"Jon Jarmon" wrote in message:
Hi Jon,
> I'm not sure totally about software -either the Basic Interpreter
> language in the early Personal Computers or the importance of
> Computer games- Remember about Atari's Pong and the much
> earlier 1958 tennis for two demo.
> I think that one of the most significant development in Computers
> was Douglas Englebarts and others ARPA Stanford Research
> Institutes development of the Computer Mouse,Graphic User
> Interface,Hypertext and networking in the 1960's with the
> Online system.You can see a RealPlayer video of this 1968 demo
> if you go to Nathans toasty technology page at
>
http://www.toastytech.com and go to his GUI links page.
The only trouble with that I see with that, is nothing much has changed
since that period!
> Also when most of the people left Englebarts group, a lot of the
> leading computer scientists later worked at Xerox PARC to develop
> a astonishing machine- The Alto Workstation(Essentially the
> prototype of the Modern Personal Computer).This ONE man
> operated small 128k memory or 256k memory machine had a 3
> button brush rollerball Computer mouse using the
> Smalltalk environment and a Graphic User Interface(GUI) with
> ethernet network,the first developed Laser Printer,MIDI etc later
> to inspire the Apple LISA,Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.
The Apple GUI I suppose you can say was created when Xerox
showed the future to head of the Apple Corporation what they
had. Digital Research also had this GUI (which came out a year
after the Mac) called GEM which Apple severly crippled (perhaps
it was just too darn good to be starting with something so good
so early). Windows started life a an extremely BASIC GUI & by
the time it got to Win3.x (when Apple saw an opportunity to
put a stop to) it wasn't quite that simple.
> I consider the Xerox Alto workstation to be the ULTIMATE
> desirable computer collector item.
?!?
> The invention of the Integrated Circuit in 1958 and 1969 Intel
> invention of the Microprocessor revolutionized the World.
> Charled babbage in the 1800's was the father of the modern
> computer. And of course lets not forget the ARPA's Internet and
> later the WWW.
Speaking of Charles babbage is more related to what started
the computer revolution (however he was many years too early
which, sadily, is why he didn't quite get anywhere!). I see
computers making a comeback when WWII arived, however
they were built with a specific task in mind (nevertheless they
were electronic) & with the coming of the transistor this brought
even more smaller & powerful computers.
Cheers.