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Period: 4000 BCE to 476
Antiquity
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3500 BCE
The abacus is invented
The type of Abacus most commonly used today was invented in China around the 2nd century B.C. However, Abacus-like devices are first attested from ancient Mesopotamia -
87 BCE
Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the oldest example of an analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance -
Period: 476 to 1492
Middle Ages
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878
The symbol “0” (Zero) appears
The first modern equivalent of numeral zero comes from a Hindu astronomer and mathematician Brahmagupta. His symbol to depict the numeral was a dot underneath a number. -
1015
Azarquiel invents the Equatorium
An equatorium (plural, equatoria) is an astronomical calculating instrument. It can be used for finding the positions of the Moon, Sun, and planets without arithmetic operations, using a geometrical model to represent the position of a given celestial body. -
1110
Gutenberg invents the printing press
In Germany, around 1440, goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which started the Printing Revolution. Modelled on the design of existing screw presses, a single Renaissance printing press could produce up to 3,600 pages per workday, compared to forty by hand-printing and a few by hand-copying. -
Period: 1492 to
Modern Age
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John Napier creates a system to perform arithmetic operations
the discovery of a new function that extended the realm of analysis beyond the scope of algebraic methods. The method of logarithms was publicly propounded by John Napier , in a book titled (Description of the Wonderful Rule of Logarithms). Prior to Napier's invention, there had been other techniques of similar scopes, .Napier coined the term for logarithm in Middle Latin, “logarithmus,” derived from the Greek, meaning, “ratio-number ,” from logos “proportion, ratio, word” + arithmos “number”. -
Wilhelm Schickard invents the first mechanical calculator
Wilhelm Schickard (22 April 1592 – 24 October 1635) was a German professor of Hebrew and astronomy who became famous in the second part of the 20th century after Franz Hammer, a biographer (along with Max Caspar) of Johannes Kepler, claimed that the drawings of a calculating clock, predating the public release of Pascal's calculator by twenty years, had been discovered in two unknown letters written by Schickard to Johannes Kepler -
William Oughtred invents the first sliding rule
After John Napier invented logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales (lines, or rules) upon which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first to use two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division. He is credited with inventing the slide rule -
Pascal invents the "Pascalina"
Pascal's calculator ( is a mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal in the mid 17th century. Pascal was led to develop a calculator by the laborious arithmetical calculations required by his father's work as the supervisor of taxes in Rouen.He designed the machine to add and subtract two numbers directly and to perform multiplication and division through repeated addition or subtraction. -
Samuel Morland invents the first multiplying machine
The English polymath Samuel Morland invented in early 1660s a total of three calculating machines: one for multiplication and division, one for trigonometry, and one for addition and subtraction. In fact, the multiplication machine of Morland simplifies only the intermediate products, using the principle of Napier’s rods. There is no automatic or mechanical carry mechanism provided.The device is made by silver, gilt and silvered brass, wood and crystal. -
Leibniz universal calculator
he German mathematician-philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz designed a calculating machine called the Step Reckoner. (It was first built in 1673.) The Step Reckoner expanded on Pascal's ideas and did multiplication by repeated addition and shifting. -
Charles Mahone invents the first machine logic, the logical demonstrator.
A demonstrator is a device able to solve mechanically traditional syllogisms, numerical syllogisms, and elementary probability problems. The rectangular version of the device consists of a brass plate, affixed to a thin mahogany block. -
Period: to
Contemporary age
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Joseph Marie Jacquard, used the mechanism punch cards
The Jacquard machine is a device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask and matelassé. The resulting ensemble of the loom and Jacquard machine is then called a Jacquard loom. The Jacquard head used replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations -
Charles Babbage completes his difference machine
.A difference engine is an automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. The name, the difference engine, is derived from the method of divided differences, a way to interpolate or tabulate functions by using a small set of polynomial coefficients. -
Charles Babbage describes the analytical engine
The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a design for a simpler mechanical computer. -
Lady Lovelace the first programmer
The first programmable computer—if it were built—would have been a gigantic, mechanical thing clunking along with gears and levers and punch cards. That was the vision for Analytical Engine devised by British inventor Charles Babbage in 1837. Whereas Babbage is credited with the machine’s conception, it was perhaps his friend Ada Lovelace who best understood its promise and the potential that computers would one day fulfil. -
George Boole publishes his Boolean Algebra
Boole worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic. He is best known for his book, The Laws of Thought, published in 1854. The Laws of Thought contains information on Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is known to have laid the foundation for the information age -
Leonardo Torres Quevedo presents the memory Machines à calculer at the Academy of Paris Sciences
Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo applied for a Patent in France for "Improvements in dirigible aerostats", complemented, with a "Note on the calculus of a dirigible balloon with interior suspension and keel" presented together to Madrid and Paris' Academies of Science. A longitudinal frame of triangular cross-section made up of non-rigid ropes, permeable curtains and metal cables which "rigidify" altogether through the excess of pressure level of the gas -
Lee De Forest invents the vacuum tube
Lee De Forest invented the audion, a vacuum tube device that could take a weak electrical signal and amplify it into a larger one. The audion helped AT&T set up coast-to-coast phone service, and it was also used in everything from radios to televisions to the first computers -
Leonardo Torres Quevedo builds the chess player
Leonardo Torres Quevedo built his first chess player in 1912. It was an experimental model that he then presented in Paris in 1914. The chess player did not play a whole game but instead played an endgame involving a simple checkmate move of rook and king versus king. -
The flip-flop is invented
The first electronic flip-flop was invented in 1919 by the British physicists William Eccles and F. W. Jordan. It was initially called the Eccles–Jordan trigger circuit and consisted of two active elements (vacuum tubes). -
Leonardo Torres Quevedo builds your electromechanical arithmometer, first automatic calculator
Torres Quevedo's 1920 arithmometer, fully functional but never commercialized, which used a remote electromechanical typewriter to send commands to a remote electromechanical calculator and to print its results once computed. -
Harvard Mark I
The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, called Mark I by Harvard University’s staff, was a general purpose electromechanical computer that was used in the war effort during the last part of World War II. One of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on 29 March 1944 by John von Neumann. -
Period: to
Contemporaray Age: The First generation
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Vacuum valves
An electron tube (also known as a 'Vacuum tube', or a 'Valve' ) is a glass or metal enclosure in which electrons move through the vacuum or gas from one metal electrode to another. The vacuum tube is often used to amplify weak currents or act as a one-way valve (rectifier) for electric current.Vacuum tubes contain electrodes for controlling electron flow and were used in early computers as a switch or an amplifier.
Inventor: John Ambrose Fleming -
ENIAC
ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. It was Turing-complete and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming. In full Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer,, built during World War II by the United States. ... Under contract to the army and under the direction of Herman Goldstine, -
The CURTA calculator was invented
The Curta is a hand-held mechanical calculator designed by Curt Herzstark. It is known for its extremely compact design: a small cylinder that fits in the palm of the hand.It can be used to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and, with more difficulty, square roots and other operations. While the cylindrical arrangement of the calculator is certainly quite rare used, it is not original or unique to the Curta. -
UNIVAC I
UNIVersal Automatic Computer I was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly,The UNIVAC I was designed as a commercial data-processing computer, intended to replace the punched-card accounting machines of the day. It could read 7,200 decimal digits per second (it did not use binary numbers), making it by far the fastest business machine yet built. -
Optical fiber
UK based physicist Narinder Singh Kapany invented the first actual fiber optical cable based on John Tyndall's experiments three decades earlier. -
Transistors
The transistor was successfully demonstrated at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs is the research arm of American Telephone and Telegraph. The three individuals credited with the invention of the transistor were William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. they built the point-contact transistor, made from strips of gold foil on a plastic triangle, pushed down into contact with a slab of germanium.Transistors are one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics -
Period: to
Contemporaray Age: The Second Generation
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The IBM 701 machine is invented
The IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, known as the Defense Calculator while in development, was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer and its first series production mainframe computer.It was invented and developed by Jerrier Haddad and Nathaniel Rochester based on the IAS machine at Princeton.The IBM 701 was the first computer in the IBM 700/7000 series, which was responsible for bringing electronic computing to the world and for IBM's dominance in the mainframe computer market. -
The magnetic disk is invented
The magnetic disk invented by IBM in the early-1950s contained 100 concentric tracks on each side. Each track stored 500 alphanumeric characters, yielding a total storage capacity of 5 million characters.it held 5 megabytes and rented for \$3,200 per month. Magnetic disks are platters coated with iron oxide, like tape and drums. -
Honeywell 800
The Datamatic Division of Honeywell announced the H-800 electronic computer in 1958. The first installation occurred in 1960. A total of 89 were delivered. The H-800 design was part of a family of 48-bit word, three-address instruction format computers that descended from the Datamatic 1000, which was a joint Honeywell and Raytheon project started in 1955. The 1800 and 1800-II were follow-on designs to the H-800. -
The multics system is created
Summary of Multics. Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is a time-sharing operating system begun in 1965 and used until 2000. It is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory. The system can grow in size by simply adding more of the appropriate resource, be it computing power, main memory, or disk storage..
Developer: Bell Labs, GE, MIT, Honeywell, IBM, ...
Programming languages used: PL/I -
Period: to
Contemporaray Age: The Third generation
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The mother of all demos
The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, which was presented by Douglas Engelbart on December 8, 1968. -
Nova minicomputer
The Data General Nova is a series of 16-bit minicomputers released by the American company Data General.The Nova family was very popular in the 1970s and ultimately sold tens of thousands of units.
The first model, known simply as "Nova".The Nova was packaged into a single rack-mount case and had enough computing power to handle most simple tasks.The Nova became popular in science laboratories around the world.It was followed the next year by the SuperNOVA, which ran roughly four times as fast. -
The mouse is invented
Engelbart was the inventor on the basic patent for what was then called the “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System.” The patent was filed in 1967 and issued in 1970. SRI licensed the computer mouse technology to Apple, Xerox, and other companies. -
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet.The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense. Building on the ideas of J.C.R. Licklider,Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable access to remote computers. -
UNIX
UNIX is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.Unix distinguishes itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language, which allows Unix to operate on numerous platforms. -
Period: to
Contemporaray Age:Fourth generation
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First mobile phone, Motorola
In the communications world, the Motorola brand brings to mind innovation. Years of experience engineering portable two-way radio systems led to Motorola's vision of personal, portable communications. The result was the world's first commercial portable cellular phone in 1983. Motorola's DynaTAC 8000X phone and the cellular system behind it changed how the world communicates. -
Ethernet is created
Ethernet is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks, metropolitan area networks and wide area networks. It was commercially introduced as IEEE 802.3.Ethernet is the traditional technology for connecting devices in a wired local area network (LAN) or wide area (WAN),enabling them to communicate with each other via a protocol a set of rules or common network language.An Ethernet cable is the physical ,encased wiring over which the data travels. -
Xerox Alto is invented
The Xerox Alto is the first computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface, later using the desktop metaphor. The first machines were introduced on 1 March 1973, a decade before mass-market GUI machines became available -
Osborne I, first laptop
The Osborne 1 is the first commercially successful portable computer, by Osborne Computer Corporation.[runs the CP/M 2.2 operating system. It is powered from a wall socket, as it has no on-board battery, but it is still classed as a portable device since it can be hand-carried when the keyboard is closed.The computer shipped with a large bundle of software that was almost equivalent in value to the machine itself, a practice adopted by other CP/M computer vendors. -
APPLE I is designed
The Apple Computer 1, originally released as the Apple Computer and known later as the Apple I, or Apple-1, is a desktop computer released by the Apple Computer Company in 1976. It was designed by Steve Wozniak. The idea of selling the computer came from Wozniak's friend and co-founder Steve Jobs. -
The router is invented
Some time after, the first Xerox routers became operational. The first true IP router was developed by Ginny Strazisar at BBN, as part of that DARPA-initiated effort. By the end of 1970'sthree PDP-11-based routers were in service in the experimental prototype Internet -
Period: to
Contemporary Age:Fifth generation
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Windows 1.0 appears
Windows 1.0 is a graphical operating environment for personal computers, developed by Microsoft. Microsoft had worked with Apple Computer to develop applications for Apple's 1984 original Macintosh, the first mass-produced personal computer with a graphical user-interface (GUI) that enabled users to see user-friendly icons on screen.Ultimately,it was a flagship GUI with desktop features.Microsoft's first true attempt at a graphical user interface in 16-bit. -
Macintosh computer appears
The Macintosh (often called "the Mac") was the first widely-sold personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) and a mouse. ... The Macintosh runs on its own operating system, Mac OS (currently Mac OS X). The Mac originally ran on Motorola's 68000 series microprocessors and then moved to the PowerPC processor.IT IS UNDER THE APPLE INC. -
Operating system (macOS)
macOS is a proprietary graphical operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc.The Macintosh "System 1" is the first version of Apple Macintosh operating system and the beginning of the classic Mac OS series. It was developed for the Motorola 68000 microprocessor. System 1 was released on January 24, 1984, along with the Macintosh 128K, the first in the Macintosh family of personal computers. It received one update,"System 1.1" on December 29, 1984, before being succeeded by System 2. -
Nintendo develops the Game Boy
The handheld gaming system was invented by Nintendo's Gunpei Yokoi, who also created the Metroid video-game series. He got the idea for a portable gaming system after watching a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculatorNintendo Co., Ltd. is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. The company was founded in 1889 as Nintendo Karuta by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produced handmade hanafuda playing cards. -
The stylus is invented
In 1957, the first stylus for computing devices was created which marks the beginning of what has now become a staple writing tool in every household and classroom. Major changes have happened throughout the course of history, and as the world adapts to a digital age, styluses have followed in suit.It was developed by Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationery Company -
The first ipod is invented
The iPod is a line of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about 81⁄2 months after the Macintosh version of iTunes was released -
The microchip (integrated circuit) is invented
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny MOSFETs integrate into a small chip -
First tactile iPhone
The iPod Touch, a touchscreen device with the media and internet abilities and interface of the iPhone but without the ability to connect to a cellular network for phone functions or internet access, was released on September 5, 2007 -
Voice recognition appears
Voice or speaker recognition is the ability of a machine or program to receive and interpret dictation or to understand and carry out spoken commands. ... In 1952, the first voice recognition device was created by Bell Laboratories and they called it (her) 'Audrey'. 'Audrey' was ground-breaking technology as she could recognize digits spoken by a single voice; a massive step forward in the digital world.
