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First Difference Engine
Charles Babbage purposed and began developing the Difference Engine -
First working telegraph
Joseph Henry of Princeton invents the first working telegraph. -
Punch cards to store and search info
Semen Korsakov uses punch cards for the first time to store and search for information. -
First transfer of signals between 2 telegraphs
On October 21, 1832 Pavel Schilling becomes the first to transmit signals between two telegraphs in different rooms of his apartment. -
First "computer"
Charles Babbage first purposed the Analytical Engine, which was the first computer to use punch cards as memory and a way to program the computer. -
Invention of (the?) morse code
Samuel Morse invents a code (later called Morse code) that used different numbers to represent the letters of the English alphabet and the ten digits. -
Calculators
In 1845, Izrael Staffel demonstrated the Staffel's calculator at the industrial exhibition in Warsaw. -
QWERTY
Christopher Sholes is issued a patent on July 14, 1868 for a typewriter utilizing the QWERTY layout keyboard still used today. -
AC
Nikola Tesla patents the rotating field motor May 1, 1888 and later sells the rights to George Westinghouse. This invention helps create and transmit AC power and today is still a method for generating and distributing AC power. -
IBM
Herman Hollerith starts the Tabulating Machine Company, the company later becomes the well-known computer company IBM (International Business machines). -
"gates"/"switches"
Nikola Tesla patents electrical logic circuits called "gates" or "switches". -
OMG
On September 9, 1917 one of the earliest records of OMG (Oh! My God!) is used by British Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher when writing to Winston Churchill in a 1917 correspondence. -
Handheld calculator
Jack St. Clair Kilby, Nobel Prize winner and inventor of the Integrated Circuit, handheld calculator, and thermal printer is born November 8, 1923. -
Lie detector machine
The Polygraph machine aka lie detector is used for the first time. -
First binary digital computer
Germany's Konrad Zuse creates the Z1, one of the first binary digital computers and a machine that could be controlled through a punch tape. -
Complex Number Calculator
George Stibitz completes the Complex Number Calculator capable of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing complex numbers. This device provides a foundation for digital computers. -
Fully operational calculating machine
German Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3, a fully program-operational calculating machine. The computer is publically introduced in Berlin May 12, 1941. -
The Colossus
The Colossus, the first electric programmable computer developed by Tommy Flowers is first demonstrated in December 1943. -
First Computer game
1947 Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. file patent #2,455,992 describing one of the first computer games played on a CRT January 25, 1947. -
Chess-playing machine
Claude Shannon builds the first machine that plays chess at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. -
Core memory
At MIT, Jay Forrester installed magnetic core memory on the Whirlwind computer. Core memory made computers more reliable, faster, and easier to make. Such a system of storage remained popular until the development of semiconductors in the 1970s. -
First fully transistorized computer
Felker and Harris program TRADIC, AT&T Bell Laboratories announced the first fully transistorized computer, TRADIC. It contained nearly 800 transistors instead of vacuum tubes. Transistors — completely cold, highly efficient amplifying devices invented at Bell Labs — enabled the machine to operate on fewer than 100 watts, or one-twentieth the power required by comparable vacuum tube computers. -
ASCII Invented
ASCII — American Standard Code for Information Interchange — permitted machines from different manufacturers to exchange data. ASCII consists of 128 unique strings of ones and zeros. Each sequence represents a letter of the English alphabet, an Arabic numeral, an assortment of punctuation marks and symbols, or a function such as a carriage return. -
First commercially successful small computer
Digital Equipment Corp. introduced the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. The PDP-8 sold for $18,000, one-fifth the price of a small IBM 360 mainframe. The speed, small size, and reasonable cost enabled the PDP-8 to go into thousands of manufacturing plants, small businesses, and scientific laboratories. -
Intel 4004
The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appeared in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the 4004 had 2250 transistors and could perform up to 90,000 operations per second in four-bit chunks. Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture. -
Intel 8008
Intel´s 8008 microprocessor made its debut. A vast improvement over its predecessor, the 4004, its eight-bit word afforded 256 unique arrangements of ones and zeros. For the first time, a microprocessor could handle both uppercase and lowercase letters, all 10 numerals, punctuation marks, and a host of other symbols. -
First e-mail
The Queen of England sends first her e-mail. Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, sends out an e-mail on March 26 from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern as a part of a demonstration of networking technology. -
5MB Hard disk
Seagate Technology created the first hard disk drive for microcomputers, the ST506. The disk held 5 megabytes of data, five times as much as a standard floppy disk, and fit in the space of a floppy disk drive. The hard disk drive itself is a rigid metallic platter coated on both sides with a thin layer of magnetic material that stores digital data.
