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Herman Hollerith invented the punch card and the associated tabulating system in the late 1880s, securing a patent in 1884 and applying it to the 1890 U.S. Census to automate data processing, a system that would eventually form the foundation of IBM. -
The term "steam calculator" can refer to different things: Charles Babbage designed large mechanical computers powered by steam in the 19th century, and Fred Q. Saunders created a "Fuel Steam Calculator" (a circular slide rule) for the Norfolk Western Railway, copyrighted in 1945. There was also a 1908 mechanical calculator for determining the horsepower of steam engines invented by Henry Golding. -
The Turing machine was created in 1936 by mathematician Alan Turing. Turing invented this theoretical, abstract model of a computer in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers" to formalize the concept of computation and provide a foundation for digital computers. -
William Redington Hewlett and David Packard founded the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) on January 1, 1939, in their garage in Palo Alto, California. -
Grace Hopper did not "create" COBOL alone but was a key technical consultant to the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) committee that developed COBOL in 1959. -
Douglas Engelbart and his team at SRI International created the GUI and other foundational computing technologies in the early to mid-1960s, first demonstrated publicly in 1968 at "The Mother of All Demos". -
Apple was created by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on April 1, 1976. They founded Apple Computer Company as a partnership to develop and sell Wozniak's personal computer, the Apple I. -
Microsoft, a company co-founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, created Windows, with the first version, Windows 1.0, being released on November 20, 1985. Bill Gates announced the software, which served as a graphical user interface (GUI) for MS-DOS, two years prior in November 1983. -
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, a global hypertext project, between 1989 and 1991 while working at CERN in Switzerland. He wrote the initial proposal in 1989 and by the end of 1990 had developed the prototype software for the system, including the first web browser, the first web server, and the protocols for transmitting documents. -
Wi-Fi's creation involved several people over time, but the CSIRO team, led by John O'Sullivan, developed the core patented technology in the 1990s, with the first official standard (IEEE 802.11) being released in 1997 under the leadership of Vic Hayes. -
Apple Inc. created the iPhone, which was unveiled by CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at the Macworld conference and officially released to the public later that year. -
Google created Chromebook, a laptop running Google's Chrome OS, which was first announced on May 11, 2011, at the Google I/O conference and began shipping on June 15, 2011 -
The Apple Watch was created by Apple, a project spearheaded by Jony Ive and other engineers, and officially unveiled in 2014 before its release in April 2015