Comments on: Daft Dave: A concise history of computers

By: David

David — Fri, 11 May 2007 04:00:21 +0000

PAUL! You’re the man!

By: Paul Ding

Paul Ding — Fri, 11 May 2007 03:32:27 +0000

The chips implanted in the late Derek Jacobs and his parents were more the size of a grain of rice, rather than a grain of sand. Didn’t see that one, first time through.

By: Pointy-Hatted Geek

Pointy-Hatted Geek — Fri, 11 May 2007 02:38:37 +0000

Ooh! Ooh! The third bullet doesn’t have a fact! (Do I win?)
:)

By: Emily Jane

Emily Jane — Fri, 11 May 2007 01:44:14 +0000

I see it’s not what you had in mind, but that should be “founded” at least. Otherwise you meant that H-P was hiding in a garage.

By: JaneM

JaneM — Fri, 11 May 2007 01:21:41 +0000

Commodore 64 not 66

By: David

David — Thu, 10 May 2007 19:27:15 +0000

THanks jv, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. Still one factual mistake waiting to be unearthed guys!

By: jv

jv — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:55:34 +0000

There is an extra space after Palo Alto in this bullet:

1939: Bill Packard and David Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto , California garage.

By: David

David — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:07:53 +0000

Lots of great answers folks! Paul has nailed almost all of them and the ones he missed, Dan and company got. Very impressive!

But there’s still one little, eensy weensy mistake waiting to be corrected for those with a microscopic eye!

By: Paul Ding

Paul Ding — Thu, 10 May 2007 14:31:07 +0000

Herman Hollerith’s name was never part of the company name – it was something like the Calculating, Recording and Tabulating Machinery Company. IBM was the International Business Machines company, and it didn’t exist in 1888.

HP founders’ first names are reversed.

The ABC (not ACB) was abandoned about 1942, as the inventors went off to war, and it never completed. (Among other things, it wasn’t programmable.)

At the time, it was called UNIVAC, not UNIVAC I. The census bureau doesn’t predict elections. In 1952, Eisenhower/Nixon beat Adlai Stevenson; JFK & LBJ ran in 1960.

Tandy Leather, not Light. I think the salesmen were probably even stupider about clubbed baby harp seals, so that wouldn’t be an error. The world ended when they swallowed Allied Electronic, anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

Trey was born about 1955, and his middle name isn’t Harry, it’s Henry.

It was ARPANET, not ARKANET.

Apple Computer had *three* founders, not two. It was founded about 1975 and they initially offered an uncased computer for $666 in Kilobyte about a year before the Apple II was released in the summer of 1976, when the PET and the TRS-80 came out.

The Commodore 66 never existed, so nothing said about it could possibly be true.

The first Mac came out before 1984, although the name change was retroactive. The 1984 ad appeared in the superbowl, not the olympics.

Microsoft didn’t spend $10 billion to introduce Windows 3.0. It sold *very* well compared to 1.x and 2.x.

The media DID make a big deal about the Jacobs’ chips.

By: Derrick Y

Derrick Y — Thu, 10 May 2007 14:08:35 +0000

also, its not ARKANET, but ARPANET.