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Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS was an English polymath. He was a mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, who is best remembered now for originating the concept of a programmable computer. -
Z1 computer
The Z1 was a mechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse from 1935 to 1936 and built by him from 1936 to 1938. It was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched tape. -
Eniac
ENIAC was the first electronic general purpose computer. it was turing-complete, digital, and capable of being reprogrammed to solve "alarge class of numerical problems". -
Univac
UNIVAC is the name of a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. -
Jack Kilby
Jack St. Clair Kilby was an American electrical engineer who took part in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments in 1958. -
1st generation computers
The first computers used vacuum tubes for circuitry and magnetic drums for memory, and were often enormous, taking up entire rooms. They were very expensive to operate and in addition to using a great deal of electricity, generated a lot of heat, which was often the cause of malfunctions.
First generation computers relied on machine language, the lowest-level programming language understood by computers, to perform operations, and they could only solve one problem at a time. Input was based on p -
2nd generation computers
Transistors replaced vacuum tubes and ushered in the second generation of computers. The transistor was invented in 1947 but did not see widespread use in computers until the late 1950s. The transistor was far superior to the vacuum tube, allowing computers to become smaller, faster, cheaper, more energy-efficient and more reliable than their first-generation predecessors. Though the transistor still generated a great deal of heat that subjected the computer to damage, it was a vast improvement -
BASIC
Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction code (BASIC -
3rd Generation Computers
The development of the integrated circuit was the hallmark of the third generation of computers. Transistors were miniaturized and placed on silicon chips, called semiconductors, which drastically increased the speed and efficiency of computers.
Instead of punched cards and printouts, users interacted with third generation computers through keyboards and monitors and interfaced with an operating system, which allowed the device to run many different applications at one time with a central progra -
Altair Computer
Only 256 bytes of memory. No keyboard or monitor. switches on front used to enter data in machine code (1s and 0s). lights on front indicated results of a program. starting cost was $395.00. -
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates, III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, investor, computer programmer, and inventor.Gates is the former chief executive and chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen. -
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs was an American entrepreneur, marketer, and inventor, who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. -
Apple II
featured color monitor, sound, and game paddles. 4KB of RAM. Operating system stored in ROM. Optional floppy disk to load programs (mostly games). starting price was $666.66. -
Visicalc
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet computer program, originally released for the Apple II. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool, and is considered the Apple II's killer app. -
Osborne computer
First "portable" computer. weighed 24.5 pounds. 5-inch screen. 64 kilobytes of RAM. Two floppy disk drives. preinstalled with spreadsheet and word processing software. starting prices was $1,795. -
Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith was an American statistician and inventor who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. -
Excel
Excel is an electronic spreadsheet program that can be used for storing, organizing and manipulating data. When you look at the Excel screen (refer to the example on this page) you see a rectangular table or grid of rows and columns. -
PageMaker
PageMaker was one of the first desktop publishing programs, introduced in 1985 by Aldus, initially for the then-new Apple Macintosh and in 1987 for PCs running Windows 1.0. As an application relying on a graphical user interface, PageMaker helped to popularize the Macintosh platform and the Windows environment. -
WordStar
WordStar is a word processor application that had a dominant market share during the early- to mid-1980s. Formerly published by MicroPro International, it was originally written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS. -
Introduction of the GUI
Graphic user interface, which allowed users to interact with the computer more easily -
Mosaic
NCSA Mosaic, or Simply Mosaic, is the web browser created with popularizing the World Wide Web. -
netscape
Netscape Navigator was the first commercially successful Web browser. It was based off the Mosaic browser and was created by a team led by Marc Andreessen, a programmer who co-wrote the code for Mosaic. Netscape Navigator helped influence the development of the Web into a graphical user experience rather than a purely text-based one. -
4th Generation Computers
The microprocessor brought the fourth generation of computers, as thousands of integrated circuits were built onto a single silicon chip. What in the first generation filled an entire room could now fit in the palm of the hand. The Intel 4004 chip, developed in 1971, located all the components of the computer—from the central processing unit and memory to input/output controls—on a single chip.
In 1981 IBM introduced its first computer for the home user, and in 1984 Apple introduced the Macintos
