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Jan 1, 1000
The Abacus
~2700 BC~ Around this time, the first abaci were made in Mesopotamia, but the actual name "abacus" was not used until roughly 1387 AD. The abacus was invented due to the needs of business-men to count their profits. As such, the abacus is the world's first calculator. -
Jun 20, 1000
Stonehenge is built
~2800 BC~ Stonehenge, the earliest-discovered calendar, was built. It was to capture the light from the sun during the summer solstice. While likely have being built by the Britons (early British), the technology to be able to raise it was far beyond that of the Britons'. Researchers believe that it was most likely raised by Druids. -
The first Mechanical Calculator
Blasie Pascal, a famed inventor based his invention on a design described by Hero of Alexandria, from roughly 2 AD. It was originially used to measure the distance travelled by carriage. When the gears were turned in a specific sequence, numbers would register and add up. -
The Difference Engine
Charles Babbage realized that many computer operations consisted of long, repeating patterns. Knowing this, he designed a prototype of the first computer; and a year later, started working on the full machine with the help of the British Government. The machine was never finished, but it paved the road to Babbage's next invention: The Analytical Engine. -
The Analytical Engine
Babbage started to work on his new invention: The Analytical Engine. It was the first machine to use a sort of code; certain operations could be completed by using up to 1000 50 decimal "words". The beauty of the machine was that it could complete each "word" in a certain order, not in numerical order. These specific processes were stored on punch cards. -
Hollerith and Tabulating Machine
The Hollerith and Tabulating Machine was a huge leap forward in automated technology. The inventor, Herman Hollerith, worked at a census office when he developed the technology. It would automatically read and input the data that was punched into the census cards. Hollerith believed so strongly in the machine that he created his own company to help market the device. Today, that company is known as the IBM (International Business Machines) -
The Harvard Mark 1
In the late 1930's, Howard Aiken and some engineers at IBM used the very popular punch cards and built upon the idea; the product of this was the Harvard Mark 1. The Harvard Mark 1 could easily perform all four mathematical operations automatically, the only necessary human interaction was the input of the equation(s). It also had subroutines, or special processes that could compute logarithms and triginometric functions. The machine was fairly advanced for the time, but it was very slow. -
Alan Turing's Idea
In 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing wrote a paper describing his soon-to-be real machine, The Turing Machine. The machine, when built would be one of the first actual ancestors for the modern computer. The machine was designed to perform certain operations, and to be able to write, erase, and read symbols on an infinite paper tape. At each point in the computing process, the next action would be matched against a set amount of possible actions. -
Binary Representation
In 1941, a German inventor who had previously released multiple calculating machines invented a new, programmable machine. This was the first machine that used binary, the language of 1's and 0's. This was, in my opinion, the most important of all the inventions on this timeline, as the Binary System is what nearly every electronic device uses today. -
EDVAC
The EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), which was quite similar to its nephew, the ENIAC, was built two years before the ENIAC. It was to be a large improvement over the ENIAC, and its unique characteristic was that the programming would be stored <i>inside</i> the computer. The memory for the computer would come from mercury-delay lines, which means that a signal could be bounced back and forth, similar to an on/off state. The computer used binary as its language. -
The Transistor and The Integrated Circuit
The Transistor was a simple device, but it was integral to the advancement of computer technology. It was to be a replacement for the vacuums found all over large computers. It was smaller, cheaper, and more efficient for the vacuums, but unfortunately, it had to be soldered with each connection. This meant that long and complex equations were more likely to have incorrect answers due to a faulty connection. The Integrated Circuit was multiple transistors soldered together, saving space and time -
The ENIAC
John Mauchly and Presper Eckert were in charge of leading the computational evolution line, and their work led to the ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer). It was a very large machine, and due to its complexity it had to be constantly cooled. There were nearly 18,000 vacuums in place to cool down the machine, taking up nearly 168 square metres. The machine was difficult to program, as it was built to specifically perform certain computations, anything else and it wasn't the best. -
The Altair Microchip (cont.)
The device did not have a base operating system, meaning that users had to code their own software in binary. This was done by flipping switches on the front of the Altair. -
The Altair Microchip
The Altair was the world's first microprocessor, developed by Intel. It was an integrated circuit that was able to process 4 bits at a time, and because of its size, technological enthusiasts were now able to have their own personal computers. At the time, computers were too large and too expensive for the general public, and only the government and certain places like universities or military bases had them. Unfortunately, only a few people could use the device to make their own computer. -
Microsoft
Two young coders liked the chip, and approached the founder of Altair with the proposition of providing a base code for the chip. The founder, Ed Roberts, agreed to the deal if the code worked. Luckily, the coding worked, the two coders were paid, and they eventually went on to find Microsoft. -
The Rise of Apple
Not long after Microsoft's founding, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak presented the Apple II Computer. It had built-in coding, colour graphics, and a 4100 character memory for only $1298. The computer was presented at a fair for technology, and by the end 300 orders had been placed for the computer. 7 years later, the first Macintosh was introduced, sporting a GUI and an actual mouse. -
The Internet: Clients and Servers
When you think of computers, you probably think of the internet. A computer that has access to the internet must have two things: One being a server program, and the other being an application. With the server program, a computer is able to make a connection to a server which in turn connects to the internet. The application is an internet browser such as Google Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. Nearly anything can be sent over the internet as long as it can be converted into 1's and 0's.
