A Brief History of Computing
1804: Joseph Jacquard of France patents a weaving loom controlled by punched cards. The introduction of mechanized looms led to riots by weavers in Lyon in 1804 and the Luddite movement in Britain in 1811.
1822: Charles Babbage of England completes work on his “difference engine”, a mechanical device regarded as the first true computer.
1889: Herman Hollerith’s new punched-card tabulating system wins a contract from the U. S. Census Bureau to process data from the 1890 census. In 1924 his company is renamed IBM.
1935: British mathematician Alan Turing develops fundamental theory of computers. During World War II he designs the Colossus, a computer created to break German codes.
1941: German engineer Konrad Zuse completes work on his Z3, the third of a series of computers made by him starting in 1936, based on binary arithmetic and using electromechanical relays. The Z3 has 2,600 relays and is used in the German aircraft industry to solve equations related to airframe design.
1946: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania complete work on ENIAC, the first large-scale general-purpose electronic digital computer, containing 17,000 vacuum tubes. It had been commissioned by the U.S. Army to calculate artillery shell trajectories. As the ENIAC is nearing completion, mathematician John von Neumann joins the team and writes a paper describing the concept of a stored program: use of the memory of a computer to store both data and the program.
1947: The transistor is invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Commercial computers using transistors instead of vacuum tubes become available in 1958.
1951: UNIVAC, Mauchly and Eckert’s successor to ENIAC, and the first commercially available electronic digital computer, is introduced.
1953: IBM introduces the model 650 and sells more than 1000 of them, beginning IBM's dominance of the industry.
1954: First commercial delivery of magnetic core memory: the first “RAM” (random access memory)
1957: The first higher level programming language, FORTRAN, is introduced by IBM. Early programming languages which are still in common use are BASIC, introduced in 1964, and C, introduced in 1973.
1957: The first disk memory is sold (by IBM, capacity 5 MB).
1958: The integrated circuit—many transistors on a chip—is invented. Their use in Minuteman missiles and Apollo spacecraft drives development and lowers costs. Commercial computers using ICs appear in 1966.
1962: Sketchpad, the first program to use a complete graphical-user interface, and the ancestor of computer-assisted drafting (CAD) programs, is written by Ivan Sutherland.
1965: Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, notes that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit has been doubling every two years. This trend, now called Moore's law, has continued to the present.
1968: Doug Englebart of Stanford Research Institute demonstrates use of the mouse and other features of future computing at a national conference in San Francisco.
1969: ARPANET, the military-sponsored precursor to the Internet, begins operation. By the end of the year it connects four locations.
1970: ALOHAnet, using digital wireless (radio) communication between islands in Hawaii, is deployed. The protocol used was similar to that later used for Ethernet.
1971: The first microprocessor—a computer on a chip—developed at Intel. In 1989 Intel introduces the 486, the first one-million transistor microprocessor
1971: First commercial use of ICs to replace magnetic core memory as RAM
1972: E-mail is first used on ARPANET.
1973: Ethernet, the protocol for local networks, is developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox’s PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). It is widely adopted to connect workstations by 1979.
1974: First floppy-disk-based operating system. It is adapted for hobbyist PCs in 1976.
1975: An Albuquerque company, Altair, sells a hobbyist computer for $400. Tones on audio magnetic tape are used for memory. Bill Gates writes BASIC for it, drops out of Harvard, and moves to Albuquerque to found Microsoft.
1977: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs introduce the Apple II computer.
1979: The first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, is introduced for the Apple II. In 1982 a faster spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3, becomes available for the new IBM PC. Microsoft's Excel, initially for the Macintosh, becomes the dominant spreadsheet program in 1988. Spreadsheet programs motivated early business purchases of personal computers
1981: IBM introduces the IBM PC. IBM had given Microsoft the contract to
develop the operating system for its PC, starting that company’s dominance of
operating systems for personal computers.
1982: Sun Microsystems is founded in Silicon Valley to manufacture workstations, powerful desktop computers running the Unix operating system. The increasing capability of PCs causes the popularity of workstations to decline in the 1990s.
1984: Apple introduces the Macintosh, the first popular computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). Many of its features were first developed at Xerox’s PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).
1984: flash memory invented by Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba. Intel introduces the first commercial flash chips in 1988.
1990: The prototype for the World Wide Web is developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (Europe’s particle physics lab).
1992: Microsoft releases Windows 3.1, its first widely-sold GUI operating system.
1993: Marc Andreessen creates the first graphical Web browser while an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. The following year he co-founds Netscape, which dominates the browser market until its market share is surpassed by Microsoft's Internet Explorer in 1999.
For further information, see the following pages on Wikipedia:
history of computing hardware
history of the internet
timeline of computing (table of contents page for very detailed timelines covering different time periods)