"Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable desktop calculator."

In Paul Allen’s forthcoming memoir, Idea Man, which is excerpted in the new Vanity Fair, the Microsoft co-founder pinpoints ten months when the technology we know today first became possible:

“That year, 1968, would be a watershed in matters digital. In March, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable desktop calculator. In June, Robert Dennard won a patent for a one-transistor cell of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, a new and cheaper method of temporary data storage. In July, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel Corporation. In December, at the legendary ‘mother of all demos’ in San Francisco, the Stanford Research Institute’s Douglas Engelbart showed off his original versions of a mouse, a word processor, e-mail, and hypertext. Of all the epochal changes in store over the next two decades, a remarkable number were seeded over those 10 months: cheap and reliable memory, a graphical user interface, a ‘killer’ application, and more.”