Computer History

Charles Babbage

Sep 1, 1834

designed the first automatic calculator, called the analytical engine. only part of the peice was finished when he passed away

Herman Hollerith

Sep 1, 1890

was the first to take Jacquard's punch-card concept and apply it to computing with his Hollerith Tabulating Machine.
the machine he built was only capable of counting

ZL computer

Sep 1, 1936

A mechanical calculator thought to be the first to include certain features integral to todays systems, such as a control unit and seperate memory functions.
This computer was destroyed in the bombardment of Berlin in December 1943, during World War II, together with all construction plans

Eniac

Sep 1, 1944

Electronic Numerical Integrator and computer (ENIAC). first successful high-speed electronic digital computer. 18,000 vacuum tubes and took up nearly 1,800 square feet of floor space. took several people to operate it.
took 18 months and 500,000 tax dollars to build the computer.

1st generation computers

Sep 4, 1950

The univac and computers like that were considered 1st generation computers.
could only solve one problem at a time.

Univac

Sep 1, 1951

Universal Automatic Computer. Operated on a magnetic tape. United States Census Bureau payed the cost $400,000 to build the computer to help keep up with the growing population.

2nd generation computers

Sep 1, 1956

computers used transisters instead of vacuum tubes.
The first computers of this generation were developed for the atomic energy industry.

Jack Kilby

Sep 1, 1958

INvented the worlds first Integrated circuit, a small chip capable of containing thousands of transisters.
TI shut down for mass company vacation but jack being new employee could not take vacation so he spent thwe summer working to find miniaturization method for circuits

Mosaic

Sep 1, 1963

Allowed users to view multimedia on the web, causing internet traffic to increase by nearly 350%.

BASIC

Mar 1, 1964

Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Language that beginning programming students could easily learn

3rd generation computers

Sep 4, 1964

generation with integrated circuits. Computers for the first time became accessible to a mass audience because they were smaller and cheaper than their predecessors.

4th generation computers

Sep 4, 1971

computers that used a microprocessor chip. What in the first generation filled an entire room could now fit in the palm of the hand.

Introduction of the GUI

Sep 1, 1972

Graphical User Interface. Allowed users to interact easily with the computer. Apple was the first company to use the GUI.

Bill Gates

Apr 1, 1975

Founder of Microsoft
original name Micro-Soft

Altair computer

Sep 1, 1975

The first personal computer. No computer or monitor. 256 bytes of memory.
Named after a star, "Altair" which is the 11th brightest star in the sky.

Steve Jobs

Sep 1, 1976

built a personal computer named Apple I with Steve Wozniac in his garage, they later formed the Apple Computer Company in 1976.
The first 50 units were built in Steve Jobs' bedroom at his parents' house.

Apple II

Jun 1, 1977

Featured color monitor, sound, and game paddles. 4KB of RAM. Optional floppy disk to load programs.
Offered a spreadsheet program called VisiCalc.

Visicalc

Sep 1, 1978

first electronic spreadsheet application.

wordstar

Sep 4, 1978

first word processing application.

Osborne computer

Jun 1, 1981

First "portable" computer. Weighed 24.5 pounds. 5-inch screen. 64 kilobytes of RAM. Two floppy disk drives. Preinstalled with spreadsheet and word processing software.

Excel

Sep 1, 1985

One of the first spreadsheets to use a graphical user interface.

PageMaker

Sep 4, 1985

The first desktop publishing software. initially released for the apple macintosh.

Netscape

Sep 4, 1994

web browser that became a predominant player in browser software.