Plain Text version. 

Introduction.

It’s only been 70 years since the first fully functional stored-program Computer was demonstrated to the World, yet it’s hard to imagine living in a World without Computers!

Today, we take Computer technology for granted on so many different levels, so we thought we’d take this opportunity to look back and highlight some interesting facts and statistics cherry picked from the history of Computing.

30 Tonnes.

The weight of Eniac, the world’s first digital all-purpose Computer is 30 tonnes. Eniac filled a 1,500 square-foot room and was nine feet tall. It was turned on for the first time in November 1945. (1)

3.75 Megabytes.

The storage capacity of the IBM 350 was 3.75 megabytes. It was the world’s first production hard disk drive that was a component of IBM’s 305 RAMAC system – the first commercial computer that used magnetic disk storage. (2)

Interface Manager.

The original name for Windows when Microsoft started working on the operating system in 1981 was Interface Manager. Microsoft named Windows after the shape of the ‘Windows’ in the graphical user interface that are used to display the content on screen. (3)

Did you know?

Apple, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard were all started in a garage (not the same one, obviously). From little seeds grow mighty trees! HP’s garage has even been transformed into a private museum. (4)

All 500 Super Computers run Linux.

At the time of writing. all 500 of the fastest Super Computers in the World run Linux. This is mainly because the operating system is Open Source, which makes it easy to customise and optimise for the computer’s specific purposes. Using Open source software is also far more cost-effective. (5)

1971.

In 1971,  Intel Corporation released Intel 4004, the World’s first commercially produced microprocessor. The 4004 was first used in the Busicom 141-PF Calculator that was commercially released in the same year. It was also used in the world’s first microprocessor-controlled pinball machine! (6)

The world’s first webcam.

The world’s first webcam was invented in 1991 by students at Cambridge University. They used the webcam to monitor the Coffee machine levels in the Computer lab, saving them a trip to an empty Coffee pot. They later gave the webcam its own website that was visited by over 2 million people! (7)

$433 Billion.

The predicted value of semiconductor sales in 2020 is 433 Billion dollars. (8)

1976.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak designed and built the first Apple Computer in 1976. It was also known as the Apple 1. (9)

8 inches.

The diameter of the first floppy disks that were invented and manufactured by IBM were 8 inches. The floppy disks and their drives became commercially available in 1972. (10)

FORTRAN.

An abbreviation of FORmula TRANslation, FORTRAN is the name of the first commercially available Computer programming language that was first developed at IBM in 1954. (11)

1967.

Robert Heath Dennard invented Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) in 1967. He was later granted a patent for DRAM in 1968. (12)

Thank you for checking out our Infographic!

We spend a lot of time researching and cross referencing the information presented to you in our Infographics. However, we are only human and sometimes we make mistakes! If you spot an error on this page, then we’d greatly appreciate you contacting us and in return, we’ll give you our gratitude 🙂