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In France, Joseph Marie Jacquard invents a loom that uses punched wooden cards to automatically weave fabric designs. Early computers would use similar punch cards.
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English mathematician Charles Babbage conceives of a steam-driven calculating machine that would be able to compute tables of numbers. The project, funded by the English government, is a failure. More than a century later, however, 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 saving the government $5 million. He establishes a company that would ultimately become IBM.
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Hewlett-Packard is founded by David Packard and Bill Hewlett in a Palo Alto, California, garage, according to the Computer History Museum.
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J.V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, attempts to build the first computer without gears, cams, belts or shafts.
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Alan Turing presents the notion of a universal machine, later called the Turing machine, capable of computing anything that is commutable. The central concept of the modern computer was based on his ideas.
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The newly formed Intel unveils the Intel 1103, the first Dynamic Access Memory (DRAM) chip.
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The newly formed Intel unveils the Intel 1103,Access the first Dynamic Memory (DRAM) chip.
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Alan Shugart leads a team of IBM engineers who invent the "floppy disk," allowing data to be shared among computers.
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: Robert Metcalfe, a member of the research staff for Xerox, develops Ethernet for connecting multiple computers and other hardware.
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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, according to Stanford University.
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Radio Shack's initial production run of the TRS-80 was just 3,000. It sold like crazy. For the first time, non-geeks could write programs and make a computer do what they wished.
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The Pentium microprocessor advances the use of graphics and music on PCs.
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The term Wi-Fi becomes part of the computing language and users begin connecting to the Internet without wires.
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Google releases the Chromebook, a laptop that runs the Google Chrome OS.