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English mathematician Charles Babbage conceives of a steam-driven calculating machine that would be able to compute tables of numbers
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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 (IBM was founded in 1911).
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J.V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, attempts to build the first computer without gears, cams, belts or shafts.
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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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Mauchly and Presper leave the University of Pennsylvania and receive funding from the Census Bureau to build the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer for business and government applications.
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Grace Hopper develops the first computer language, which eventually becomes known as COBOL. Inventor Thomas Johnson Watson, Jr., son of IBM CEO Thomas Johnson Watson, Sr., conceives the IBM 701 EDPM to help the United Nations keep tabs on Korea during the war
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The FORTRAN programming language is born.
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Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce unveil the integrated circuit, known as the computer chip.
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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.
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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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The IBM 5100 becomes the first commercially available portable computer.
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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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The Gavilan SC is the first portable computer with the familiar flip form factor and the first to be marketed as a “laptop.
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The first dot-com domain name is registered on March 15, years before the World Wide Web would mark the formal beginning of Internet history. The Symbolics Computer Company, a small Massachussets computer manufacturer, registers Symbolics.com. More than two years later, only 100 dot-coms had been registered.
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Linus Torvalds begin to work on Linux .
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PCs become gaming machines as Command & Conquer, Alone in the Dark 2, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Descent andLittle Big Adventure are among the games to hit the market.
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Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google
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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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Sony release the PlayStation 2.
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The first 64-bit processor, AMD’s Athlon 64, becomes available to the consumer market.
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Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0 challenges Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the dominant web browers.
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Microsoft launches Windows 7, which offers the ability to pin applications to the taskbar and advances in touch and handwriting recognition, among other features.
