Technology History Project

Turing Machine

Jan 1, 1936

Turing MachineAlan Turing presents the notion of a universal machine, later called the Turing machine, capable of computing anything that is computable. The central concept of the modern computer was based on his ideas.

IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator

Aug 1, 1944

IBM's SSECIBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed scientific data in public display near the company´s Manhattan headquarters. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon.

ENIAC-first electronic general-purpose computer

Jan 1, 1946

ENIACTwo 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.

SEAC-first-generation electronic computer

Apr 1, 1950

SEACThe National Bureau of Standards constructed the SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer) in Washington as a laboratory for testing components and systems for setting computer standards. The SEAC was the first computer to use all-diode logic, a technology more reliable than vacuum tubes, and the first stored-program computer completed in the United States. Magnetic tape in the external storage units (shown on the right of this photo) stored programming information, coded subroutines, numerica

UNIVAC-a line of electronic digital stored-program computers

Jan 1, 1951

UNIVACThe UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau was the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer.

LINC-Laboratory Instrumentation Computer

Jan 1, 1962

LINCThe LINC (Laboratory Instrumentation Computer) offered the first real time laboratory data processing. Designed by Wesley Clark at Lincoln Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp. later commercialized it as the LINC-8.

ARPANET-First Intenet

Oct 29, 1969

The ARPANETThe ARPANET was the first network ever created by Department of Defense. The TCP/IP protocol was created which is still used in today's computer networks.

C-programming language

Jan 1, 1972

CC is a general-purpose, imperative computer programming language, supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope and recursion, while a static type system prevents many unintended operations.

First Apple Computer

Apr 1, 1976

First Apple ComputerSteve 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.

PET

Jan 1, 1977

PETThe Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) — the first of several personal computers released in 1977 — came fully assembled and was straightforward to operate, with either 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, two built-in cassette drives, and a membrane "chiclet" keyboard.

C++-programming language

Jan 1, 1983

C++C++ is a general-purpose programming language. It has imperative, object-oriented and generic programming features, while also providing facilities for low-level memory manipulation.

Python-programming language

Jan 1, 1991

PythonPython is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than would be possible in languages such as C++ or Java.

Bluetooth

Jan 1, 1994

BluetoothBluetooth is a wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances (using short-wavelength UHF radio waves in the ISM band from 2.4 to 2.485 GHz[4]) from fixed and mobile devices, and building personal area networks (PANs).

Java-programming language

Jan 1, 1995

JavaJava is a general-purpose computer programming language that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented,[12] and specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere" (WORA),[13] meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation.

Alice-programming language

Jan 1, 2000

AliceAlice ML is a programming language designed by the Programming Systems Lab at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. It is a dialect of Standard ML, augmented with support for lazy evaluation, concurrency (multithreading and distributed computing via remote procedure calls) and constraint programming.