While the computer’s forerunner was actually invented by a British woman, Ada Lovelace, in the nineteenth century, the computer was improved and enhanced dramatically by a number of large American companies, principally IBM in the 1950s and ’60s. But the computer, initially quite large and cumbersome by today’s standards, spawned—most especially in the newly named Silicon Valley area of Northern California—a whole variety of products that revolutionized the business world as well as life itself.
