1834 - Analytical Engine Designed: a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, a design for a mechanical computer.
1896 - Tabulating Machine Company Formed: a firm which manufactured and sold Hollerith unit record equipment and other data-processing equipment. During World War II, BTM constructed a number of "bombes", machines used at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma machine ciphers. This company, formed by Herman Hollerith, later became the tech giant IBM.
1938 - Z1 Computer Created: The Z1 was a mechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse from 1935 to 1936 and built by him from 1936 to 1938. It was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched celluloid film.
1943 - Enigma and Colossus: Colossus was an electronic digital computer, built during WWII from over 1700 valves (tubes). It was used to break the codes of the German Lorenz SZ-40 cipher machine that was used by the German High Command. Colossus is sometimes referred to as the world's first fixed program, digital, electronic, computer.
1945 - ENIAC Developed: ENIAC was amongst the earliest electronic general-purpose computers made. It was Turing-complete, digital and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.
1945 - First Computer Bug: At 3:45 p.m., Grace Murray Hopper records the first computer bug in her log book as she worked on the Harvard Mark II. The problem was traced to a moth stuck between a relay in the machine, which Hopper duly taped into the Mark II's log book with the explanation: “First actual case of bug being found.”
1947 - Transistor Invented: 1947: Invention of the Transistor. The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain .
1951 - UNIVAC Introduced: The UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) was the first commercial computer produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC.
1954 - FORTRAN Developed: Fortran (Formula Translation) is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM for scientific and engineering applications,
1962 - First Computer Game: Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed by Steve Russell, in collaboration with Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, and programmed by Russell with assistance from others including Bob Saunders and Steve Piner @ MIT. The goal was to develop an application that got the public interested in using comptuers.
1963 - Mouse Developed: The first computer mouse was conceived of by Douglas Engelbart, then a Director of Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), in Menlo Park, California.
1963 - ASCII Developed: ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or an action of some sort.
1964 - BASIC Introduced: Invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system 5 at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964. The two math professors deeply believed that computer literacy would be essential in the years to come, and designed the language--its name stood for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code"--to be as approachable as possible.
1967 - Floppy Disk: The floppy disk drive (FDD) was invented at IBM by Alan Shugart. The first floppy drives used an 8-inch disk (later called a "diskette" as it got smaller), which evolved into the 5.25-inch disk that was used on the first IBM Personal Computer in August 1981.
1970 - RAM Introduced: Intel's 1103 was the world's first available dynamic RAM chip. Robert Dennard was the inventor of ram: random access memory, the device was patented in 1968 by Dennard. Jay Forrester was a pioneer in early digital computer development and invented random-access, coincident-current magnetic storage.
1971 - Email InventedThis is why Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972. Like many of the Internet inventors, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor. He picked the @ symbol from the computer keyboard to denote sending messages from one computer to another.
1972 - First Video Game: Developed by Atari, Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games and the first sports arcade video game. It is a table tennis sports game featuring simple two-dimensional graphics.
1973 - Xerox Alto Released: The Xerox Alto was the first computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface (GUI), later using the desktop metaphor.
1976 - Apple Computers Founded: Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in April 1976 to develop and sell personal computers. It was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc.
1977 - Apple II Demonstrated: The Apple II series is a family of home computers, one of the first highly successful mass-produced text command microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and introduced in 1977 with the original Apple II.
1980 - DOS Developed: A disk operating system (abbreviated DOS) is a computer operating system that can use a disk storage device, such as a floppy disk, hard disk drive, or optical disc. A disk operating system must provide a file system for organizing, reading, and writing files on the storage disk. IBM hired Paul Allen and Bill Gates to create an operating system for a new PC. They buy the rights to a simple operating system manufactured by Seattle Computer Products and use it as a template to develop DOS.
1981 - IBM PC Introduced: BM's brand recognition, along with a massive marketing campaign, ignites the fast growth of the personal computer market with the announcement of its own personal computer (PC). The first IBM PC, formally known as the IBM Model 5150, was based on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft´s MS-DOS operating system. The IBM PC revolutionized business computing by becoming the first PC to gain widespread adoption by industry. The IBM PC was widely copied (“cloned”) and led to the creation of a vast “ecosystem” of software, peripherals, and other commodities for use with the platform.
1984 - Apple Macintosh Released: Apple introduces the Macintosh with a television commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl, which plays on the theme of totalitarianism in George Orwell´s book 1984. The ad featured the destruction of “Big Brother” – a veiled reference to IBM -- through the power of personal computing found in a Macintosh. The Macintosh was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface and was based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor. Its price was $2,500. Applications that came as part of the package included MacPaint, which made use of the mouse, and MacWrite, which demonstrated WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processing.
1991 - World Wide Web Public Launch: The World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or the Web) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.
1995 - Java Created: Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. Java is a general-purpose computer programming language that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented,and specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere" (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation.
1998 - Google Founded: Google Inc. is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware