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(opens in
new tab).. 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(opens in new tab). 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 microprocessor, 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(opens in new tab).