent the Ethernet received as a new network system. It included chips and wiring with completely new designs.

It has been reported that Metcalfe invented the Ethernet when he wrote a note to his boss regarding the potential of his new Ethernet system. Metcalfe himself, however, has said that the invention of the Ethernet evolved gradually over a period of years. It was 1976 when Metcalfe and his assistant, David Boggs, published a paper on the completed new Ethernet system.

The Introduction of Apple

Personal computers began to take off with the release of the “Altair.” These new computers created a lot of interest in the concept of having a computer in the home. But of course this was just the first step in many that would be taken to get computers into the homes of people across the country.

An important next step began back in 1975 when Steve Wozniak was working for a calculator manufacturing company called Hewlett Packard. After spending his day working for HP, he would return home at night and tinker with his Altair computer kit. In 1975, these first computers were not much more than boxes with switches that made little or no sense to the common man. This is how Wozniak saw them in any case. Fortunately he also noted that the components of the new computers, the memory chips and the microprocessors, were dropping in price, to the point that he could purchase them himself with as little as he might earn in a month. With this in mind he partnered up with a friend of his, Steve Jobs, who also tinkered with the new computers and decided that they could, and should, build their own.

By the first of April in 1976, Wozniak and Jobs started Apple Computers by releasing their first computer called the “Apple I.” It became the first computer with a single circuit board. They included a video interface with their new product, which also came with its own keyboard and 8 kilobytes of RAM. They put an affordable component in it as well, the 6502 processor, which could be purchased from MOS Technologies for $25. It also included the new dynamic RAM which held data within separate capacitors inside an integrated circuit.

Wozniak and Jobs demonstrated their new Apple I prototype at a local meeting of computer hobbyists. The new computer was mounted on wood with the components visible for all to see. A dealer for a local computer shop called the Byte Shop was there and was so impressed that he ordered 100 of them. Over the next 10 months Wozniak and Jobs assembled around two hundred of the Apple Is and sold them for a price many found religiously unsettling of $666.66.

By 1977 the new Apple Computers company became incorporated and then released their new computer model, the Apple II. This new version of the Apple computer was based on the same 6502 processor but included color graphics and utilized audio cassettes for data storage. A year later, they increased the RAM from 4KB to 45KB and replaced their cassette drive with a floppy disk unit. The new Apple II sold for $1,298.

The Floppy Disk

Floppy Disk Holiday Card

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The history of the “floppy disk” is an interesting one. This part of the history began in 1971 when IBM introduced to the world the first “memory disk,” or what was to be called later on, a “floppy disk.”  This first floppy was 8 inches in size and created out of a flexible plastic material. The disk surface had to be covered in magnetic iron oxide which would allow data to be written and read from by the computer. The name “floppy” developed naturally from the flexible structure of the disk itself. The floppy disk ushered in the first device that could contain data and be physically moved from one computer to another.

Alan Shugart was the engineer at IBM who came up with the floppy disk concept. His original intent with the floppy was to be able to move data from one location into another holding device. This larger storage device was a whopping 100 megabytes in size. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before other uses for the floppy emerged, and soon it became the premium medium for data storage.

The cassette tape in use at the time also used magnetic material to record data. The floppy used a similar idea on the structure was different being a circle of magnetic material instead of a moving stream of tape. The disk drive would attach itself to the center of the floppy and spin it like a record. The head of the drive could read and write data and resembled that of a tape deck head. It would make contact with the surface by permeating the envelope, or the hard plastic shell of the floppy, and could read and write to both sides of the diskette. The first floppy Shugart developed could only hold 100 KB of information.

Shugart refined his design in 1976 when he created the next level, the 5 1/4″ floppy diskette. He did this for Wang Laboratories who needed a smaller size floppy disk that could be used with their new desktop computers. The new 5 /14″ disks were in full manufacture by 1978 and could now hold 1.2 MB of information. Interestingly, the 5 1/4″ size came about during a discussion at a bar, where An Wang pointed to a napkin and suggested that the disk needed to be “about that size.”  The napkin she pointed at was 5 1/4″ in size.

Sony developed the first 3 1/2″ diskettes and drives in 1981. Instead of being actually floppy like their 5 1/4″ counterparts, these were encased in hard plastic. That, however, didn’t change the name as they too were referred to as “floppy disks.”  Their first storage capacity was only 400KB, but this later increased to 720KB and they were referred to as “double density.”  The last version was able to hold 1.44MB and was called the high density disk.

The First Single-Chip Microprocessor

National Semiconductor INS4004 (=i4004)

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November of 1971 the world witnessed the release of the first single chip microprocessor. This new electronic marvel was the Intel 4004, the brain child of Federico Faggin, Stan Mazor and Ted Hoff, engineers working for Intel at the time. With the breakthrough of integrated circuits changing the design of computers from that point forward the only way to improve the concept was to go smaller. This new single chip microprocessor accomplished that by taking all the parts that made up the complex circuitry of the computer (the parts that made it think) and put them all together onto a single tiny silicon chip. They had made it possible for the first time ever to place programmed intelligence into an object that could do the thinking for you.

Two engineers from the Fairchild Semiconductor Company left, as did many others in 1968, to start up their own company. These two geniuses were Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore. After putting together a one-page company plan that described what the company hoped to accomplish, Noyce forwarded this business outline to Art Rock, a venture capitalist living in San Francisco at the time. Rock was able to raise $2.5 million in short order to back their new business scheme.

A hotel corporation had already trademarked the name “Moore Noyce” which they wanted to use for their new company name. But with that off the table, the two entrepreneurs took the words “Integrated” and “Electronics” and put them together to come up with the name: “Intel.” That went on to become their new name. The first product they worked on that made money for the new startup company was the “3101 Schottky Bipolar 64-bit Static Random Access Memory,” better known as an SRAM chip.

After a request to create a multifunction chip by a Japanese company called Busicom, Ted Hoff of Intel figured they could built a single chip that would do the same thing as 12 chips combined. The result was that nine months later they created the 4004 chip, a general-purpose logic chip. This new chip had 2,300 transistors that fit on 1/8th of an inch by 1/6th of an inch of silicon yet had the same power as the old ENIAC computer which consisted of 18,000 vacuum tubes and took up three-thousand cubic feet of space.

The Internet Before the Internet

The first version of the Internet began in 1969. In an attempt to create a form of protection for the flow of information between military computers, a new system was underway. ARPAnet was the first network of computers used first by military personnel between the computers which were geographically spread out but needed to exchange information. In order to exchange information in this new manner they developed a new rule for computers to interact, a protocol called Network Control Protocol (NCP).

During the cold war an organization called Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created. This branch of the military was in charge of developing top secret weapons and systems for Cold War activities. Charles M. Herzfeld, a former director of ARPA, suggested an differing view of how ARPAnet came about, claiming that it was not the result of a need in the military, but that it was an outgrowth of a frustration that needed to be addressed. There were only a limited number of powerful, large research computers in the U.S. and those who needed access to them were separated by a geographical distance. ARPAnet sought to address this concern.

The system was tested for a data exchange using this new network between the computers at UCLA and those at the Stanford Research Institute. They began by attempting to log in onto a Stanford computer, which was to be accomplished by typing in “log win.” By the time the letter “g” was typed, the UCLA computers crashed.

There wree four original computers connected in the ARPAnet’s original configuration. Each was located in its own research labs, one located in UCLA, a Honeywell DDP 516; another located at the Stanford Research Institute, a SDS-940; an IBM 360/75 located at UC Santa Barbara; and the final one, a DEC PDP-10 located at the University of Utah. As they expanded their network other types of computers were connected which resulted in compatibility issues. In 1982, in order to overcome these problems they developed a new and better set of protocols called “Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol” or simply: TCP/IP. This allowed the computers to send data to each other by breaking it down into packets (IP) which the TCP made sure were delivered to the server and then reassembled correctly.

While the system remained under ARPAnet innovations like email were created as was the first remote connection: telnet; and file transfer protocol (FTP) allowing bulk information to flow directly from one computer to another. However, soon non-military uses for ARPAnet increased to the point that it was no longer a secure military operation. To combat this, the MILnet, a military only network was created in 1983. Soon after, almost all computers were loading Internet Protocol software. Shortly thereafter Local Area Networks (LANs) were invented, local in-house networks, also using Internet Protocol software so that they groups of computers could interact as well as groups of LANs.

By 1986 a new network of LANs formed the National Science Foundation Network, or NSFnet. This new network linked together five supercomputer centers, followed by all the major universities, slowly replacing the ARPAnet. It was NSFnet which eventually became the substructure to what is now commonly called the Internet today.

Contributions of Douglas Engelbart

If you’ve never heard the name Douglas Engelbart before, you have not followed the progress of the computer from an enigmatic specialized machine that only scientists had the knowledge to unravel, to the simple, user-friendly space-age tool almost everyone uses in their homes daily. Englebart either invented or was integrally a part of the creation of most of the user-friendly, interactive devices that help make computers something everyone could use. Even if you haven’t heard of Enbelbart, you have heard of the computer mouse, windows, teleconferencing, email, computer video, hypermedia and the Internet. Yes, if he didn’t invent it, he played a large role in its creation.

The first computer mouse prototype was made in 1964 in order to work in tandem with a graphical user interface (GUI) called “Windows.” Engelbart’s first mouse was a wooden shell with metal wheels designed to run an “X-Y position indicator for a display system,” as per his patent application, which he was granted by 1970. It picked up the nickname “mouse” because of the tail that came out of the end of the device. At that time when he attempted to patent his version of “Windows,” it wasn’t possible because the patent office wasn’t issuing them for software at that time. Nevertheless he now has over 45 patents that bare his name.

He worked on his inventions during the sixties and seventies in a lab he established at the Augmentation Research Center, Stanford Research Institute. He was determined to create a hypermedia groupware system which he “oNLine System” or NLS. Most of his innovations, including the mouse and windows, were an outgrowth of his NLS research.

Believe it or not in 1968 he held a 90-minute public demonstration of networked computer systems at the Augmentation Research Center. It was there that the world was first introduced to windows, the mouse, and hypermedia (including object linking), as well as video teleconferencing. By 1997 he was awarded the Lemelson-MIT prize for invention and innovation, receiving $500,000, the largest single prize awarded in the world for this kind of contribution. The following year, 1998, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The First Computer Game

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It was 1962 when Steven Russell (“Slug” to his friends), an MIT computer programmer was inspired by some stories by E. E. Smith. This inspiration let him to form a team that came up with the first official computer game. They put in approximately 200 man-hours as they created the first version of the game they came to call “Spacewar.” Russell wrote the code for the game on an early Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) device called a PDP-1 – an interactive mini-computer, complete with an old cathode-ray tube display monitor and keyboard for input. The computer had been donated to MIT from DEC in the hopes that their impressive think-tank would create some new remarkable product with their hardware. The creation of a computer game was the last thing they had on their minds when they made their donation, even though they later distributed the game as a diagnostic program to those who purchased their products. Unfortunately for Russell, he never made any money from his clever invention.

Thanks to the PDP-1′s operating system, it was the first to allow more than a single user to share a computer at the same time. This became integral to the playing of the new game. Spacewar was a two-player game that featured spaceships in a war where they fired photon torpedoes at enemy craft. It allowed each player to maneuver their own spaceship and fire missiles at the opposing player while at the same time trying to avoid being sucked into the sun by its gravitational pull. Many still find it a fun game to play today.

By the mid-sixties, despite the expensive of computer time, the game was found on almost every research computer across the United States. In the meantime, Steve Russell took his computer game programming knowledge with him to Stanford University and introduced Spacewar and his programming skills to a student named Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell took his newly acquired knowledge and started “Atari Computers.”

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