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Wilhelm Schickard created a calculating machine in 1623 (Herrenberg). He abandoned the project, when the prototype he had started building was destroyed by a fire in 1624.
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In 1642, aged only 18, French (Paris) scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1666) invented the first practical mechanical calculator, the Pascaline, to help his tax-collector father do his sums.
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In 1671, German (Hannover) mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) came up with a more advanced machine. Instead of using cogs, it had a "stepped drum" , an innovation that survived in mechanical calculators for 300 hundred years. The Leibniz machine could do much more than Pascal's.
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In 1837 Charles Babbage first described his Analytical Engine (UK) which is accepted as the first design for a modern computer. The analytical engine had expandable memory, and arithmetic unit, and logic processing capabilities able to interpret a programming language with loops and conditional branching.
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Ada Lovelace wrote the world's first machine akgorithm for an early computing machine that exited only on paper in 1943 (London, England).
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·Englishman George Boole (1815–1864) used Leibniz´s idea to invent a new branch of mathematics called Boolean algebra. In modern computers, binary code and Boolean algebra allow computers to make simple decisions by comparing long strings of zeros and ones.
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The vacuum tube, each one about as big as a person's thumb and glowing red hot like a tiny electric light bulb, had been invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest (Talladega, Alabama), who named it the Audion.
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In 1925, Vannevar Bush (Everett, Massachusetts) made the first of a series of unwieldy contraptions with equally cumbersome names: the New Recording Product Integraph Multiplier. Later, he built a machine called the Differential Analyzer, wich used gears, belts, levers and shafts to represent numbers and carry out calculations in a very physical way.
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In 1938, German Engineer Konrad Zuse (Berlin, Germany) cronstructed his Z1, the world´s first programmable binary computer, in his parents' living room.
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In 1939, American physicist John Atanasoff (Hamiton, NY) and his assistant, electrical engineer Clifford Berry, built a more elaborate binary machine that they named the Atanasoff Berry Computer.
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In 1943, a team of mathematicians based at Bletchley Park near London, England (including Alan Turing) built a computer called Colossus to help them crack secret German codes. Colossus was the first fully electronic computer.
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The first large-scale digital computer appeared in 1944 at Harvard University, built by mathematician Howard Aiken (Hoboken, NJ). Sponsored by IBM, it was variously known as the Harvard Mark I or the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC).
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Claude Elwood Shannon went on to found field of information theory with his 1948 paper titled A Mathematical Theory Of Communication, which applied probability theory to the problem of how to best encode the information a sender wants to transmit. This work is one of the theoretical foundations for many areas of study.
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Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse in 1963 (Portland, Oregon). The basic idea for the mouse first came to him in 1961 while sitting in a conference session on computer graphics, his mind mulling over the challenge of making interactive computing mre efficient.
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DARPA creates ARPAnet, the first operational computer network and ascentor of the internet, in 1968, in the USA. ARPANET was a Wide Area Networklinking many universities and research centers, was first to use packet switching, and was the beginning of what we consider the Internet today.
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Steve Wozniak designed the Apple-1, a single-board computer for hobbyists, in 1976, in California. The Apple-1 is the first computer that launched Apple.
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In 1981, IBM introduces its first MS-DOS computer in Nuevo Mexico, USA. It's an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft.
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In 1985, Microsoft releases Windows 1.0 in the USA. Windows 1.0 is a graphical personal computer operating environment developed by Microsoft.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee of CERN invented the WorldWideWeb in 1990 in London, England. The WorldWideWeb (www) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by URLs, interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet.
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Marc Andreessen created Mosaic, later known as Netscape, the first popular, user-friendly web browser on April 4th, 1994 in Illinois. Netscape communications is an American computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser.
