Celebrating 50 years of the hardware that makes our PC's tick
09 November, 2021
Apparently, it’s the 50th anniversary of the very first commercial video game, a commemoration to which many will no doubt take profound epistemological exception on account of some or other obscure oscilloscope-based laboratory curiosity.
Anyway, to complement that peerless gaming landmark and provide plenty more opportunities for a fact-checking furore, here is a list of PC hardware firsts from the annals of technology. Have at ‘em, kids.
The first mouse
Arguably, the first computer pointing device roughly the size and shape of a rodent and with a cable resembling a tail dates back to 1964.
Working at the Stanford Research Institute, Bill English helped Douglas Engelbart build the first mouse prototype based on conceptual work done the previous year by Engelbart.
As it happens, that mouse was used as a critical part of what has since become known as the 'Mother of All Demos', a keynote given in 1968 by Englebert in which he demonstrated for the first time in a single system with many of the core elements of modern personal computing, including a GUI with resizable application windows, hypertext, the command prompt, video conferencing, word processing and collaborative real-time editing.
English and Englebert’s mouse used wheels rather than a trackball to register movement. The first mouse based on a trackball was offered for sale in 1968 by the German company AEG-Telefunken as an input device for its SIG 100 vector graphics terminal, a subsystem of a mainframe computer. The mouse weighed nearly half a kilo and had a single input button.
As for the first mouse attached to something akin to a personal computer, that came with the Xerox Alto of 1973, a single-cabinet machine with a list price of around $100,000 in today’s money.
In the early 1980s, the Xerox 8010, Sun-1 and Apple Lisa began to popularise the mouse, with Logitech introducing its first third-party mouse in 1982, the same year that Microsoft added mouse compatibility to MS Word.
The first hard drive
The first hard disk drive (or HDD for short) dates way back to 1956 and the IBM 305 RAMAC mainframe with its IBM Model 350 disk storage.
It was the first such system to store and retrieve data on a magnetic disk via a moving head.
The IBM Model 350 was 60-inches long, 68-inches high and 29-inches deep and contained 50 magnetic disks rotating at 1,200RPM and had a total capacity of 3.75MB. Seek time averaged about 600 milliseconds.
Problem is, the IBM 350 was the size of a large cupboard. Not exactly the stuff of personal computing. Instead, it was the early 80s that saw several landmarks, including the first desktop PCs with built-in HDDs such as 1983’s IBM PC XT and its capacity of 10MB.
The hard drive as we know it arguably arrived that same year from Rodime PLC in the UK, which introduced the first 3.5-inch drives, the format that soon became the standard for personal computing.
Colorado-based PrairieTek then introduced the first 2.5-inch HDD in 1988. Together, the 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors dominated PC storage until the solid-state era rejigged storage media.
The first GPU
How, exactly, do you define a GPU or graphics processing unit? As early as the 1970s, so-called arcade games had dedicated circuitry for rendering graphics. In the 80s, consumer computers like the Commodore Amiga had dedicated graphics chips. By the 1990s several vendors offered add-in boards for accelerating graphics that resembled today’s high-end GPUs in concept, including cards from S3, ATI (now AMD), PowerVR, and 3dfx.
Arguably, it was Sony that first coined the term GPU in 1994 in reference to the Toshiba-designed graphics chip in the PlayStation One.
But we’ll give the accolade of the first GPU to the Nvidia GeForce 256 of late 1999. It was the first add-in board for a PC to be marketed as a GPU or Graphics Processing Unit.
Just as important, it was the first consumer PC card to offer a single-chip graphics solution capable of transform, lighting, triangle setup and clipping and rasterising.
It was the hardware transform and lighting support that really set the GeForce 256 apart, offloading those tasks from the CPU and massively increasing rendering performance compared to the competition.
Just for the record and purely for fun, the GeForce 256 or NV10 as the chip was codenamed, was built on TSMC’s 220nm process and contained 17 million transistors. Nvidia’s latest GPU, the GA102 monster in the GeForce RTX 3090, is produced on an 8nm process and packs 28 billion transistors. Progress doesn't half enjoy messing with numbers.
Anyway, to complement that peerless gaming landmark and provide plenty more opportunities for a fact-checking furore, here is a list of PC hardware firsts from the annals of technology. Have at ‘em, kids.
The first mouse
Arguably, the first computer pointing device roughly the size and shape of a rodent and with a cable resembling a tail dates back to 1964.
Working at the Stanford Research Institute, Bill English helped Douglas Engelbart build the first mouse prototype based on conceptual work done the previous year by Engelbart.
As it happens, that mouse was used as a critical part of what has since become known as the 'Mother of All Demos', a keynote given in 1968 by Englebert in which he demonstrated for the first time in a single system with many of the core elements of modern personal computing, including a GUI with resizable application windows, hypertext, the command prompt, video conferencing, word processing and collaborative real-time editing.
English and Englebert’s mouse used wheels rather than a trackball to register movement. The first mouse based on a trackball was offered for sale in 1968 by the German company AEG-Telefunken as an input device for its SIG 100 vector graphics terminal, a subsystem of a mainframe computer. The mouse weighed nearly half a kilo and had a single input button.
As for the first mouse attached to something akin to a personal computer, that came with the Xerox Alto of 1973, a single-cabinet machine with a list price of around $100,000 in today’s money.
In the early 1980s, the Xerox 8010, Sun-1 and Apple Lisa began to popularise the mouse, with Logitech introducing its first third-party mouse in 1982, the same year that Microsoft added mouse compatibility to MS Word.
The first hard drive
The first hard disk drive (or HDD for short) dates way back to 1956 and the IBM 305 RAMAC mainframe with its IBM Model 350 disk storage.
It was the first such system to store and retrieve data on a magnetic disk via a moving head.
The IBM Model 350 was 60-inches long, 68-inches high and 29-inches deep and contained 50 magnetic disks rotating at 1,200RPM and had a total capacity of 3.75MB. Seek time averaged about 600 milliseconds.
Problem is, the IBM 350 was the size of a large cupboard. Not exactly the stuff of personal computing. Instead, it was the early 80s that saw several landmarks, including the first desktop PCs with built-in HDDs such as 1983’s IBM PC XT and its capacity of 10MB.
The hard drive as we know it arguably arrived that same year from Rodime PLC in the UK, which introduced the first 3.5-inch drives, the format that soon became the standard for personal computing.
Colorado-based PrairieTek then introduced the first 2.5-inch HDD in 1988. Together, the 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors dominated PC storage until the solid-state era rejigged storage media.
The first GPU
How, exactly, do you define a GPU or graphics processing unit? As early as the 1970s, so-called arcade games had dedicated circuitry for rendering graphics. In the 80s, consumer computers like the Commodore Amiga had dedicated graphics chips. By the 1990s several vendors offered add-in boards for accelerating graphics that resembled today’s high-end GPUs in concept, including cards from S3, ATI (now AMD), PowerVR, and 3dfx.
Arguably, it was Sony that first coined the term GPU in 1994 in reference to the Toshiba-designed graphics chip in the PlayStation One.
But we’ll give the accolade of the first GPU to the Nvidia GeForce 256 of late 1999. It was the first add-in board for a PC to be marketed as a GPU or Graphics Processing Unit.
Just as important, it was the first consumer PC card to offer a single-chip graphics solution capable of transform, lighting, triangle setup and clipping and rasterising.
It was the hardware transform and lighting support that really set the GeForce 256 apart, offloading those tasks from the CPU and massively increasing rendering performance compared to the competition.
Just for the record and purely for fun, the GeForce 256 or NV10 as the chip was codenamed, was built on TSMC’s 220nm process and contained 17 million transistors. Nvidia’s latest GPU, the GA102 monster in the GeForce RTX 3090, is produced on an 8nm process and packs 28 billion transistors. Progress doesn't half enjoy messing with numbers.