A Brief History of Computing
- Products noteable for their technical achievement or popularity

Cray 1, the first commercially developed Supercomputer, it contained 200,000 integrated circuits and was freon-cooled. It could perform 150 million floating point operations per second - it is now the basis of an informal measurement of the power Supercomputers, by the mid-1990s these had reached the 1000-'cray' mark! Supercomputers are also measured by the number of floating point operations they can do in a second, but this figure can be misleading as the definition of a floating point operation is open to some debate - but these operations are far more complicated than integer operations normally handled by Microcomputers. In 1992 the fastest Computer was the Cray-2, which can do around 250 million floating point operations per seconds. Cray have continued to develop even more powerful computers, such as the Cray Y-MP/832.

Such Supercomputers are used for weather forecasting, complex maths and physics problems, and animation in modern films.

Introduction of 8086 by Intel, the first commercially successful 16 bit processor. It was too expensive to implement in early computers, so an 8 bit version was developed (the 8088), which was chosen by IBM for the first IBM PC. This ensured the success of the x86 family of processors that succeeded the 8086 since they and their clones are used in every IBM PC compatible computer.

The available clock frequencies are 4.77, 8 and 10 MHz. It has an instruction set of about 300 operations. At introduction the fastest processor was the 8 MHz version which achieved 0.8 MIPs and contained 29,000 transistors.

The Xerox 8010 ('Star') System, the first commerical system to use a WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing Devices) graphic user interface - from which all modern WIMP and Windowing systems have evolved. Apple used these concepts when designing the interface for the Apple Macintosh (see January 1984), and later alleged that Microsoft copied their 'look and feel' when designing Microsoft Windows.

The Xerox 'Star' was the commercialisation of the 'Alto', which had available internally inside Xerox PARC since 1973. Sales of the 'Star' were terrible and the system rapidly fell into obscurity.

The Commodore Amiga (later known as the Amiga 1000) was announced, although it was not released until September. Amiga had a turbulent history, with no real revenue stream to support their development. After a period of legal wranglings with Atari, Amiga were bought by Commodore. Their product was finally completed and brought to market under the 'Commodore Amiga' name. The system cost £1500, a high price at the time (comparable to the pricey Apple Macintosh). You got what you paid for though, it was an impressive machine for the era. It featured a colour graphical user interface, a 16 bit processor, TV output and 256K of RAM. It also included a 'bit-blitter' for moving graphical data without tieing up the main CPU.

In 1987 the Amiga 1000 was followed with the higher specification A2000, and the cheaper A500. It was the A500 which really pushed the Amiga brand forwards, spurred on by the development of various games for the platform (and to the detriment of the Atari ST which, until the A500, was the popular choice among gamers).

80386 DX released. It supports clock frequencies of up to 33 MHz and can address up to 4 GB of memory and virtual memory of up to 64 TERABYTES! It also includes a bigger instruction set than the 80286.

At the date of release the fastest version ran at 20 MHz and achieved 6.0 MIPs. It contained 275,000 transistors.

Macintosh II & Macintosh SE released. The SE was still based on the 68000, but could cope with 4 Mb of RAM and had a SCSI adapter, similar specifications to the Macintosh Plus of Jan. 1986.

The Macintosh II was based on the newer Motorola 68020, that ran at 16 MHz and achieved a much more respectable 2.6 MIPs (comparable to an 80286). It too had a SCSI adapter but was also fitted with a colour video adapter.

AD-LIB soundcard released. Not widely supported until a software company, Taito, released several games fully supporting AD-LIB - the word then spread how much the special sound effects and music enhanced the games.

Adlib, a Canadian Company, had a virtual monopoly until 1989 when the SoundBlaster card was released.