In february of 1945, the public got its first glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.

An inspiring summer school on computing at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering stimulated construction of stored-program computers at universities and research institutions. This free, public set of lectures inspired the EDSAC, BINAC, and, later, IAS machine clones like the AVIDAC. Here, Warren Kelleher completes the wiring of the arithmetic unit components of the AVIDAC at Argonne National Laboratory. Robert Dennis installs the inter-unit wiring as James Woody Jr. adjusts the deflection control circuits of the memory unit.

On December 23, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen successfully tested this point-contact transistor, setting off the semiconductor revolution. Improved models of the transistor, developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories, supplanted the vacuum tubes used on computers at the time.

IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed scientific data in public view near the company's Manhattan headquarters. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon.

Maurice Wilkes assembled the EDSAC, the first practical stored-program computer, at Cambridge University. His ideas grew out of the Moore School lectures he had attended three years earlier.

The first Computer made in England, the Lyons Electronic Office, solved clerical problems. The president of Lyons Tea Co. had the computer, which was modeled after the EDSAC, built to solve the problem
of daily scheduling production and delivery of cakes to the Lyons tea shops. After the success of the first LEO, Lyons went into business manufacturing computers to meet the growing need for data processing systems.

John von Neumann's IAS computer became operational at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. By contract the builders were obliged to share their designs with other research institutes. This resulted in a number of clones: the MANIAC at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the ILLIAC at the University of Illinois, the Johnniac at Rand Corp., the SILLIAC in Australia, and others.

IBM Computers shipped its first electronic computer, the 701. During three years of production, IBM sold 19 machines to research laboratories, aircraft companies, and the federal government.

A silicon-based junction transistor, perfected by Gordon Teal of Texas Instruments Inc., brought the price of this component down to $2.50. A Texas Instruments news release from May 10, 1954, read, "Electronic "brains" approaching the human brain in scope and reliability came much closer to reality today with the announcement by Texas Instruments Incorporated of the first commercial production of silicon transistors, kernel-sized substitutes for vacuum tubes."

The company became a household name when the first transistor radio incorporated Teal's invention. The radio, sold by Regency Electronics for $50, launched the world into a global village of instant news and pop music.

MIT researchers built the TX-0, the first general-purpose, programmable computer built with transistors. For easy replacement, designers placed each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube. Constructed at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, the TX-0 moved to the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, where it hosted some early imaginative tests of programming, including a Western movie shown on TV, 3-D tic-tac-toe, and a maze in which mouse found martinis and became increasingly inebriated.

Japan's NEC built the country's first electronic computer, the NEAC 1101.

IBM's 7000 series mainframes were the company's first transistorized computers. At the top of the line of computers -- all of which emerged significantly faster and more dependable than vacuum tube machines -- sat the 7030, also known as the "Stretch." Seven of the computers, which featured a 64-bit word and other innovations, were sold to national laboratories and other scientific users. L. R. Johnson first used the term "architecture" in describing the Stretch.

The LINC (Laboratory Instrumentation Computer) offered the first real time laboratory data processing. Designed by Wesley Clark at Lincoln Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp. later commercialized it as the LINC-8.

Research faculty came to a workshop at MIT to build their own machines, most of which they used in biomedical studies. DEC supplied components.

CDC's 6600 supercomputer, designed by Seymour Cray, performed up to 3 million instructions per second -- a processing speed three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM Stretch. The 6600 retained the distinction of being the fastest computer in the world until surpassed by its successor, the CDC 7600, in 1968. Part of the speed came from the computer's design, which had 10 small computers, known as peripheral processors, funneling data to a large central processing unit.

Hewlett-Packard entered the general purpose computer business with its HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational power formerly found only in much larger computers. It supported a wide variety of languages, among them BASIC, ALGOL, and FORTRAN.

The Kenbak-1, the first personal computer, advertised for $750 in Scientific American. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-scale and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory. In 1973, after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corp. closed its doors.

Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center designed the Alto -- the first work station with a built-in mouse for input. The Alto stored several files simultaneously in windows, offered menus and icons, and could link to a local area network. Although Xerox never sold the Alto commercially, it gave a number of them to universities. Engineers later incorporated its features into work stations and personal computers.