OPPapers.com

Apple

I. Industry

During the last fifty years or so, computers have become the complex electronic machines that we know today. Many people use these every day, and most don't realize how much they affect their daily life. During the early 20th century, before World War II, a need for calculating machines arose from the military. These first machines were usually designed to do one task each, so they were not designed for general use, but for specific use.
The punched-card machine was more popular than digital computers during this time period. Punched-card machines processed data from paper cards with holes punched in them. The main supplier of these machines and cards was the IBM Company. As late as 1960 IBM was still primarily a punched-card machine supplier. It was not until 1962 that computer sales equaled those of its traditional punched-card products.
The history of computers changed dramatically with the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. Jack Kilby & Robert Noyce were the developers of the integrated circuit. Also known as chips, integrated circuits allowed computers to be many times smaller. They took large, complex circuits and compacted them into a single component. Integrated circuits are still used today, and can contain up to several millions of components in each chip.
Early consumer computers included the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Intel 8080, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II. All of these computers were first introduced in 1977. Although it was more expensive than the TRS-80 or the PET, the Apple II sold better. It did not take long for people to write imaginative software for it. By this time, companies were offering 8 inch floppy drives to go with their machines. They were very expensive but much better than cassette tape. In 1977, Apple developed a 5 ¼ inch floppy drive. Apple's 5 ¼ inch floppy drive could hold 113 Kbytes of data and sold for $495, which included operating system software and a controller that plugged into one of the...