Timeline: History of Computers

Mar 20, 1939

Change of sound!

Hewlett-Packard is Founded. David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. Walt Disney Pictures ordered eight of the 200B model to use as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie “Fantasia.”

Mar 20, 1941

Start writing faster

Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 computer. The Z3 was an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere. Using 2,300 relays, the Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length. The original Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid of Berlin in late 1943. However, Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in the 1960s which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Mar 20, 1945

The start of a new ERA

John von Neumann drafts a report describing a stored-program computer, and gives rise to the term "von Neumann computer".

Mar 20, 1946

Learning a new language

Zuse invents Plankalkul, the first programming language, while hiding out in Bavaria.The ENIAC is revealed to the public. A panel of lights is added to help show reporters how fast the machine is and what it is doing; and apparently Hollywood takes note.

Mar 21, 1951

First computer made by U.S bussiness

Eckert and Mauchly, now with their own company (later sold to Remington Rand), design UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer)—the first computer for U.S. business. Its breakthrough feature: magnetic tape storage to replace punched cards. First developed for the Bureau of the Census to aid in census data collection, UNIVAC passes a highly public test by correctly predicting Dwight Eisenhower’s victory over Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential race. But months before UNIVAC is completed,

Jun 26, 1954

Nazi code breaker

Alan Turing was principally a mathematician, most famous for helping break the German's Enigma code during World War II at Bletchley Park. It was here, though, that Turing turned to computers to help break codes faster, saving millions of lives in the process and shortening the length of the war.

Mar 21, 1955

First ever disk drive for RAM

IBM engineerled by Reynold Johnson design the first disk drive for random-access storage of data, offering more surface area for magnetization and storage than earlier drums. In later drives a protective "boundary layer" of air between the heads and the disk surface would be provided by the spinning disk itself. The Model 305 Disk Storage unit, later called the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control, is released in 1956 with a stack of fifty 24-inch aluminum disks storing 5 millionbyte

Mar 21, 1957

High Level programm made!

FORTRAN (for FORmula TRANslation), a high-level programming language developed by an IBM team led by John Backus, becomes commercially available. FORTRAN is a way to express scientific and mathematical computations with a programming language similar to mathematical formulas. Backus and his team claim that the FORTRAN compiler produces machine code as efficient as any produced directly by a human programmer. Other programming languages quickly follow, including ALGOL, intended as a universal com