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Charles Babbage designs the first programmable computer called the "Analytical Engine". This was designed to use punch cards of the type used in Jacquard looms. Ada Lovelace wrote a program for the machine.
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George Boole develops Boolean algebra which is the foundation of the hardware design of all modern digital computers.
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The German Enigma machine, an electromechanical rotor machine is widely used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. Although this was not a computer, being more like an advanced adding machine, its role in World War II stimulated computer design for decryption machines.
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"On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" by Alonzo Church and Alan Turing
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Hewlett-Packard (HP) founded by William Hewlett and David Packard although they didn't make any computers until 1966.
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German engineer Konrad Zuse invents and builds the first electronic programmable computer. It was called the Z3 and gave rise to the Z4 in 1950.
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First programmable digital electronic computer is built by the British to decode German messages.
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First commercially successful electronic computer, UNIVAC was built.
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First magnetic core memory in an IBM 405 Alphabetical Accounting Machine is tested successfully.
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Whirlwind, the first real-time computer is built at MIT for the US Air Defence System
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World's Largest Computer ever built consisting of 200,000 vacuum tubes requiring 1,000,000 Watts
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Scientist Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments files the first patent for an Integrated Circuit
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Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor was awarded a patent for "unitary circuit" made of silicon
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Douglas Engelbart starts work on the NLS system at the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute
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Douglas Engelbart invents the computer mouse. Bill English of Xerox Parc develops the mouse ball, replacing the original set of wheels.
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Ted Nelson publishes his first article about his invention, hypertext.
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Gordon Moore makes his famous "law" which is not a law at all, in any form, but quickly becomes an accepted myth supported by very scientific-looking charts.
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Larry Roberts heads the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's project to create the first ever packet switched network, largely considered unworkable by experts.
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Doug Engelbart presents his team's work in a 90-minute live public demonstration of a personal (super) computer. This demonstration is now known as The Mother Of All Demos. Among other things, the NLS system has hypertext and distributed collaboration.
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Intel formed by Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, & Andy Grove.
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Unix created at AT&T's Bell Telephone Labs by Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie.
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UCLA and Stanford Research Institute become the second nodes on the ARPANET
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Xerox establishes PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, which will go on to create the modern personal computer, including GUI, laser printer and networking.
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Alan Kay[2] joins PARC where he will develop Smalltalk for the Dynabook project which aims to create a useful user-programmable laptop computer ... for kids. Despite early successes with children, Alan Kay will decide that this is a more or less impossible goal and fall back on reimplementing Smalltalk.