Boot Up This Quiz on Early Computers

The Commodore 64 is a great example of being in the right place at the right time — and at the right price point. In 1982, the personal computer business began to take off thanks to companies like IBM and Apple, which made computers more accessible. Commodore International seized the opportunity and created a 64 KB computer with high-quality sounds and graphics, which sold for just $595 (around $1,800 in 2022). The company sold upwards of 17 million machines.

The term “bug” was used in engineering circles in the 19th century as a way to describe mechanical glitches or malfunctions. But the first known computer “bug” was a real moth, found in the Mark II computer at Harvard University in 1947. The research team noticed their electronics seemed to keep getting interrupted. After taking some components apart, they found an actual moth in the machine.

Today, English inventor Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine is considered the world’s first computer. Babbage first conceived of the computer in 1837 and worked on it until his death in 1871. Unlike today’s computers, the Analytical Engine was the size of an entire room and completely analog, meaning it ran on thousands of cogs and springs rather than integrated circuits.

The first home computers were extremely expensive. To cut costs, developers decided that lowercase letters were unnecessary on the TRS-80, the most popular personal computer at the time. The Tandy Corporation sold these early PCs in the 1970s for around $399 at their Radio Shack stores, ushering in the era of home computing.

The world’s first computer virus was not malicious, but it was likely no less irritating. Called the “Creeper,” it was an experiment by Bob Thomas, a software engineer at BBN Technologies. The program was known as a “worm” because it could self-replicate over a computer network. The Creeper caused all infected systems to display the message, “I’M THE CREEPER : CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.”

What began in a garage is now the most widely used computer operating system in the world. The system was first introduced in 1985 and was almost called “Interface Manager,” until Microsoft’s savvy marketing team convinced Bill Gates to call it “Windows.” Today, about 80% of computers worldwide use a Windows operating system.

Today, these companies make billions, but their beginnings were much more humble. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded HP in Packard's garage in 1939 — commonly known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. Microsoft and Apple came along in the mid-1970s, and also started out of their founders’ garages. IBM, however, was born after three computing companies merged in 1911.

On May 11, 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov resigned to IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue, marking the first time a computer had bested a human at the game. The Enigma Machine is a cipher device famously cracked by Alan Turing, and the Difference Engine is one of Charles Babbage’s earliest computational devices. AlphaZero is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that followed in Deep Blue’s chess-playing footsteps.

In 1965, American engineer and future co-founder of Intel Gordon Moore made a prediction that proved pivotal for the future of computing. By evaluating manufacturing trends, Moore extrapolated that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every two years, indefinitely. That prediction panned out, and for more than 50 years, computers have grown smaller and more powerful because of it.

Like Windows, Android, iOS, or macOS, Linux is an operating system. First released in 1991, Linux has a number of different versions — known as distributions — to match various user needs. In fact, Android is a Linux-based operating system, so the lineage of Linux can be found in the pockets of millions.

Founded in 1968, Intel gets its name from a combination of “integrated” and “electronics,” and has played a crucial role in computing history. The company’s big moment came in 1981, when IBM chose Intel's 16-bit 8088 CPU as the brains of its first mass-produced personal computer. Since then, Intel has provided the computational power behind some of the industry’s most game-changing machines.

The daughter of English poet Lord Byron, 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace was just 17 years old when she met computer pioneer Charles Babbage and began a long-lasting friendship. When translating a text regarding one of Babbage’s machines, Lovelace described the first computer program in a note marked “G.” She later said that machines would one day perfect the “abstract science of operations.”

IBM introduced the world’s first 1GB hard drive in 1980, but it was not available for at-home use as such drives are today. The drive was a whopping 550 pounds and about the size of a refrigerator, a far cry from the “memory cards” that we use now. IBM’s 3380 hard drive came with a hefty price tag: $40,000. Today, a 1GB memory card is rather obsolete. Typically, they’re sold in sizes from 8GB to 2TB, with a price tag starting around $10.

The computer that brought the world into the digital age, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was built in the U.S. during World War II. The enormous computer filled the 50-by-30-foot basement of the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania. Unlike humans, it could perform thousands of calculations per second, promising breakthroughs in mathematics and engineering.

The 1964 invention of the first computer mouse completely changed how humans interacted with these early machines. The basic design had perpendicular wheels mounted in a hollow wooden block with a button on top and cord attached to the back that looked like a mouse tail. The design beat out other options such as a knee-controlled device under the desk, a light pen, and a joystick.

The change to transistors was one of the biggest advancements in computer technology history. English computer scientist Tom Kilburn and his team unveiled a prototype of a transistorized computer in 1953, which proved to be a success. These switches completely replaced vacuum tubes by the 1960s, allowing for smaller and cheaper computers. This led to complex circuitry in many electronics, such as the transistor radio.

“The Oregon Trail” was originally designed for the teletypewriter in 1971 and made its more modern debut on the Apple II in 1985. Played in grade schools around the country, the computer game followed pioneers traveling west in the mid-19th century, with players facing the dangers of such a treacherous trek, including river fording, food shortages, and dysentery.

The letters on a computer keyboard aren’t arranged in alphabetical order, or any other recognizable pattern — but this is by design. Named for the first six letters in the top row, the QWERTY keyboard was made to improve the performance of mechanical typewriters. It spaced frequently used letters far apart to prevent the lever arms from becoming tangled by typing too fast. This design stuck and is still used today.

Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak famously founded Apple at Jobs’ family home in Los Altos, California, in the mid-1970s. While Jobs was focused more on the business side of Apple, Wozniak was the hardware mastermind of the company’s early years and single-handedly designed and built the company’s first computer kits, called the Apple I, in 1976.

On October 29, 1969, the first data traveled between two nodes that made up the nascent ARPANET. UCLA student programmer Charles Kline sent a message to a Stanford Research Institute’s host computer. The first message was supposed to say “login,” but the system crashed after Kline had typed the letters “L” and “O.” Although not an auspicious beginning, the milestone eventually revolutionized modern life.