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In 1822, Charles Babbage created a concept of the first automatic computing machine to approximate polynomials.
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In 1837, Charles Babbage proposed the first general computer the "Analytical Engine", Unfortunately the computer was never built while Babbage was alive. -
Ada Lovelace, commonly called the first computer programmer, first described how a routine could be written for machine-based problem-solving. This was the starting point for every development in the computing field. -
Herman Hollerith developed a method for machines to record and store information on punch cards for the US census. Hollerith's machine was approximately ten times faster than manual tabulations, saving the census office millions of dollars. -
The Z3 was a German electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse in 1938, and completed in 1941. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. -
The Colossus was the first electric programmable computer, developed by Tommy Flowers, and was first demonstrated in December 1943. The Colossus was created to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages. -
The Turing machine was first proposed by Alan Turing in 1936 and became the foundation for theories about computing and computers. The machine was a device that printed symbols on paper tape in a manner that emulated a person following several logical instructions -
Curt Herzstark was an Austrian engineer who worked in his family’s manufacturing business until he was arrested by the Nazis in 1943. While imprisoned at Buchenwald concentration camp for the rest of World War II, he refines his pre-war design of a calculator featuring a modified version of Leibniz’s “stepped drum” design. After the war, Herzstark’s Curta made history as the smallest all-mechanical, four-function calculator ever built. -
The Harvard Mark I, or IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), was one of the earliest general-purpose electromechanical computers, initiated by John con Neumann, it was used in the war effort during the last part of World War II. -
The Nimrod, built in the United Kingdom by Ferranti for the 1951 Festival of Britain, was an early computer custom-built to play Nim, inspired by the earlier Nimatron. -
Grace Hopper developed the first computer language, called COBOL -
Doug Ross wrote a memo advocating direct access in February. Ross contended that a Flexowriter -- an electrically-controlled typewriter -- connected to an MIT computer could function as a keyboard input device due to its low cost and flexibility. An experiment conducted five months later on the MIT Whirlwind computer confirmed how useful and convenient a keyboard input device could be. -
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. -
The first Apple computer went on sale in 1976 and was designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak -
The fastest machine of its day, The Cray-1's speed comes partly from its shape, a "C," which reduces the length of wires and thus the time signals need to travel across them. High packaging density of integrated circuits and a novel Freon cooling system also contributed to its speed. Each Cray-1 took a full year to assemble and test and cost about $10 million. -
The Colossus was the first electric programmable computer, developed by Tommy Flowers, and was first demonstrated in December 1943. The Colossus was created to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages. -
The P75 was a released in 1990 upgraded version of P70 model, and is noted as being the first portable computer using a 486 CPU to be available for sale in the United States. It had a briefcase-shaped design and ran off A/C power only, as was common with high performance portable computers at the time. -
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) introduced the Whirlwind machine on March 8, 1955, a revolutionary computer that was the first digital computer with magnetic core RAM (Random-Access Memory) and real-time graphics. -
In 2007, Apple extended its reach into the consumer electronics market with the release of the iPhone, a smartphone that sold over 6 million units. Later models of the iPhone have added a multitude of features, including GPS navigation, Touch ID, and facial recognition, along with the ability to shoot photos and video.