-
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.
-
Herman Hollerith designs a punch card system to calculate the 1880 census, accomplishing the task in just three years and saving the government $5 million. He establishes a company that would ultimately become IBM.
-
PCs become gaming machines as "Command & Conquer," "Alone in the Dark 2," "Theme Park," "Magic Carpet," "Descent" and "Little Big Adventure" are among the games to hit the market.
-
The FORTRAN programming language is born.
-
Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce unveil the integrated circuit, known as the computer chip. Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for his work.
-
By the early 1960s many people can share a single computer, using terminals to log in over phone lines. These timesharing computers are like central hubs with spokes radiating to individual users. Although the computers generally can't connect to each other, these are the first common multi-user systems, with dozens of people online at the same time. As a result, timesharing pioneers many features of later networks, from file sharing to email and chat.
-
Robert Metcalfe, a member of the research staff for Xerox, develops Ethernet for connecting multiple computers and other hardware.
-
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple Computers on April Fool’s Day and roll out the Apple I, the first computer with a single-circuit board.
-
ARPANET adopted TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, and from there researchers began to assemble the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet. The online world then took on a more recognizable form in 1990, when computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
-
Microsoft announces Windows, its response to Apple’s GUI. Commodore unveils the Amiga 1000, which features advanced audio and video capabilities.
-
Compaq brings the Deskpro 386 to market. Its 32-bit architecture provides as speed comparable to mainframes.
-
Apple unveils the Mac OS X operating system, which provides protected memory architecture and pre-emptive multitasking, among other benefits.
-
Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0 challenges Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the dominant Web browsers.
-
Microsoft launches Windows 7, which offers the ability to pin applications to the taskbar and advances in touch and handwriting recognition, among other features.
-
Google released the Chromebook, a laptop that runs the Google Chrome OS.