Modern computing can probably be traced back to the 'Harvard Mk I' and Colossus (both of 1943). Colossus was an electronic computer built in Britain at the end 1943 and designed to crack the German coding system - Lorenz cipher. The 'Harvard Mk I' was a more general purpose electro-mechanical programmable computer built at Harvard University with backing from IBM. These computers were among the first of the 'first generation' computers. First generation computers were normally based …showed first 75 words of 1600 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1600 total…several political reasons for doing this, but one condition was that Apple had to drop this long-running court case. It is also worth mentioning another windowing system, developed in the late 1980s, 'X Windows'. This was developed at MIT for use on graphics workstations, and due largely to the availability of the source code used to write it, it has become the standard graphical interface on most Unix based systems - including most Linux distributions.