Beaverton City Map Poster

About Beaverton

The Oregon Electric Railway began service to Beaverton in 1911. In 1943, the United States government took control of what is now Nike Missile Base property in neighboring Hillsboro and used it as a World War II Japanese American internment camp. The base was decommissioned from 1944 to 1946, at which time the land was returned to private ownership and development resumed in Beaverton. In 1948, an early prototype of a computer called BINAC ran its first test program on this site; it went into operation for the Portland General Electric Company (a utility) on June 5 that year using two words per second with paper tape input/output or five hundred words per minute using punched cards for input/output.[6] This machine is considered by some as "the first computer invented.