Timeline of the

Significant Eve
nts
in the
HISTORY OF
COMPUTER

Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French merchant,

1801 and inventor. Invented a loom that used

punched wooden cards to weave fabric
designs.
Charles Babbage, an English Mathematician
develops a steam-driven calculating
machine that computes tables of numbers.
Funded by the British government, and was
1821
called the "Difference Engine".
Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician wrote the first
program while translating a paper on Babbage's
Analytical Engine from French into English. Her

1848 annotations, simply called "notes," turn out to be three

times as long as the actual transcript,". She also adds a
step-by-step description for the computation of
Bernoulli numbers with Babbage's machine which is
essentially an algorithm, in effect, makes her the
world's first computer programmer.

Swedish inventor Per Georg Scheutz and his

son Edvard design the world's first printing
calculator.
1853
Herman Hollerith designs a punch-card system

1890
to help calculate the 1890 U.S. Census. He later
establishes a company that will eventually
become International Business Machines
Corporation (IBM).
At the Massachusetts Institute of

1931
Technology (MIT), Vannevar Bush invents and
builds the Differential Analyzer, the first
large-scale automatic general-purpose
mechanical analog computer.
Alan Turing, a British scientist, and
mathematician presents the principle of a
universal machine, later called the Turing

1936 machine, in a paper called "On Computable

Numbers…". He is also later involved in the
development of the Turing-Welchman Bombe,
an electromechanical device designed to
decipher Nazi codes during World War II.
John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of

1937
physics and mathematics at Iowa State
University, submits a grant proposal to build
the first electric-only computer, without
using gears, cams, belts, or shafts.
David Packard and Bill Hewlett found the

1939 Hewlett Packard Company in Palo Alto,

California. The pair decide on the name of
their new company by the toss of a coin.
A German inventor and engineer Konrad
Zuse completes his Z3 machine, the world's

1941
earliest digital computer.
Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford
Berry, design the first digital electronic
computer in the U.S., called the Atanasoff-
Berry Computer (ABC).
Two professors at the University of
Pennsylvania, John Mauchly, and J.

1945
Presper Eckert, designed and build the
Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Calculator (ENIAC). The machine is the
first "automatic, general-purpose,
electronic, decimal, digital computer".
 A Mauchly and Presper leave the University of

1946
Pennsylvania and receive funding from the
Census Bureau to build the UNIVAC, the first
commercial computer for business and
government applications.
William Shockley, John Bardeen, and
Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories
invented the transistor. They discover
how to make an electric switch with
solid materials without the need for a
1947
vacuum.
A team at the University of Cambridge develops the
Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC),
which is said to be "the first practical stored-program

1949 computer,". In November 1949, scientists with the Council

for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), now called
CSIRO, build Australia's first digital computer called the
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic
Computer (CSIRAC). CSIRAC is the first digital computer
in the world to play music.
Grace Hopper develops the first computer
language, which eventually becomes known as
COBOL, which stands for COmmon, Business-
Oriented Language. She is later dubbed the
"First Lady of Software" in her posthumous
1953
Presidential Medal of Freedom citation.
John Backus and his team of programmers at

1954
IBM published a paper describing their newly
created FORTRAN programming language, an
acronym for FORmula TRANslation, according
to MIT.

1958
Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce unveil the
integrated circuit, known as the
computer chip.
Douglas Engelbart reveals a prototype of the modern
computer called "A Research Center for Augmenting
Human Intellect" includes a live demonstration of his

1968 computer at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, San

Francisco. This marks the development of the computer
from a specialized machine for academics to a technology
that is more accessible to the general public.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and a group of

other developers at Bell Labs produce UNIX,
an operating system that made "large-scale
networking of diverse computing systems —
1969
and the internet — practical".

1970 The newly formed Intel unveils the Intel 1103, the
first Dynamic Access Memory (DRAM) chip.

A team of IBM engineers led by Alan

Shugart invents the "floppy disk,"
enabling data to be shared among
different computers.
1971
Ralph Baer, a German-American engineer,
releases Magnavox Odyssey, the world's first

1972 home game console, in September 1972. Months

later, entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell and engineer
Al Alcorn with Atari released Pong, the world's
first commercially successful video game.

Robert Metcalfe, a member of the

research staff for Xerox, develops
Ethernet for connecting multiple
computers and other hardware..
1973
The magazine cover of the January issue of "Popular

1975
Electronics" highlights the Altair 8080 as the "world's
first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models.". On
April 4, after the success of this first endeavor, the
two childhood friends Paul Allen and Bill Gates, form
their own software company, Microsoft.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-found
Apple Computer. They unveil Apple I, the
first computer with a single-circuit
board and ROM (Read Only Memory).
1976
The Commodore Personal Electronic
Transactor (PET), is released onto the
home computer market and is especially

1977
successful in the education market.
The first West Coast Computer Faire is
held in San Francisco. Jobs and Wozniak
present the Apple II computer which
includes color graphics and features an
audio cassette drive for storage.
Radio Shack began its initial production
run of 3,000 TRS-80 Model 1 computers
— disparagingly known as the "Trash 80" ..
VisiCalc, the first computerized
1978
spreadsheet program is introduced.
 MicroPro International, founded by
software engineer Seymour Rubenstein,
releases WordStar, the world's first
commercially successful word processor..
1979
"Acorn," IBM's first personal computer, is

1981 released onto the market which uses the

MS-DOS operating system from Windows.
The Apple Lisa, standing for "Local Integrated
Software Architecture" is the first personal
computer to feature a GUI. Also this year, the
Gavilan SC is released and is the first portable
computer with a flip-form design and the very
1983
first to be sold as a "laptop.".
As a response to the Apple Lisa's GUI,

1985 Microsoft releases Windows in November

1985. Meanwhile, Commodore announces
the Amiga 1000.

Tim Berners-Lee, a British researcher at

the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN(opens in new tab)),
submits his proposal for what would
become the World Wide Web. His paper
1989
details his ideas for Hyper Text Markup
Language (HTML), the building blocks of
the Web.

1993 The Pentium microprocessor advances

the use of graphics and music on PCs.

1996
Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed
the Google search engine at Stanford
University.

1999 Wi-Fi, the abbreviated term for "wireless

fidelity" is developed.
Mac OS X, later renamed OS X then simply
macOS, is released by Apple as the
successor to its standard Mac Operating
System..
2001
2003
AMD's Athlon 64, the first 64-bit
processor for personal computers, is
released to customers.

The Mozilla Corporation launches Mozilla

Firefox 1.0. 2004
2006 The MacBook Pro from Apple hits the
shelves. The Pro is the company's first
Intel-based, dual-core mobile computer.
Microsoft launches Windows 7 on July 22.
Features the ability to pin applications to
the taskbar, scatter windows away by
shaking another window, easy-to-access
2009
jumplists, easier previews of tiles, and
more.

2010 The iPad, Apple's flagship handheld

tablet, is unveiled.

Google releases the Chromebook, which

runs on Google Chrome OS. 2011
2015 Apple releases the Apple Watch.
Microsoft releases Windows 10.

The first reprogrammable quantum

computer was created. 2016
The Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a
new "Molecular Informatics" program
that uses molecules as computers.
"Millions of molecules exist, and each

2017 molecule has a unique three-dimensional

atomic structure as well as variables
such as shape, size, or even color. This
richness provides a vast design space
for exploring novel and multi-value ways
to encode and process data beyond the
0s and 1s of current logic-based, digital
architectures.".

BY: MARY ROSE TORALBA & JOANNA GRA.-ORTALIZ