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Ed deCastro and Nova
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Computers
Data General Corp., started by a group of engineers that had left Digital
Equipment Corp., introduced the Nova, with 32 kilobytes of memory, for $8,000.
In the photograph, Ed deCastro, president and founder of Data General, sits
with a Nova minicomputer. The simple architecture of the Nova instruction set
inspired Steve Wozniak's Apple I board eight years later.
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Apollo Guidance Computer
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Computers
The Apollo Guidance Computer made its debut orbiting the Earth on Apollo 7.
A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the lunar surface. Astronauts
communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes and the appropriate
syntactic category into the display and keyboard unit.
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Tentacle Arm
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Robots & AI
Marvin Minsky developed the Tentacle Arm, which moved like an octopus. It had
twelve joints designed to reach around obstacles. A PDP-6 computer controlled
the arm, powered by hydraulic fluids. Mounted on a wall, it could lift the
weight of a person.
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Software & Languages
Edsger Dijkstra's "GO TO considered harmful" letter, published in
Communications of the ACM, fired the first salvo in the structured programming
wars. The ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it
established a policy of no longer printing articles taking such an assertive
position against a coding practice.
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