Word: ibm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...IBM launches the System/360 the first commercial mainframe computer...
...entirely forgotten. In the late 1960s, Sperry Rand, which held the rights to Eckert and Mauchly's original UNIVAC patents, sued Honeywell (which, like IBM, had got into the computer business) for royalty payments. At one point in the six-year litigation, Atanasoff testified that Mauchly cribbed ABC's key features during a five-day visit in 1941. Mauchly indignantly denied the accusation. But the judge took a different view. In a 1973 decision that was never appealed, he invalidated Eckert and Mauchly's patents and in effect declared Atanasoff the winner. Historians, however, interpret the ruling more broadly, viewing...
That's an immense if. Drexler's idea was initially dismissed as science fiction, but even skeptics admit that, unlike time travel and warp drives, nothing about it actually violates the laws of physics. And when in 1989 an IBM team famously spelled the Big Blue logo in xenon atoms, nanotech spread from the basements of feverish acolytes poring over Drexler's seminal book, Engines of Creation (1986), to the research labs of NASA and Xerox PARC. Today nanotech researchers speak not of if but of when. Great leaps forward come from thinking outside the box. Drexler may be remembered...
...programmed to perform any task. Von Neumann persuaded the I.A.S.'s somewhat skeptical board of trustees to allocate $100,000--quite a sum in 1945--to build the MANIAC, the first in a series of early Von Neumann machines that included the JOHNNIAC (at Argonne National Laboratory) and the IBM 701, one of the progenitors of IBM's enormously profitable mainframe lines...
After Herman Hollerith designs his punch-card tabulating machine for the 1890 U.S. Census and founds the company that will become IBM, the idea of computers slowly gathers steam...