-
2300 BCE
Abacus
Various forms date
back to 2300 BC -
1600s: Mechanical Calculating Machines
1610: Wilhelm
Schickard’s calculating
machine -
1642
1642: Blaise Pascal’s
Pascaline -
1694
1694: Gottfried
Leibniz’s mechanical
calculator -
Mid 1800s: Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace, daughter of the
poet Lord Byron, worked with
Babbage on the Analytical Engine
Programmed Analytical Engine
using punched cards
Considered first computer
programmer -
1801: Jacquard Loom
Joseph Jacquard invents loom
that is “programmed” using
punched cards -
1860s: Babbage’s Engines
Charles Babbage invents (but never completely builds) two machines: -
1890: Hollerith’s Census Machines
Herman Hollerith developed a
machine for tabulating US
census which used punched
cards
1880 census took 8 years to
tabulate
1890 census took 1 year -
1936: Turing Machine
Alan Turing, considered the
father of computer science,
described a theoretical device
called the Turing machine or
“a-machine”. Formalized the
concepts of computation and
algorithms -
1939: Atanasoff-Berry Computer
Considered first fully
electronic digital computing
device, but was not
programmable or fully
functiona -
1944: Harvard Mark I
Howard Aiken designs
Mark I, the first
operational generalpurpose electromechanical computer.
Financed and built at IBM -
1946: ENIAC
John Mauchley and Presper
Eckert complete the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and
Calculator (ENIAC) at Univ of
Pennsylvania. Much based on
Atanasoff’s ABC
First general purpose, digital
electronic computer -
1947: Computer Bug
Computer operators
working with Grace Murray
Hopper on Harvard’s Mark
II computer discover a
“bug”, a moth lodged in the
components, and paste it
into the computer’s logbook
which now resides in
Smithsonian -
1947: Transistor
Bell Labs develops the
transistor (right), an
electronic switch made with a
small piece of silicon with
added impurities. It’s smaller,
uses less power, more
reliable, and cheaper to
produce than vacuum tubes
(left)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Triody_var.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File: -
1951: UNIVAC I
UNIVersal Automatic Computer
I (UNIVAC I), designed
principally by Eckert and
Mauchly, is the first
commercially successful
computer
Price: $1.25M - $1.5M
Units Produced: 46 -
1954: FORTRAN
John Backus and IBM
develop FORTRAN, the first
successful high-level
programming language and
compiler
Designed for scientific
problems and still widely used
today -
1955: Logic Theorist
The first artificial intelligence
program written by Allen
Newell, Herbert Simon and J. C.
Shaw mimicked the problem solving
skills of a human by proving math
theorems
The term artificial intelligence (AI)
would be coined in 1956 at the
Dartmouth summer research project
on artificial intelligence -
1958: Integrated Circuit
Integrated circuits (chips)
independently co-invented by
Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments
and Robert Noyce of Fairchild
Semiconductor
Transistors, and other electronic
components all fabricated on
single chip of silicon -
1962: Spacewar!
Spacewar! is the first
computer game, written by
Steve Russell (from MIT) and
his small team for the PDP-1
computer -
1965: Moore’s Law
Gordon Moore, a cofounder of Intel, predicts that
the number of transistors
which can be placed on a
single chip will double every
year. The prediction was
later modified to every 2
years, but it has held steady
and was dubbed “Moore’s
Law” around 1970 -
1969: ARPANET
ARPANET, which eventually
becomes the Internet, goes
online with 4 nodes.
Department of Defense
sponsors ARPA (Advanced
Research Projects Agency) to
build a robust interconnected
network of geographically
distant computers -
1971: Microprocessor
Microprocessor: entire CPU
fits on a single chip. Three
companies developed the
microprocessor independently
at the same time: Texas
Instruments, Intel, and Garrett
AiResearch -
1977: Apple II Personal Computer
Apple II, designed primarily by
Steve Wozniak, was the first
highly successful, massproduced personal
computers (PCs)
Price: $1300 for model with 4
KB RAM, $2600 for 48 KB RAM
model -
1978: Spam!
Gary Thuerk, an aggressive
DEC marketer, attempted to
send the first commercial
spam message to every
Arpanet address on the west
coast (393 recipients) -
1981: IBM Personal Computer
IBM develops a PC with
an Intel microprocessor
and Microsoft’s DOS
operating system
Price started at $1,565
300,000 sold in 1981;
3,274,000 sold in 1982 -
1982: Tron Movie
Disney’s Tron, a movie about the
fictional world inside a computer, is
the first major film to use extensive
3D computer graphics -
1984: Apple’s Macintosh
Apple’s iconic 1984
commercial promoting the
Macintosh was the most
expensive commercial ever
produced at the time (about $1
million) and played only once
during the Super Bow -
1985-87: Therac-25
Therac-25 provided
radiation therapy to
patients with cancer
Several software bugs
caused radiation
overdoses leading to five
deaths and other serious
injuries -
1990: World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
develops the WWW, a global
web of interconnected
documents, which runs on top
of the Internet
The Web would become
popular several years later
when Netscape develops an
easy-to-use web browser -
1992: Microsoft Windows
Microsoft (Bill Gates) releases
Windows 3.1, the first version
of Windows that was widely
successful -
1997: Deep Blue
IBM's Deep Blue
computer defeats world
chess champion Garry
Kasparov in their second
six-game showdown,
becoming the first
computer system to defeat
a reigning world champion
under standard chess
tournament time controls -
1998: Google
Ph.D. students Larry Page and
Sergey Brin drop out of
Stanford to create Google, a
Web search engine which uses
their novel PageRank algorithm
to order search engine results
Google originated from a
misspelling of googol which is 1
followed by 100 zeros -
200x: Online Social Networks
Online social networks (and sharing
too much trivial information) first
became popular in the early 2000s
2002: Friendster created by
Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin
2003: MySpace created by eUniverse
employees
2004: Facebook created by Mark
Zuckerberg while a Harvard student
2006: Twitter created by Jack Dorsey -
2003: Worms and Viruses
The most devastating Internet worms and
viruses (SQL Slammer, Sobig.F, Blaster) cause
millions of dollars in damages to individuals and
companies -
2005: Multi-core Processors
PCs with dual core CPUs hit
the market. Multi-core CPUs
have multiple processors on
a single chip, and they allow
more throughput with a lower
processor speed, thus using
less power
Places more emphasis in
parallel programming -
2007: iPhone
iPhone by Apple
revolutionizes touch-screen
interfaces for mobile devices -
2010: iPad
iPad by Apple reinvigorates the tablet
computing market -
2011: IBM’s Watson
IBM’s Watson defeats veteran Jeopardy champs -
2012: Google’s Driverless Car
Google is awarded the first self-driven car license in
Nevada -
2013: Google Glass
Wearable computers get lots of buzz -
The Future?
Smart clothing
• Brain-powered prosthesis
• Gesture recognition
• Quantum computers
• The Singularity?
