Timeline: Caleb's history of technology

1882

First mechanical computer or automatic computing engine concept

Charles Babbage developed the difference machine. This machine could compute multiple several sets of numbers and make hard copies of the results.

Jan 13, 1910

First public broadcast

The first public radio performance was broadcast on January 13, 1910, from the Metropolitan Opera House. The signal was broadcast with a five hundred watt transmitter, and was heard as far away as Bridgeport, Connecticut.

1930

First Television

The first television was pioneered by Peter Goldmark called the LCD TV. LCD meaning Liquid crystal Display.

1936

The first electric computer

Alan Turing proposed the Turing Machine. This machine was a device that printed symbols on paper tape in a manner that emulated a person following a series of logical instructions

1937

The first programmable computer

The Z1 was developed by Konrad Zuse, a German, in his parents living room and is considered to be the first electro-mechanical binary programmable computer, and the first really functional modern computer.

1937

First digital computer

Atanasoff-Berry Computer or ABC was developed by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry in 1937. Its development continued until 1942 at the Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). With over 300 vacuum tubes for digital computation including binary math and Boolean logic and had no CPU.

1940

First Airplane radar system

English physicists John Randall and Harry Boot develop a compact magnetron for use in airplane radar navigation systems.

1943

First electric programmable computer

Colossus, developed by Tommy Flowers, was created in December of 1943 to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages.

1947

The start of the modern computer Revolution

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invent the transistor, which allows electronic equipment to made much smaller and leads to the modern computer revolution.

1959

The First CAD system

IBM and General Motors develop Design Augmented by Computers-1 (DAC-1), the first computer-aided design (CAD) system.

1960

The first computer Mouse

Douglas Engelbart develops the computer mouse.

1972

First Basic Cable Network

In 1972, HBO became the first pay cable network. It was the first to use a newly approved satellite-based distribution system, distributing its signal to cable operators nationwide.

1974

First barcode scanner and codes

The first ever UPC scanner was installed at one checkout station in a Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in June of 1974.In 1972, a Kroger in Cincinnati experimented with a “bulls-eye” style code—but at the time, a committee was being formed within the grocery industry to produce a standard. IBM’s proposal, for what would become known as the UPC or Uniform Product Code, won out.

1984

The First Graphical User Interface

The first commercially available home computer called the Xerox Alto, with anything resembling a familiar GUI (a graphical user interface), with windows, folders, and a mouse was the Apple Macintosh in 1984, which was famously adapted by Microsoft for its Windows OS.

Aug 6, 1991

CERN's World Wide Web project

The World Wide Web is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents. So reads the text at the top of the first website ever to be published, by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, on August 6, 1991.The page was created on a NeXT workstation at CERN labs in Geneva, Switzerland.