National Computer Systems history

Xerox PARC physicist Gary Starkweather realizes in 1967 that exposing a copy machine’s light-sensitive drum to a paper original isn’t the only way to create an image.

Designed by Don Lancaster, the TV Typewriter is an easy-to-build kit that can display alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. It used $120 worth of electronics components, as outlined in the September 1973 issue of hobbyist magazine Radio Electronics.

The kit was the cover story of hobbyist magazine Radio-Electronics in July 1974 – six months before the MITS Altair 8800 was in rival Popular Electronics magazine.

The first of several personal computers released in 1977, the PET comes fully assembled with either 4 or 8 KB of memory, a built-in cassette tape drive, and a membrane keyboard.

Apple introduces the Macintosh with a television commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl, which plays on the theme of totalitarianism in George Orwell´s book 1984.

Dell dropped out of school to focus on his business and in 1985, the company produced the first computer of its own design, the Turbo PC, which sold for $795.

The 2200 used a built-in CRT, cassette tape for storage, and ran the programming language BASIC. The PC era ended Wang’s success, and it filed for bankruptcy in 1992.

Thousands of software titles were released over the lifespan of the C64 and by the time it was discontinued in 1993, it had sold more than 22 million units.

The Newton line never performed as well as hoped and was discontinued in 1998.

Until the year 2000, it was the world's fastest supercomputer, able to achieve peak performance of 1.3 teraflops, (about 1.3 trillion calculations per second).

Lenovo, China's largest manufacturer of PCs, purchased IBM's personal computer business in 2005, largely to gain access to IBM's ThinkPad line of computers and sales force.

By 2011, over 2.4 million laptops had been shipped.