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Pascal - Mechanical Calculator
"The Pascaline" - Invented to help his tax-collector father do his sums. The machine had a series of interlocking cogs (gear wheels with teeth around their outer edges) that could add and subtract decimal numbers -
Leibniz [The Biscuit man] - Step reckoner
The Leibniz machine could do much more than Pascal's: as well as adding and subtracting, it could multiply, divide, and work out square roots. Leibniz was also a big advocate of the binary system! Fun fact: The Biscuits were named after the man! -
Jacquard Loom
Jacquard’s loom utilized interchangeable punched cards that controlled the weaving of the cloth so that any desired pattern could be obtained automatically. These punched cards were adopted by the noted English inventor Charles Babbage as an input-output medium for his proposed analytical engine https://www.britannica.com/technology/Jacquard-loom -
Charles Babbage - Difference Engine
The father of Computers?
English mathematician and inventor: Reformed the Postal system, and had a lifelong fascination with keys, ciphers, and mechanical dolls The Difference Engine mechanised not just a single calculation but a whole series of calculations on a number of variables to solve a complex problem. It went far beyond calculators in other ways as well. Like modern computers, the Difference Engine had storage! -
Computing-Tabulating-Recording-Company is formed
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company will be renamed International Business Machines Corporation in 1924. With binary, inventors were able to use punch card systems for the first electronic computers. International Business Machines (IBM) would later take this technology and make it available for more widespread uses. -
CTRC renamed to IBM
IBM later revolutionised the computing industry. Inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine (ATM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, the UPC barcode, and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). The IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform during the 1960s and 1970s. -
Vannevar Bush - Analogue Computing
Originally developed to solve complex problems associated with long-distance power lines, Bush’s analog computers were also applied to many other engineering problems. The Differential Analyzer could obtain practical approximate solutions to problems which up to that point had been prohibitively difficult. The Differential Analyzer was soon employed in solving diverse engineering and physics problems. [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vannevar-Bush] -
Alan Turing
The notion of a universal machine, later called the Turing machine, capable of computing anything that is computable. The central concept of the modern computer was based on his ideas. -
Colossus
Colossus’s job was to strip a first layer of encryption from the German message. The Colossi delivered precious information about the German army’s intentions as well as revealing the positions and condition of its fighting units and the extent of their supplies. After the war, it was not long before Colossus’s successor, the first all-purpose electronic computer, was built. This new machine was the ancestor of today’s computers. https://www.britannica.com/technology/Colossus-computer -
Von Neumann
Von Neumann is frequently cited as the birth certificate of computer science. Among the principles enunciated in the paper were that data and instructions should be kept in a single store and that instructions should be encoded so as to be modifiable by other instructions. This meant that one program could be treated as data by another program. https://www.britannica.com/technology/von-Neumann-machine -
Shockley - The Transistor
The transistor proved to be a viable alternative to the electron tube and, by the late 1950s, supplanted the latter in many applications. Its small size, low heat generation, high reliability, and low power consumption made possible a breakthrough in the miniaturization of complex circuitry. During the 1960s and ’70s, transistors were incorporated into integrated circuits. https://www.britannica.com/technology/transistor#ref236464 -
COBOL - The first computer programming language
A woman, Grace Hopper invents the first programming language. -
The GUI
Douglas Engelbart shows a prototype of the modern computer, with a mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI). This marks the evolution of the computer from a specialized machine for scientists and mathematicians to technology that is more accessible to the general public. -
Moore's Law
Moore's law is an unofficial law that suggested the number of transistors available on a chip would double every 24 months. Measured in millimetres in the late 1940s, the dimensions of a typical transistor in the early 2010s were more commonly expressed in tens of nanometres (a nanometre being one-billionth of a metre)—a reduction factor of over 100,000!!! https://www.britannica.com/technology/Moores-law/media/1/705881/68188 -
HP develop their first Computer
Hewlett-Packard’s first computer, the HP 2116A, was developed in 1966 specifically to manage the company’s test and measurement devices. In 1972 the company released the HP 3000 general-purpose minicomputer—a product line that remains in use today—for use in business. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hewlett-Packard-Company#ref92973 -
The Floppy Disk - Transferable User DATA
Alan Shugart leads a team of IBM engineers who invent the "floppy disk," allowing data to be shared among computers. -
Metcalfe - The Ethernet Cable!
Robert Metcalfe, a member of the research staff for Xerox, develops Ethernet for connecting multiple computers and other hardware. -
TCP/IP
TCP/IP is a standard Internet communications protocols that allow digital computers to communicate over long distances. The Internet is a packet-switched network, in which information is broken down into small packets, sent individually over many different routes at the same time, and then reassembled at the receiving end. TCP is the component that collects and reassembles the packets of data, while IP is responsible for making sure the packets are sent to the right destination. -
Apple I - Steve and Steve! [Jobs and Wozniak]
The first single circuit board computer In 1976 an engineering intern at HP, Wozniak, built a prototype for the first personal computer (PC) and offered it to the company. Hewlett-Packard declined BUT gave Wozniak all rights to his idea; later he joined with Jobs to create Apple and the Apple 1 computer -
Microsoft Started
Microsoft Corporation, is a leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications. The company also publishes books and multimedia titles, produces its own line of hybrid tablet computers, offers e-mail services, and sells electronic game systems, computer peripherals (input/output devices), and portable media players https://www.britannica.com/topic/Microsoft-Corporation#ref288467 -
Windows!
Microsofts response to Apple's GUI -
HTML
Tim Berners-Lee develops HTML which gave rise to the birth of the World Wide Web -
Google
The age of shared knowledge - The Google search engine was started -
Fountain of knowledge
Wikipedia started! -
Facebook is launched
Facebook is now the largest social network in the world, with more than one billion users as of 2012, and about half that number were using Facebook every day. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Facebook -
The iPhone
Apples first mobile “smartphone”. The device’s most revolutionary element was its touch-sensitive multisensor interface. The touch screen allowed users to manipulate all programs and telephone functions with their fingertips rather than a stylus or physical keys. This interface—perfected, if not invented, by Apple—recreated a tactile, physical experience! https://www.britannica.com/technology/iPhone -
Apple Watch
The Apple Watch was released on April 24, 2015 and quickly became the best-selling wearable device with 4.2 million sold in the second quarter of the 2015 fiscal year. The goal of the Apple Watch was to enhance the uses of an iPhone while also providing the user with some additional new features. Designer, Kevin Lynch asked the question, how can we provide engagement with tech that people are craving, in a way that is a little more human? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Watch