Home Computer Market example essay topic

It started with the dina sors. The first UNIVAC computer (Universal Automatic Computer is developed in 1951. It can store 12,000 digits in random access mercury-delay lines) was delivered to the Census Bureau in June 1951. Internally, the UNIVAC operated at a clock frequency of 2.25 MHz, which was no mean feat for vacuum tube circuits. The UNIVAC also employed mercury delay-line memories. Unlike the ENIAC, (electronic numerical integrator and computer) -- the world's first electronic digital computer the UNIVAC processed each digit serially.

But its much higher design speed permitted it to add two ten-digit numbers at a rate of almost 100,000 additions per second. The machine designed by Drs. Eckert and Mauchly was a monstrosity. When it was finished, the ENIAC filled an entire room, weighed thirty tons, and consumed two hundred kilowatts of power. Vacuum tubes, over 19,000 of them, were the principal elements in the computer's circuitry. It also had fifteen hundred relays and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Too soon, Charles, sadly.

A century and a half ago Charles Babbage, Luc asian Professor of Mathematics, devised his Analytical Engine, which embodied most of the concepts which we now take for granted in the digital computer. But those concepts were far ahead of the available technology. The man Maurice Vincent Wilkes, finally brought to its fullest reality Babbage's dream, by providing the computer with the one vital organ which it still lacked: a capacious memory. He converted a program and its data, punched onto paper tape, into ultrasonic pulses, and he fed the pulses into a tube of memory, which delayed their progress, and he caused the pulses to circulate indefinitely. And so EDSA C was born, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, the first full operational computer with its own memory.

From all sides they flocked to admire it, and stayed to use it. Soon it was performing the vital calculations by which our chemists and radio-astronomers perfected their Nobel Prize-winning work. On those glorious pioneering days he has never ceased to build. Spreadsheets are born. Years later, while at Harvard, Bricklin began to formulate the groundwork for something that would eventually lead to his, and one of the computer industries, most influential products ever, VisiCalc. The idea for the project stemmed from Bricklin's belief that computers could be used in the business industry for more than just word processing.

Up until that point calculations that now seem simple and practically error-free had to be done by hand. Not only was the work long and tedious, but it often produced inaccurate results. Bricklin decided that a computer could do the job faster, easier, and more accurately than had ever been done before. His program would enable users to manipulate numbers as easily as they could manipulate words. Budgets, cost estimates, inventories, and investments could be easily managed through one program. The benefit to the business world would be tremendous.

Such a project, though, required long hours of planning, coding, and testing. Receiving a masters degree from Harvard was tough enough without having to revolutionize the PC industry by himself. Luckily his old friend from MIT, Bob Franksten, was around to help. The two combined to take Bricklin's idea from the drawing board to a reality. With Bricklin designing the interface and Franksten coding, the project was in full swing. The two men formed Software Arts in 1978 with the express purpose of producing and (later) enhancing VisiCalc.

By the time Bricklin received his degree in 1979 the product was ready for market. At the same time changes were being made in the hardware industry as well. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were in the process of creating their own place in history. This was the era of the Apple Computer. 1977: Apple is selling its Apple II for $1,195, including 16 K of RAM but no monitor. (unbelievable) For the first time small, relatively inexpensive computers were available to the general public.

There was only one problem: who wanted to buy a machine that did nothing useful? What Jobs and Wozniak needed was the so-called "killer application"; the one item that would turn the computer from a curiosity into a necessity. It was in 1979 that VisiCalc was made available to the public for use on the Apple II. The impact was felt immediately. Software Arts develops the first spreadsheet program, Visicalc, by the spring of 1979. It is released in October and is an immediate success.

Copies shipped per month rise from 500 to 12,000 between 1979 and 1981. Who would like to have been an affiliate then? At $100 per copy the software was being bought by just about anyone who could afford it. Apple's sales rose accordingly, as many people bought computers just to be able to run VisiCalc. To capitalize on the market Bricklin and Franksten made their product available on many more platforms; most notable was a version for IBM, which became available in 1981. Throughout all this Bricklin made the decision not to patent VisiCalc, holding to his ideal that software should not be proprietary.

Alas, the decision not to patent VisiCalc would soon prove disastrous. This allowed countless others to develop and further his work. Products such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel may never have materialized as quickly as they did without Bricklin's influence. The Birth of Microsoft (opportunities are still around) In December of 1974, Allen was on his way to visit Gates when along the way he stopped to browse the current magazines.

What he saw changed his and Bill Gates's lives forever. On the cover of Popular Electronics was a picture of the Altair 8080 and the headline "World's First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models". He bought the issue and rushed over to Gates's dorm room. They both recognized this as their big opportunity. The two knew that the home computer market was about to explode and that someone would need to make software for the new machines.

Within a few days, Gates had called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the makers of the Altair. He told the company that he and Allen had developed a BASIC that could be used on the Altair. This was a lie. They had not even written a line of code. They had neither an Altair nor the chip that ran the computer. The MITS company did not know this and was very interested in seeing their BASIC.

So, Gates and Allen began working feverishly on the BASIC they had promised. The code for the program was left mostly up to Bill Gates while Paul Allen began working on a way to simulate the Altair with the schools PDP-10. Eight weeks later, the two felt their program was ready. Allen was to fly to MITS and show off their creation.

The day after Allen arrived at MITS, it was time to test their BASIC. The program worked perfectly the first time. MITS arranged a deal with Gates and Allen to buy the rights to their BASIC. Gates was convinced that the software market had been born. Within a year, Bill Gates had dropped out of Harvard and Microsoft was formed. Bill gates speaking, now".

"Documents on the Internet are showing rapid improvement in terms of taking advantage of what's possible. When people started out, they were mostly taking the idea of a paper document and simply transferring it to the screen. Now we " re seeing documents with pictures, sound, motion, and interactivity. The opportunity here is for creating a whole new document type" The next step... Business computers have been able to read text aloud for years, but systems and programs for use at home have typically cost hundreds of dollars, and their quality, design, and usability have varied wildly. But all of that has changed with the introduction of new high quality and affordable screen reading software.

Now it is possible for your computer read to you! You no longer have to feel tied to your computer monitor in order to get the information you need-you can perform other tasks or simply sit and relax while listening to e-mail messages, Microsoft Word documents, Adobe Acrobat files, or Internet Explorer Web pages being read aloud to you in a natural, pleasant, human-sounding voice. In addition, screen-reading technology offers assistance to users with vision, learning, or physical disabilities that may make using a computer difficult or impossible. Font size, volume control, and speed control can be easily adjusted to suit individual preferences, and programs are available now in both English and Spanish, with more languages coming soon.

Be ready for the next step, judge for yourselves. The technology is alraedy being used, and its just about to break into the home market. Alex Armet web.