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English mathematician Charles Babbage conceives of a steam-driven calculating machine that was be able to compute tables of numbers. More than a century later, The world’s first computer was actually built.
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Herman Hollerith designs a punch card system to calculate the 1880 census, accomplishing the task in just three years and whitch saved the government $5 million. He establishes a company that would ultimately become IBM.
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J.V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, attempts to build the first computer without using 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.
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1943-1944: 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
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Mauchly and Presper leave the University of Pennsylvania and receive funding for UNIVAC, the first commercial computer for business and government applications.
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1954: 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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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 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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: Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, develops HyperText Markup Language (HTML), giving rise to the World Wide Web.
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Sony release the PlayStation 2. A game machine that also acts like a computer online
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: Apple introduces the MacBook Pro, its first Intel-based, dual-core mobile computer, as well as an Intel-based iMac. Nintendo’s Wii hits the market.
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Apple unveils the iPad, changing the way consumers view media and jumpstarting the dormant tablet computer segment.
