History of Computer II

• 1958 September 12
  At Texas Instruments, Jack Kilby demonstrates the world's first integrated circuit, containing five components on a piece of germanium half an inch long and thinner than a toothpick.
• 1959 (month unknown)
  At Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce constructs an integrated circuit with components connected by aluminum lines on a silicon-oxide surface layer on a plane of silicon.
• 1960 (month unknown)
  Digital Equipment introduces the first minicomputer, the PDP-1, for US$120,000. It is the first commercial computer equipped with a keyboard and monitor. PDP stands for Program, Data, Processor. (The minicomputer represents an important size and power step from mainframe toward personal computers.)
• 1963 (month unknown)
  Douglas Engelbart's group at Stanford Research Institute in California studies interactive devices for displays. Of the different devices tested - pointers, joysticks, trackballs - a brown, wooden box with two rolling wheels and a red push button on top achieves the best results. Douglas Engelbart is credited with inventing the mouse pointing device for computers. (The mouse will be re-born some twenty years in the future, when personal computers become powerful enough to support graphical user interfaces.)
• 1964 May 1
  At Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, the BASIC programming language runs for the first time. The language was developed by professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, BASIC is an acronym for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It is based on FORTRAN and Algol, and was developed for a General Electric 225 mainframe computer. (BASIC becomes the most popular introductory programming language for microcomputers, often stored in ROM and executing commands interactively.)
• 1964 (month unknown)
  The American Standard Association adopts ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) as a standard code for data transfer. (This standard, defining 7-bit character codes, will be used for most personal computers in the Western world.)
• History of Computer III