Computer softwares history

In this event, key figures from the Alto story discussed and demonstrated it live! Today, the computer is an indispensable tool in the creation of print—books, magazines, and printed materials of all sorts. While computers appeared in printing and publishing in the s, it was the s that set the stage for a remarkable transformation in the s: the desktop publishing revolution. In this two-day meeting, pioneers of desktop publishing discussed the technological, economic, and social dimensions of this transformation.

Desktop Publishing Pioneer Meeting. For centuries, many have taken prowess at the game of chess to be a symbol of human intelligence, requiring cunning, strategy, memory, focus, and creativity. What would it mean if a computer could be made to play chess well?

This online exhibit explores the deep connections between chess, computing, and artificial intelligence. Mastering the Game. How are historians and other researchers exploring the development and consequences of computing today? What new directions and insights are emerging? Command Lines. The Museum preserves and makes accessible a large archival collection in its Shustek Research Archives. Recently, we were honored to be entrusted with the papers of Dennis M.

Ritchie was the creator of the C programming language in the s—still among the most widely used today—and an instrumental figure in the development of Unix, both at the Bell Telephone Laboratories where he spent his career. The Earliest Unix Code. We are submerged in interactive multimedia. The online world combines digital versions of traditional media text, sound, image, video navigated through hyperlinks. How did it evolve?

How have computers become creative tools? What has been gained and what has been lost? We are actively collecting software, archives, and other materials on the history of interactive multimedia, and exploring it using video ethnography and events. Video Ethnography of Visual Almanac. Software is more than obscure computer code. From Fortran to sophisticated programs in use today, discover the technology, creativity, hard work, and technique behind these elegant languages. Software pioneers share their stories in this 9-minute video production.

The Art of Writing Software. Understanding AI Understanding human intelligence and how computers might act intelligently spans the entire history of computing. Historical Source Code CHM is committed to building and preserving a broad collection of historical software. Source code releases. Software in Action Software is made to run; it is what computers do.

Either way, the software is actually the most recent implementation of something that has been around for quite some time. Software developed to meet the needs of early computer programmers. Instead, they all function on binary, which is a series of ones and zeros.

Some of the earliest computers were programmed directly in binary, but this was a long, tedious chore that few people could actually do.

In order to make programming easier, different programming languages were created. This led to the creation of software, something that serves as a translator of sorts. Computer users, through the software interface, give the computer instructions. These instructions are then translated by the software into a language that the computer can understand.

Before software as we know it was created, there were a few different early attempts at programming computers. Punch cards were the first. These cards were simple paper cards that had rows of dots. If the dot was punched, it represented a zero. These cards would later be replaced by reels of magnetic tape. This was easier to manage space-wise, since storing stacks of cards was very impractical, but it still took a lot of time and work to program.

During this time, a number of different types of programming software were created. This did have some advantages: the software was tailored for the specific needs of the user, and the user understood exactly what the software was doing. However, the disadvantages were much greater. When computers became small enough to be sold to individuals, software became much more prevalent. ASCII can only represent up to symbols, and for this reason many other languages are better supported by Unicode, which has the ability to represent over , symbols.

Ivan Sutherland publishes Sketchpad, an interactive, real-time computer drawing system, as his MIT doctoral thesis. Using a light pen and Sketchpad, a designer could draw and manipulate geometric figures on a computer screen.

Blossoming into the best known of the early drawing applications, Sketchpad influenced a generation of design and drafting programs.

Although used mostly for engineering drawings, it had some artistic applications, including a famous drawing of Nefertiti that could be animated to a limited extent. Its use spread widely to schools all over the world. Over a decade later, most early personal computers were shipped with a version of BASIC embedded in their system, which opened up programming to an entirely new audience.

Based largely on the Algol 60 programming language, Simula grouped data and instructions into blocks called objects, each representing one facet of a system intended for simulation. In addition to simulation, Simula also has applications in computer graphics, process control, scientific data processing and other fields. Initially a drawing program, LOGO controlled the actions of a mechanical "turtle," which traced its path with pen on paper. Electronic turtles made their designs on a video display monitor.

Papert emphasized creative exploration over memorization of facts: "People give lip service to learning to learn, but if you look at curriculum in schools, most of it is about dates, fractions, and science facts; very little of it is about learning.

I like to think of learning as an expertise that every one of us can acquire. He called for abolishing the unrestricted GOTO statements used in higher-level languages, and argued that they complicated programming. The ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it established a policy of no longer printing articles taking such an assertive position against a coding practice. Before CICS was introduced, many industries used punched card batch processing for high-volume customer transactions.

As it allowed online transaction processing, CICS was able to replace this method and greatly sped up the way that companies interacted with their customers. It was first used in the public utility industry for access to customer information and transactions, but soon after its release it was quickly adopted by a wide spectrum of industries including banking, oil, insurance and even smaller companies.

Although it was originally intended to only last a few years, CICS is still in use today. UNIX combined many of the timesharing and file management features offered by Multics, from which it took its name. Multics, a project of the mids, represented one of the earliest efforts at creating a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system. The standard permits computers and peripheral devices to transmit information serially — that is, one bit at a time.

RSC compatible ports were widely used for equipment like printers and modems. Compared to more modern interfaces, serial connections had slow transmission speeds, were bulky and have been largely replaced by USB ports on new PCs and peripheral equipment.

The Pascal programming language, named after Blaise Pascal, a French physicist, mathematician and inventor turned philosopher, is introduced by Professor Niklaus Wirth. His aim with Pascal was to develop a programming language applicable to both commercial and scientific applications, and which could also be used to teach programming techniques to college students. The C programming language is released. As such, Unix was easily ported to other computers and spread swiftly.

C is still widely used today. In , it had significant market share, in part because it came bundled with the Osborne 1 computer. WordStar retained a loyal following well after Microsoft Word surpassed it in sales. IBM purchased Lotus in Microsoft announces Word, originally called Multi-Tool Word.

In a marketing blitz, Microsoft distributed , disks containing a demonstration version of its Word program in the November issue of PC World magazine, giving readers a chance to try the program for free. It competed with WordPerfect for market share as a word processing program, and it was not until Microsoft Word for Windows was introduced in that it became a global standard.

This operating system called GNU for Gnu's Not Unix was going to be free of charge but also allow users the freedom to change and share it. While the GNU work did not immediately result in a full operating system, it provided the necessary tools for creating another Unix-type system known as Linux. Matlab Matrix Laboratory , a high-level programming language, is released.

Its roots began in the academic community, but it spread quickly to many other areas of technical computing and is widely used today.

Phil Moorby and Prabhu Goel of Gateway Design Automation create Verilog, a hardware description language that is used in the design of digital circuitry. Verilog is now one of two hardware description languages used in the world today to design complex digital systems.

Aldus announces its PageMaker program for use on Macintosh computers, launching the desktop publishing revolution.

Developed by Paul Brainerd, PageMaker allowed users to combine graphics and text easily into professional quality documents. Pagemaker was one of three components to the desktop publishing revolution.

The other two were the invention of Postscript by Adobe and the LaserWriter laser printer from Apple. All three were necessary to create a desktop publishing environment.

It was intended to facilitate report processing and could scan and extract information from text files and ultimately create reports generated from that information. It was designed for ease of use and quick programming and has found multiple applications in every branch of computing. Apple engineer William Atkinson designs HyperCard, a software tool that simplifies development of in-house applications. As a stack author, a programmer employed various tools to create his own stacks, linked together as a sort of slide show.

Apple distributed the program free with Macintosh computers until Mathematica is created by Stephen Wolfram, a British scientist.