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In France, Joseph Marie Jacquard invents a loom that uses punched wooden cards to automatically weave fabric designs. Early computers would use similar punch cards.
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English mathematician Charles Babbage conceives of a steam-driven calculating machine that would be able to compute tables of numbers. The project, funded by the English government, is a failure. More than a century later, however, the world’s first computer was actually built.
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Alan Turing presents 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.
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Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, design a computer that can solve 29 equations simultaneously. This marks the first time a computer is able to store information on its main memory.
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Two University of Pennsylvania professors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, build the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). Considered the grandfather of digital computers, it fills a 20-foot by 40-foot room and has 18,000 vacuum tubes.
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William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories invent the transistor. They discovered how to make an electric switch with solid materials and no need for a vacuum.
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The newly formed Intel unveils the Intel 1103, the first Dynamic Access Memory (DRAM) chip.
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Alan Shugart leads a team of IBM engineers who invent the “floppy disk,” allowing data to be shared among computers.
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Robert Metcalfe, a member of the research staff for Xerox, develops Ethernet for connecting multiple computers and other hardware.
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Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak start Apple Computers on April Fool’s Day and roll out the Apple I, the first computer with a single-circuit board.
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Accountants rejoice at the introduction of VisiCalc, the first computerized spreadsheet
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Microsoft invests $150 million in Apple, which was struggling at the time, ending Apple’s court case against Microsoft in which it alleged that Microsoft copied the “look and feel” of its operating system.
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The term Wi-Fi becomes part of the computing language and users begin connecting to the Internet without wires.
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Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0 challenges Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the dominant Web browsers. Facebook, a social networking site, launches.
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The iPhone brings many computer functions to the smartphone.
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Apple unveils the iPad, changing the way consumers view media and jumpstarting the dormant tablet computer segment.
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Google releases the Chromebook, a laptop that runs the Google Chrome OS.
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Apple releases the Apple Watch. Microsoft releases Windows 10.
