A little history

Hey everybody! My name is Matt Boller and before I start talking about the class I'd like to let you know a little bit about myself. This is my first semester here at EMU and I am a transfer student from Jackson Community College. I attended JCC for two and a half years and I am a business major. I've never done any blogging before so I'm new to all of this. After just two class periods I am beginning to understand how important and vital computer systems are to everyday life in the business world. I'm interested in learing about how we got to where we are now throughout time and how computers have adapted greatly since the invention of computer systems.

As we began to learn about the history of computers and how they came about, there were a few things that really stuck out to me. I found myself really amused with the how IBM got to where they are today and how they grew with the creation of more and more systems. I also learned something else that affects the entire world and I did not know too much about its history; the Internet, which came about from Arpanet.

In 1911, Charles Flint began the merger of Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company with two others known as the Computing Scale Company of America and the International Time Recording Company. They became known as C-T-R, which stood for Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company. They were based in New York and had 1300 employees along with offices and plants in 5 locations-including Detroit, Michigan. The name IBM was created in 1924, when they changed it based on the production of many other machines. IBM stood for International Business Machines Corporation. The company had expanded to Europe and was growing rapidly. As the country went through the Great Depresion in the 1930s, companies were going out of business and IBM was growing. In 1951, IBM released their newest product-the IBM 701. This was designed primarily for scientific calculations. Three years later, they released the IBM 702. They also came out with one of the first fully transistorized mainframes in 1958 called the IBM 7090. Then about 20 years later, they released the first personal computer which went on sale in 1981. The PC offered Microsofts MS DOS as the operating system. http://http//www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/history_intro.html

Just real quick, briefly about the Arpanet and how it got turned into the Internet. It came about in 1969 and connected 4 computers in different cities from New York to LA and over the years, expanded and is now what we know as the Internet. I just thought that was pretty cool to learn about and what it used to be like before we had all of this.