History of computers: A brief timeline

The history of computers began with primitive designs in the early 19th
century and went on to change the world during the 20th century.
The history of computers goes back over 200 years. At first theorized by
mathematicians and entrepreneurs, during the 19th century mechanical
calculating machines were designed and built to solve the increasingly complex
number-crunching challenges. The advancement of technology enabled ever
more-complex computers by the early 20th century, and computers became
larger and more powerful.

Today, computers are almost unrecognizable from designs of the 19th century,
such as Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine — or even from the huge computers
of the 20th century that occupied whole rooms, such as the Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Calculator.  

Here's a brief history of computers, from their primitive number-crunching origins

to the powerful modern-day machines that surf the Internet, run games and
stream multimedia. 

19TH CENTURY
1801: Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French merchant and inventor invents a loom
that uses punched wooden cards to automatically weave fabric designs. Early
computers would use similar punch cards.
1821: English mathematician Charles Babbage conceives of a steam-driven
calculating machine that would be able to compute tables of numbers. Funded by
the British government, the project, called the "Difference Engine" fails due to the
lack of technology at the time, according to the University of Minnesota. 
1848: Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and the daughter of poet Lord
Byron, writes the world's first computer program. According to Anna Siffert, a
professor of theoretical mathematics at the University of Münster in Germany,
Lovelace writes the first program while translating a paper on Babbage's
Analytical Engine from French into English. "She also provides her own comments
on the text. Her annotations, simply called "notes," turn out to be three times as
long as the actual transcript," Siffert wrote in an article for The Max Planck
Society. "Lovelace also adds a step-by-step description for computation of
Bernoulli numbers with Babbage's machine — basically an algorithm — which, in
effect, makes her the world's first computer programmer." Bernoulli numbers are
a sequence of rational numbers often used in computation.
1853: Swedish inventor Per Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard design the world's
first printing calculator. The machine is significant for being the first to "compute
tabular differences and print the results," according to Uta C. Merzbach's book,
"Georg Scheutz and the First Printing Calculator" (Smithsonian Institution Press,
1977).
1890: Herman Hollerith designs a punch-card system to help calculate the 1890
U.S. Census. The machine,  saves the government several years of calculations,
and the U.S. taxpayer approximately $5 million, according to Columbia
University  Hollerith later establishes a company that will eventually become
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

EARLY 20TH CENTURY

1931: At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Vannevar Bush invents
and builds the Differential Analyzer, the first large-scale automatic general-
purpose mechanical analog computer, according to Stanford University. 
1936: Alan Turing, a British scientist and mathematician, presents the principle of
a universal machine, later called the Turing machine, in a paper called "On
Computable Numbers…" according to Chris Bernhardt's book "Turing's Vision"
(The MIT Press, 2017). Turing machines are capable of computing anything that is
computable. The central concept of the modern computer is based on his ideas.
Turing is later involved in the development of the Turing-Welchman Bombe, an
electro-mechanical device designed to decipher Nazi codes during World War II,
according to the UK's National Museum of Computing. 
1937: John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of 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.
1939: David Packard and Bill Hewlett found the Hewlett Packard Company in Palo
Alto, California. The pair decide the name of their new company by the toss of a
coin, and Hewlett-Packard's first headquarters are in Packard's garage, according
to MIT. 
1941: German inventor and engineer Konrad Zuse completes his Z3 machine, the
world's earliest digital computer, according to Gerard O'Regan's book "A Brief
History of Computing" (Springer, 2021). The machine was destroyed during a
bombing raid on Berlin during World War II. Zuse fled the German capital after
the defeat of Nazi Germany and later released the world's first commercial digital
computer, the Z4, in 1950, according to O'Regan. 
1941: Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, design the first digital
electronic computer in the U.S., called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). This
marks the first time a computer is able to store information on its main memory,
and is capable of performing one operation every 15 seconds, according to the
book "Birthing the Computer" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016)
1945: Two professors at the University of Pennsylvania, John Mauchly and J.
Presper Eckert, design and build the Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Calculator (ENIAC). The machine is the first "automatic, general-purpose,
electronic, decimal, digital computer," according to Edwin D. Reilly's book
"Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology" (Greenwood
Press, 2003). 
1946: Mauchly and Presper leave the University of Pennsylvania and receive
funding from the Census Bureau to build the UNIVAC, the first commercial
computer for business and government applications.
1947: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories
invent the transistor. They discover how to make an electric switch with solid
materials and without the need for a vacuum.
1949: A team at the University of Cambridge develops the Electronic Delay
Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), "the first practical stored-program
computer," according to O'Regan. "EDSAC ran its first program in May 1949 when
it calculated a table of squares and a list of prime numbers," O'Regan wrote. In
November 1949, scientists with the Council of 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, according to O'Regan.
LATE 20TH CENTURY
1953: Grace Hopper develops the first computer language, which eventually
becomes known as COBOL, which stands for COmmon, Business-Oriented
Language according to the National Museum of American History. Hopper is later
dubbed the "First Lady of Software" in her posthumous Presidential Medal of
Freedom citation. Thomas Johnson Watson Jr., son of IBM CEO Thomas Johnson
Watson Sr., conceives the IBM 701 EDPM to help the United Nations keep tabs on
Korea during the war.
1954: John Backus and his team of programmers at IBM publish 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. Kilby is later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work.
1968: Douglas Engelbart reveals a prototype of the modern computer at the Fall
Joint Computer Conference, San Francisco. His presentation, called "A Research
Center for Augmenting Human Intellect" includes a live demonstration of his
computer, including a mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI), according to
the Doug Engelbart Institute. This marks the development of the computer from a
specialized machine for academics to a technology that is more accessible to the
general public.
1969: 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 — and the internet — practical," according to Bell Labs.. The
team behind UNIX continued to develop the operating system using the C
programming language, which they also optimized. 
1970: The newly formed Intel unveils the Intel 1103, the first Dynamic Access
Memory (DRAM) chip.
1971: A team of IBM engineers led by Alan Shugart invents the "floppy disk,"
enabling data to be shared among different computers.
1972: Ralph Baer, a German-American engineer, releases Magnavox Odyssey, the
world's first home game console, in September 1972 , according to the Computer
Museum of America. Months later, entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell and engineer Al
Alcorn with Atari release Pong, the world's first commercially successful video
game. 
1973: Robert Metcalfe, a member of the research staff for Xerox, develops
Ethernet for connecting multiple computers and other hardware.
1977: The Commodore Personal Electronic Transactor (PET), is released onto the
home computer market, featuring an MOS Technology 8-bit 6502
microprocessors, which controls the screen, keyboard and cassette player. The
PET is especially successful in the education market, according to O'Regan.
1975: The magazine cover of the January issue of "Popular Electronics" highlights
the Altair 8080 as the "world's first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models."
After seeing the magazine issue, two "computer geeks," Paul Allen and Bill Gates,
offer to write software for the Altair, using the new BASIC language. On April 4,
after the success of this first endeavor, the two childhood friends form their own
software company, Microsoft.
1976: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-found Apple Computer on April Fool's
Day. They unveil Apple I, the first computer with a single-circuit board and ROM
(Read Only Memory), according to MIT.
1977: Radio Shack began its initial production run of 3,000 TRS-80 Model 1
computers — disparagingly known as the "Trash 80" — priced at $599, according
to the National Museum of American History. Within a year, the company took
250,000 orders for the computer, according to the book "How TRS-80 Enthusiasts
Helped Spark the PC Revolution" (The Seeker Books, 2007).
1977: The first West Coast Computer Faire is held in San Francisco. Jobs and
Wozniak present the Apple II computer at the Faire, which includes color graphics
and features an audio cassette drive for storage.
1978: VisiCalc, the first computerized spreadsheet program is introduced.
1979: MicroPro International, founded by software engineer Seymour
Rubenstein, releases WordStar, the world's first commercially successful word
processor. WordStar is programmed by Rob Barnaby, and includes 137,000 lines
of code, according to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum's book "Track Changes: A Literary
History of Word Processing" (Harvard University Press, 2016).
1981: "Acorn," IBM's first personal computer, is released onto the market at a
price point of $1,565, according to IBM. Acorn uses the MS-DOS operating system
from Windows. Optional features include a display, printer, two diskette drives,
extra memory, a game adapter and more.
1983: The Apple Lisa, standing for "Local Integrated Software Architecture" but
also the name of Steve Jobs' daughter, according to the National Museum of
American History (NMAH), is the first personal computer to feature a GUI. The
machine also includes a drop-down menu and icons. Also this year, the Gavilan SC
is released and is the first portable computer with a flip-form design and the very
first to be sold as a "laptop."
1984: The Apple Macintosh is announced to the world during a Superbowl
advertisement. The Macintosh is launched with a retail price of $2,500, according
to the NMAH. 
1985: As a response to the Apple Lisa's GUI, Microsoft releases Windows in
November 1985, the Guardian reported. Meanwhile, Commodore announces the
Amiga 1000.
1989: Tim Berners-Lee, a British researcher at the European Organization for
Nuclear Research (CERN), submits his proposal for what would become the World
Wide Web. His paper 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 develop the Google search engine at Stanford
University.
1997: Microsoft invests $150 million in Apple, which at the time is struggling
financially.  This investment ends an ongoing court case in which Apple accused
Microsoft of copying its operating system. 
1999: Wi-Fi, the abbreviated term for "wireless fidelity" is developed, initially
covering a distance of up to 300 feet (91 meters) Wired reported. 

21ST CENTURY
2001: Mac OS X, later renamed OS X then simply macOS, is released by Apple as
the successor to its standard Mac Operating System. OS X goes through 16
different versions, each with "10" as its title, and the first nine iterations are
nicknamed after big cats, with the first being codenamed "Cheetah," TechRadar
reported. 
2003: AMD's Athlon 64, the first 64-bit processor for personal computers, is
released to customers. 
2004: The Mozilla Corporation launches Mozilla Firefox 1.0. The Web browser is
one of the first major challenges to Internet Explorer, owned by Microsoft. During
its first five years, Firefox exceeded a billion downloads by users, according to
the Web Design Museum. 
2005: Google buys Android, a Linux-based mobile phone operating system
2006: The MacBook Pro from Apple hits the shelves. The Pro is the company's first
Intel-based, dual-core mobile computer. 
2009: Microsoft launches Windows 7 on July 22. The new operating system
features the ability to pin applications to the taskbar, scatter windows away by
shaking another window, easy-to-access jumplists, easier previews of tiles and
more, TechRadar reported.  
2010: The iPad, Apple's flagship handheld tablet, is unveiled.
2011: Google releases the Chromebook, which runs on Google Chrome OS.
2015: Apple releases the Apple Watch. Microsoft releases Windows 10.
2016: The first reprogrammable quantum computer was created. "Until now,
there hasn't been any quantum-computing platform that had the capability to
program new algorithms into their system. They're usually each tailored to attack
 a particular algorithm," said study lead author Shantanu Debnath, a quantum
physicist and optical engineer at the University of Maryland, College Park.
2017: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a
new "Molecular Informatics" program that uses molecules as computers.
"Chemistry offers a rich set of properties that we may be able to harness for
rapid, scalable information storage and processing," Anne Fischer, program
manager in DARPA's Defense Sciences Office, said in a statement. "Millions of
molecules exist, and each 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."
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
 Fortune: A Look Back At 40 Years of Apple
 The New Yorker: The First Windows
 "A Brief History of Computing" by Gerard O'Regan (Springer, 2021)
