History of Computers

• Z1 Computer. Developed in 1936 by Conrad Zuse, the first freely programmable computer served as an automatic calculator device with three elements: a control, a memory and a calculator for arithmetic. It used a punched tape reader as its output device instead of a monitor.
• ABC Computer. The first electronic-digital (binary) computer was developed by Atanasoff and Clifford Berry in 1942. It used parallel processing, regenerative memory and had a separation of memory and computing functions.
• Harvard Mark I Computer. Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper developed this model in 1944. Imagine a giant room full of noisy, clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and eight feet high. The five-ton device contained almost 760,000 separate pieces.
  
  
• Manchester Baby Computer and the Williams Tube. Developed by Frederic Williams and Tom Kilburn in 1948, it used a type of altered cathode ray tube for a computer monitor. (Cathode ray tubes were also used for early television sets.)
• The Transistor was developed by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley in 1948. Although not a computer itself, it greatly assisted in their evolution by making them more stable electronically and cheaper to produce.
• UNIVAC Computer. Developed by John Presper Eckert and John Mauchley in 1951 for the Census Bureau, the device was also used commercially for payroll.
• IBM FORTRAN. John Backus developed the first successful high-level programming language in 1954.
• MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition). This technology was developed for the bank industry in 1955 by Stanford Research Institute, Bank of America and General Electric to read the numbers at the bottom of checks.
• Integrated Circuit or "Computer Chip." Developed by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce in 1958; placed the previously separated transistors, resistors, capacitors and all the connecting wiring onto a single crystal (or "chip") made of semiconductor material.
• Spacewar Computer Game. The first computer game was invented by Steve Russell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962.
• Computer Mouse and Windows. In 1964, Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute created the mouse to use with the first graphical user interface, both his inventions.
• ARPAnet. The first internet was developed in 1969 by Charles M. Herzfeld.
• Intel 1103 Computer Memory. The world's first dynamic random access memory (RAM) chip was developed in 1970.
• Intel 4004 Computer Microprocessor was developed by Faggin, Hoff, and Mazor in 1971.
• The Floppy Disk was invented by Alan Shugart and IBM in 1971.
• Ethernet Computer Networking was developed by Robert Metcalfe and Xerox in 1973.
• First Consumer Computers. The first consumer computers were developed by IBM and Apple in the mid-1970s.
• MS-DOS Computer Operating System was developed by Microsoft in 1981.
• Laptop Computer. The PC Convertible, the first laptop sold to consumers, was developed by IBM in 1986. It weighed 12 pounds.
• 3.5-inch diskette. First produced by IBM in 1987.
• VGA Computer Screens. Introduced in 1987 by IBM, the Video Graphics Array is a display standard that provides 640 x 480 resolution that could display 16 colors at one time.
• Worm. A computer worm released onto ARPAnet in 1988, disabled about 6,000 computers.
• The World Wide Web. Launched to the public Aug. 6, 1991, the World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at the European Partial Physics Laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The year before he also developed the first hypertext system.