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Wilhelm Schickard built the first mechanical calculator
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Gottfried Leibniz invented the binary system, on which future computers were based
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Konrad Zuse designed the first high-level programming language
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The first transistor was developed at the Bell Telephone
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The first Soviet computer, MESM (M∋CM in Russian, small electronic calculating machine), was created under the direction of Sergei Alexeevich Lebedev at the Electro-Technology Institute of Kiev. It was composed of 6,000vacuum tubes and performed 3,000 operations per second
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Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) launched the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor), the first interactive computer that pioneered the concept of the minicomputer. With a clock speed of 0.2 MHz, it could execute 100,000 operations per second.
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Douglas Engelbart, who later patented the first mouse
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ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet, four universities were connected.
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Steve Paul Jobs and Stephan Gary “Woz” Wozniak started building and selling “blue boxes” in California.
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Intel presented a 1K RAM chip and the 4004, a 4-bit microprocessor.
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George Stibitz built the first binaty circuit
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BBN opened Telenet, the first public network
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Paul Allen and Bill Gates founded Microsoft, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.
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Steve Jobs and Stephan Wozniak formed Apple Computers.
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Microsoft was approached by IBM to develop BASIC
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The first IBM PC (model 5150) was released
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TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was established as the standard for ARPANET.
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The Commodore 64 (or C64, right), sold about 30 million units, making it the best-selling PC of all time. With a 6510 MOS technology processor at 1 MHz, a 16 colours screen and a sound card, it was sold for “only” $ 595.
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The Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984, featuring a simple,
graphical interface: it used the 8 MHz 32-bit Motorola 68000 CPU, and had a built-in 9-inch B/W screen.
