| Timeline |
|---|
| 1623 CE | German mathamatician Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635) invented the first mechanical calculating machine, a 6-digit 'calculating clock' that could add and subtract | |
| 1623 CE | Wilhelm Schickard invented a mechanical calculator. | |
| 1642 CE | French mathamatician Blaise Pascal develops a mechanical calculator at the age of 21. He did so to ease the drudgery of his tax-collector father, but it was considered too complicated. | |
| 1645 CE | French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) completes his 5-digit 'Pascaline' that can add, after three years work. | |
| 1671 CE | In Germany Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz devised a mechanical calculator to add, subtract, multiply and divide. | |
| 1820 CE | The first mechnaical calculating machine which was produced in large numbers was invented by the Frenchman Thomas de Colmar and was called the Arithmometer | |
| 1822 CE | Charles Babbage began construction of the difference engine which was the first mechnaical computer | |
| 1833 CE | Ada Lovelace (future first computer programmer) meets Charles Babbage. | |
| 1834 CE | Babbage conceives the analytical engine which was the forerunner of the computer. | |
| 1843 CE | Howard Aiken constructs first mechanical programable calculator. | |
| 1843 CE | Ada Lovelace (Lady Lovelace) publishes her 'Notes' explaining a computer. | |
| 1847 CE | George Boole formalizes symbolic logic in 'The Mathematical Analysis of Logic'. | |
| 1850 CE | Adding machine employing depressible keys patented, New Paltz New York. | |
| 1854 CE | In the UK George Boole published his systesm of symbolic logic now called boolean algebra. | |
| 1873 CE | Lord Kelvin calculates the tides with a machine. | |
| 1884 CE | Electric tabulator is introduced. | |
| 1887 CE | Comptometer multi-function adding machine is manufactured. | |
| 1889 CE | Dr Herman Hollerith receives first US patent for a tabulating machine. | |
| 1905 CE | Swedish inventor Willgodt T. Odhner invents the next 'generation' of mechanical calculating machine using a 'pin wheel' mechanism. | |
| 1911 CE | The merger of three companies forms Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R). This company will later become IBM. | |
| 1914 CE | Thomas Watson becomes the head of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R), the company that will later become IBM. | |
| 1917 CE | The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company enters the Canadian market under name of International Business Machines Co Limited or IBM. | |
| 1919 CE | Flip-flop circuit invented which helps compuers to remember binary numbers, and hence enables them to count. | |
| 1921 CE | The word 'robot' enters the language. | |
| 14 Feb 1924 CE | The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R) is renamed International Business Machines or IBM. | |
| 1928 CE | IBM adopts the 80-column punched card. | |
| 1930 CE | Bush's differential analyzer introduces the computer. | |
| 1936 CE | Alan Turing discusses computability. | |
| 1936 CE | Alan Turing's 'On Computable Numbers' describes a general purpose computer. | |
| 1937 CE | Stibitz of Bell Labs invents the electrical digital calculator. | |
| 1941 CE | Zuse's Z3 is the first computer controlled by software. | |
| 1942 CE | Atanasoff - Berry build the first electronic digital computer | |
| 1944 CE | Harvard's Mark I - first digital computer - put in service | |
| 1944 CE | IBM offers a typewriter with proportional spacing. | |
| 1946 CE | ENIAC the first US computer is finished by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert in Pennsylvania. | |
| 1947 CE | The transistor is invented and evetually replaces most vacuum tubes. | |
| 1948 CE | The first stored computer program run, on Manchester Mark I. | |
| 1949 CE | John von Neumann computes Pi to 2037 decimal places using ENIAC. | |
| 1949 CE | Whirlwind at MIT is the first real time computer. | |
| 1949 CE | Magnetic core computer memory is invented. | |
| 1950 CE | Alan Turing proposes the 'Turing test' criterion for an intelligent machine. | |
| 1950 CE | Changeable typewriter typefaces are in use. | |
| 1950 CE | Phototransistor invention announced, Murray Hill NJ | |
| 1951 CE | Presper Eckert and John Mauchly finish UNIVAC I - the first mass-produced electronic computer. | |
| 1951 CE | The first mass-produced electronic computer, UNIVAC 1, enters service at Census Bureau. | |
| 1952 CE | IBM announces its 'electronic' brain based on the vacuum tube, the IBM 701, that could perform 17,000 per second (or 1 million operations an hour). | |
| 1954 CE | The first FORTRAN computer program run | |
| 1956 CE | Jay Forrester issued a patent for computer core memory | |
| 1957 CE | IBM makes FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) a scientific programming language available to its customers. | |
| 1959 CE | Bell Labs experiments with artificial intelligence. | |
| 1959 CE | Texas Instruments requests patent of IC (Integrated Circuit). | |
| 1959 CE | Bob Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, U.S., prints an entire electronic circuit on a single crystal or microchip of silicon using a photographic process. This breakthrough enables the computer revolution to begin. | |
| 1959 CE | The IBM 7090 computer was introduced. It was one of the first fully transistorized mainframes and could perform 229,000 calculations per second. | |
| 1960 CE | C.A.R. Hoare invents the quicksort algorithm. | |
| 1960 CE | Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon develop the Reed-Solomon error-correcting code. | |
| 1961 CE | Daniel Shanks and John Wrench compute pi to 100000 decimal places using an inverse-tangent identity and an IBM-7090 computer. | |
| 1961 CE | IBM introduces the 'golf ball' typewriter. | |
| 1961 CE | The time-sharing computer is developed. | |
| 1961 CE | Robert Noyce patents the integrated circuit. | |
| 1963 CE | PDP-8 becomes the first popular minicomputer. | |
| 1964 CE | The first BASIC program runs on a computer. | |
| 1965 CE | ARPA sponsors study on 'cooperative network of time-sharing computers' | |
| 1965 CE | Computer time-sharing becomes popular. | |
| Oct 1966 CE | Lawrence G Roberts publishes the first ARPANET plan 'Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers' | |
| Apr 1967 CE | ARPANET design discussions held by Larry Roberts at ARPA IPTO PI meeting in Ann Arbor Michigan | |
| 1967 CE | The computer light pen is dveloped. | |
| Aug 1968 CE | Request for proposals for ARPANET sent out responses received in September | |
| 1968 CE | The RAM (Randon Access Memory) microchip reaches the market. | |
| 1968 CE | Douglas C. Engelbart, of the Stanford Research Institute, demonstrates his system of keyboard, keypad, mouse, and windows at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco's Civic Center. | |
| 30 Aug 1969 CE | ARPANET commissioned by DoD for research into networking, the beginning of the Internet. | |
| Nov 1969 CE | Intel announces a 1 kilobit RAM chip, which has a significantly larger capacity than any previously produced memory chip | |
| 1969 CE | Intel's Marcian (Ted) Hoff and Stan Mazor design a 4-bit CPU chip set architecture that could receive instructions and perform simple functions on data and this CPU becomes the 4004 microprocessor | |
| 1970 CE | The computer floppy disc is developed. | |
| 1970 CE | The beginning of 'The Epoch', which is Time 0 for UNIX systems. | |
| 1970 CE | Digital Equipment Corp introduces PDP-11 minicomputer. | |
| 1970 CE | IBM introduces its System/370 computer. It is one of the first computers to include 'virtual memory' technology, a technique developed in England in 1962 to expand the main memory available to the computer by using space on the hard drive. | |
| 1970 CE | The first computer chess tournament is held. | |
| Sep 1971 CE | In major trade publications, Intel officially introduces the MCS-4 microcomputer system comprised of the 4001 ROM chip, 4002 RAM chip, 4003 shift register chip, and the 4004 microprocessor and the clock speed of the CPU is 108 kHz. | |
| 1971 CE | Texas Instruments releases the first easily portable electronic calculator. | |
| 1971 CE | Wang 1200 is the first word processor. | |
