1940 The Complex Number Calculator (CNC) is completed.

In 1939, Bell Telephone Laboratories completed this calculator, designed by researcher George Stibitz. In 1940, Stibitz demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College.

1941

Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 computer. The Z3 was an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere. The original Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid of Berlin in late 1943. However, Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in the 1960s which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

The Zuse Z3 Computer

The Zuse Z3 Computer

The first Bombe is completed. Based partly on the design of the Polish Bomba, a mechanical means of decrypting Nazi military communications during WWII, the British Bombe design was greatly influenced by the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and others.

Bombe replica, Bletchley Park, U.K.

1942 The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed. After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in 1939, Atanasoff received funds to build the fullscale machine. Built at Iowa State College (now University), the ABC was designed and built by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry between 1939 The Atanasoff-Berry Computer 1943

Project Whirlwind begins. During World War II, the U.S. Navy approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) about building a flight simulator to train bomber crews.

Whirlwind installation at MIT

The Relay Interpolator is completed. The U.S. Army asked Bell Labs to design a machine to assist in testing its M-9 Gun Director. Bell Labs mathematician George Stibitz recommended using a relay-based calculator for the project. The result was the Relay Interpolator, later called the Bell Labs Model II. The Relay Interpolator used 440 relays and since it was programmable by paper tape, it was used for other applications following the war.

George Stibitz circa 1940

1944

Harvard Mark-I in use, 1944

The Colossus at Work At Bletchley Park

1945

Harvard Mark-1 is completed. Conceived by Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a roomsized, relay-based calculator. The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machines thousands of component parts. The Mark-1 was used to produce mathematical tables but was soon superseded by stored program computers. The first Colossus is operational at Bletchley Park. Designed by British engineer Tommy Flowers, the Colossus was designed to break the complex Lorenz ciphers used by the Nazis during WWII. A total of ten Colossi were delivered to Bletchley, each using 1,500 vacuum tubes and a series of

John von Neumann wrote "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" in which he outlined the architecture of a stored-program computer. Electronic storage of programming information and data eliminated the need for the more clumsy methods of programming, such as punched paper tape a concept that has characterized mainstream computer development since 1945. Hungarian-born von Neumann demonstrated prodigious expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, statistics, and the use of mechanical devices for computation. After the war, he concentrated on the development of Princetons Institute for Advanced Studies computer and its copies around the world. Konrad Zuse began work on Plankalkul (Plan Calculus), the first algorithmic programming language, with an aim of creating the theoretical preconditions for the formulation of problems of a general nature. Seven years earlier, Zuse had developed and built the worlds first binary digital computer, the Z1. He completed the first fully functional program-controlled

John von Neumann

1946 major breakthrough

In February, the public got its first glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.
Start of project: 1943 Completed: 1946 Programmed: plug board and switches Speed: 5,000 operations per second Input/output: cards, lights, switches, plugs Floor space: 1,000 square feet Project leaders: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.

ENIAC

An inspiring summer school on computing at the

AVIDAC University of Pennsylvanias Moore School of

Electrical Engineering stimulated construction of stored-program computers at universities and 1947 research institutions. This free, public set of lectures inspired the EDSAC, BINAC, and, later, IAS machine The Williams tube won the race for a practical random-access memory. Sir Frederick Williams of Manchester University modified a cathoderay tube to paint dots and dashes of phosphorescent electrical charge on the screen, representing binary ones and zeros. Vacuum tube machines, such as the IBM 701, used the Williams tube as primary memory.

Vacuum tube

Point-contact transistor
1948 On December 23, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen successfully tested this point-contact transistor, setting off the semiconductor revolution. Speed: 50 multiplications per second

Input/output: cards, punched tape Memory type: punched tape, vacuum tubes, relays Technology: 20,000 relays, 12,500 vacuum tube Floor space: 25 feet by 40 feet Project leader: Wallace Eckert

IBMs SSEC

IBMs Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed scientific data in public display near the companys Manhattan headquarters. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon.

1949

Maurice Wilkes assembled the EDSAC, the first practical stored-program computer, at Cambridge University.

The Manchester Mark I computer functioned as a complete system using the Williams tube for memory. This University machine became the prototype for Ferranti Corp.s first computer.

Manchester Mark I

Wilkes with the EDSAC

1950 Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer; Magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. Drums registered information as magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder. Read/write heads both recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second.

ERA 1101 drum memory

1951 MITs Whirlwind debuted on Edward R. Murrows "See It Now" television series.
Start of project: 1945 Completed: 1951 Add time: .05 microseconds Input/output: cathode ray tube, paper tape, magnetic tape Memory size: 2048 16-digit words

Project leaders: Jay Forrester and Robert Everett

MIT Whirlwind LEO

Englands first commercial computer, the Lyons Electronic Office, solved clerical The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census problems. The president of Lyons Tea Co. Bureau was the first commercial computer to had the computer, UNIVAC I attract widespread public attention. Although 1952 Another manufactured by Remington Rand.

Breakthrough

John von Neumanns IAS computer became operational at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeto. Magnetic tape allows for inexpensive mass storage of information and so is a key part of the computer revolution. The IBM 726 was one of the first practical highspeed magnetic tape systems for electronic digital computers. Announced on May 21, 1952, the system used a unique vacuum channel method of keeping a loop of tape circulating

Los Alamos MANIAC

between two points allowing the tape drive to start and stop the tape in a split-second. The Model 726 was first sold with IBMs first electronic digital computer the Model 701 and could store 2 million digits per tapean enormous amount at the time. It rented for $850 a month. 1953

At memory MIT, Jay Forrester installed magnetic core Core

memory on the Whirlwind computer. Core memory 1954 made computers more reliable, faster, and easier to A silicon-based make. Such a system of storage remainedjunction popular transistor, perfected by until the development of semiconductors in the Gordon Teal of Texas 1970s. Instruments Inc., brought the price of this component down to $2.50. Texas Instruments Incorporated of the first commercial production of silicon transistors kernel-sized substitutes for vacuum tubes." The IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator established itself as the first massproduced computer. The 650s magnetic data-storage drum allowed much faster access to stored material than drum memory machines.

1955 First production silicon junction transistors

Felker and Harris program TRADIC, AT&T Bell Laboratories announced the first fully transistorized computer, TRADIC. It contained nearly 800 transistors instead of vacuum tubes. Transistors completely cold, highly efficient amplifying devices invented at Bell Labs enabled the machine to operate on fewer than 100 watts, or one-twentieth the power required by comparable vacuum tube computers. 1956 MIT researchers built the TX-0, the first generalcomputer built with replacement, designers circuit inside a "bottle," Constructed at MITs

purpose, programmable transistors. For easy placed each transistor similar to a vacuum tube. Lincoln Laboratory.

MIT TX0
1957

Sperry Rand released a commercial compiler for its UNIVAC. Developed by Grace Hopper as a refinement of her earlier innovation, the A-0 compiler, the new version was called MATH-MATIC. A new language, FORTRAN (short for FORmula TRANslator), enabled a computer to perform a repetitive task from a single set of instructions by using loops. 1958 Jack Kilby created the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments to prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material. His circuit consisted of a sliver of germanium with five components linked by wires. Japans NEC built the countrys first electronic computer, the NEAC 1101.

Kilby integrated circuit

1959 IBMs 7000 series mainframes were the companys first transistorized computers. At the top of the line of computers all of which emerged significantly faster and more dependable than vacuum tube machines sat the 7030, also known as the "Stretch." 1960 AT&T designed its Dataphone, the first commercial modem, specifically for converting digital computer data to analog signals for transmission across its long distance network. Outside manufacturers incorporated Bell Laboratories digital data sets into commercial products. The development of equalization techniques and bandwidth-conserving modulation systems improved transmission efficiency in national and global systems.

IBM STRETCH

COBOL design team AT&T Dataphone

A team drawn from several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon developed COBOL, Common Business Oriented Language. Designed for business use, early COBOL efforts aimed for easy readability of computer programs and as much machine

independence as possible. Quicksort is developed. Working for the British computer company Elliott Brothers, C. A. R. Hoare developed Quicksort, an algorithm that would go on to become the most used sorting method in the world. Quicksort used a series of elements called pivots that allowed for fast sorting. C.A.R. Hoare was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000. 1961 Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. invented the resistor-transistor logic (RTL) product, a set/reset flip-flop and the first integrated circuit available as a monolithic chip. IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit is released. The IBM 1301 Disk Drive was announced on June 2nd, 1961 for use with IBMs 7000-series of mainframe computers.

RTL integrated circuit

1962 Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. produced the first widely accepted epitaxial gold-doped NPN transistor. The LINC (Laboratory Instrumentation Computer) offered the first real time laboratory data processing. Designed by Wesley Clark at Lincoln Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp. later commercialized it as the LINC-8.

Fairchild NPN transistor

1963 ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange permitted machines from different manufacturers to exchange data. ASCII consists of 128 unique strings of ones and zeros. Each sequence represents a letter of the English alphabet, an Arabic numeral, an assortment of punctuation marks and symbols, or a function such as a carriage return. 1964

IBM System/360

IBM announced the System/360, a family of six mutually compatible computers and 40 peripherals

that could work together.

CDC 6600
CDCs 6600 supercomputer, designed by Seymour Cray, performed up to 3 million instructions per second a processing speed three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM Stretch. Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny created BASIC, an easy-to-learn programming language, for their students at Dartmouth College. 1965 Digital Equipment Corp. introduced the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. The PDP-8

DEC PDP-8 1966

1966 The Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contracted with the University of Illinois to ILLIAC IV build a large parallel processing computer, the ILLIAC IV, which did not operate until 1972 at NASAs Ames Research Center. The first large-scale array computer, the ILLIAC IV achieved a computation speed of 200 million instructions per second, about 300 million operations per second, and 1 billion bits per second of I/O transfer via a unique combination of parallel architecture and the overlapping or "pipe-lining" structure of its 64 processing elements.

1967 Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. built the first standard metal oxide semiconductor product for data processing applications, an eight-bit arithmetic

unit and accumulator. In a MOS chip, engineers treat the semiconductor material to produce either of two varieties of transistors, called n-type and ptype.

MOS semiconductor
1968 Data General Corp., started by a group of engineers that had left Digital Equipment Corp., introduced the Nova, with 32 kilobytes of memory.

Ed deCastro and Nova Apollo Guidance Computer

The Apollo Guidance Computer made its debut orbiting the Earth on Apollo 7. A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the lunar surface. Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes and the appropriate syntactic category into the display and keyboard unit. 1969 AT&T Bell Laboratories programmers Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed the UNIX operating system on a spare DEC minicomputer. 1970 Engineers at PARC circa Xerox opens Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1972 1970, Xerox Corporation hired Dr. George Pake to lead a new research center in Palo Alto, California. PARC attracted some of the United States top computer scientists, and produced many groundbreaking inventions that transformed computingmost notably the personal computer graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer, and object-oriented

programming. Xerox was unable to market the inventions from PARC but others did, including Steve Jobs (Apple), Bob Metcalfe (3Com), as well as Charles Geschke and John Warnock (Adobe) Citizens and Southern National Bank in Valdosta, Ga., installed the countrys first automatic teller machine. 1971 breakthrough email is send

The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appeared in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the 4004 had 2250 transistors and could perform up to 90,000 operations per second in four-bit chunks.

Intel 4004 Kenbak-1

personal computer, Blankenbaker using and small-scale integrated The Kenbak-1, the first designed by John V. standard medium-scale circuits

he first e-mail is sent. Ray Tomlinson of the research firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman sent the first e-mail when he was supposed to be working on a different project. Tomlinson, who is credited with being the one to decide on the "@" sign for use in e-mail, sent his message over a military network called ARPANET. When asked to describe the contents of the first email, Tomlinson said it was something like "QWERTYUIOP" An IBM team, originally led by David Noble, invented the 8-inch floppy diskette. It was initially designed for use in loading microcode into the controller for the "Merlin" (IBM 3330) disk pack file.

IBM 23FD 8
1972 Intels 8008 microprocessor made its debut. A vast improvement over its predecessor, the 4004, its eight-bit word afforded 256 unique arrangements of ones and zeros. For the first time, a microprocessor could handle both uppercase and lowercase letters, all 10 numerals, punctuation marks, and a host of other symbols.

Intel 8008
1973

IMSAI is founded. In 1973, Bill Millard left his regular job in management to found the consulting firm Information Management Services or IMS. The following year, while he was working on a clients project, he developed a small computing system using the then-new Intel 8080 microprocessor.

IMSAI 8080 System

The TV Typewriter, designed provided the first display of information on an ordinary by Don Lancaster, alphanumeric television set. The Micral was the earliest commercial, nonkit personal computer based on a microprocessor, the Intel 8008. Thi Truong developed the computer and Philippe Kahn the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that didnt require high

TV Typewriter Micral

1974

Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center designed the Alto the first work station with a built-in mouse for input. The Alto stored several files simultaneously in windows, offered menus and icons, and could link to a local area network. Although Xerox never sold the Alto commercially, it gave a number of them to universities. Engineers later incorporated its features into work stations and personal computers.

Xerox Alto

Scelbi 8H Scelbi advertised its 8H computer, the first commercially advertised U.S. computer based on a microprocessor, Intels 8008. Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. It had 4 kilobytes of internal memory and a cassette tape, with both teletype and oscilloscope interfaces. In 1975, Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 kilobytes of memory

1975 The January edition of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800 computer kit, based on Intels 8080 microprocessor, on its cover. Within weeks of the computers debut, customers inundated the manufacturing company, MITS, with orders. Bill Gates and Paul Allen licensed BASIC as the software language for the Altair. Ed Roberts invented the 8800 which sold for $297, or $395 with a case and coined the term "personal computer." The machine came with 256 bytes of memory (expandable to 64K) and an open 100-line bus structure that evolved into the S-100 The visual display module (VDM) prototype, designed in 1975 by Lee Felsenstein, marked the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers. Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March 1976, the visual display module allowed use of personal computers for interactive games.

MITS Altair

Felsensteins VDM
1976

Intel and Zilog introduced new microprocessors. Five times faster than its predecessor, the 8008, the Intel 8080 could address four times as many bytes for a total of 64 kilobytes. The Zilog Z-80 could run any program written for the 8080 and included twice as many built-in machine instructions.

Zilog Z-80
Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I, a single-board computer. With specifications in hand and an order for 100 machines at $500 each from the Byte Shop, he and Steve Jobs got their start in business. In this photograph of the Apple I board, the upper two rows are a video terminal and the lower two rows are the computer. The 6502 microprocessor in the white package sits on the lower right. About 200 of the machines sold before the company announced the The Cray I made its name as the first commercially successful vector processor. The fastest machine of its day, its speed came partly from its shape, a C, which reduced the length of wires and thus the time signals needed to travel across them.

Apple I

Cray I

Project started: 1972 Project 1976 completed: The Queen of England sends first her e- Speed: 166 million floating-point operations per second mail. Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Size: 58 cubic feet Kingdom, sends out an e-mail on March Weight: 5,300 lbs. 26 from the Royal Signals and Radar Technology: Integrated circuit Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern as a Clock rate: 83 million cycles per 1977 second part of a demonstration of networking Word length: 64-bit words technology. Instruction set: 128 instructions

The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) the first of several personal computers released in 1977 came fully assembled and was straightforward to operate, with either 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, two built-in cassette drives, and a membrane "chiclet" keyboard.

Commodore PET
The Apple II became an instant success when released in 1977 with its printed circuit motherboard, switching power supply, keyboard, case assembly, manual, game paddles, A/C powercord, and cassette tape with the computer game "Breakout." When hooked up to a color television set, the Apple II produced brilliant color graphics.

Apple II

TRS-80

In the first month after its release, Tandy Radio Shacks first desktop computer the TRS-80 sold 10,000 units, well more than the companys projected sales of 3,000 units for one year. Priced at $599.95, the machine included a Z80 based microprocessor, a video display, 4 kilobytes of memory, BASIC, cassette storage, and easy-tounderstand manuals that assumed no prior

The U.S. government adopted IBMs data encryption standard, the key to unlocking coded messages, to protect confidentiality within its agencies. Available to the general public as well, the standard required an eight-number key for scrambling and unscrambling data. The 70 quadrillion possible combinations made breaking the code by trial and error unlikely.

The VAX 11/780 from Digital Equipment Corp. featured the ability to address up to 4.3 gigabytes of virtual memory, providing hundreds of times the capacity of most minicomputers. Texas Instruments Inc. introduced Speak & Spell, a talking learning aid for ages 7 and up. Its debut marked the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. Speak & Spell utilized linear predictive coding to formulate a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample based on previous input. It transformed digital information processed through a filter into synthetic speech and could store more than 100 seconds of linguistic sounds. Shown here are the four individuals who began the Speak & Spell program: From left to right, Gene Frantz, Richard Wiggins, Paul Breedlove, and George

VAX 11/780

Speak & Spell creators

Original Shugart SA400 5 1/4

The 5 1/4" flexible disk drive and diskette were introduced by Shugart Associates in 1976. This was the result of a request by Wang Laboratories to produce a disk drive small enough to use with a desktop computer, since 8" floppy drives were considered too large for that purpose. By 1978, more than 10 manufacturers were producing 5 1/4"

1979

The Motorola 68000 microprocessor exhibited a processing speed far greater than its contemporaries. This high performance processor found its place in powerful work stations intended for graphics-intensive programs common in engineering. John Shoch and Jon Hupp at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center discover the computer "worm," a short program that searches a network for idle processors. Initially designed to provide more efficient use of computers and for testing, the worm had the unintended effect of invading networked computers, creating a security threat. California Institute of Technology professor Carver Mead and Xerox Corp. computer scientist Lynn Conway wrote a manual of chip design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems." Demystifying the planning of very large scale integrated (VLSI) systems, the text expanded the ranks of engineers capable of creating such chips. The authors had observed that computer architects seldom participated in the specification of the standard integrated circuits with which they worked. The authors intended "Introduction to VLSI Systems" to fill a gap in the literature and introduce all electrical engineering

Motorola 68000

Introduction to VLSI Systems

USENET established. USENET was invented as a means for providing mail and file transfers using a communications standard known as UUCP. It was developed as a joint project by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by graduate students Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, and Steve Bellovin. USENET enabled its users to post messages and files that could be accessed and archived. It would go on to Seagate Technology created the first hard disk through drive for the become one of the main areas for large-scale interaction for interest groups

microcomputers, the ST506. The disk held 5 megabytes of data, fivefirst times as much as a standard floppy disk, and The Multi-User Domain (or Dungeon), fit in the space is of goes a floppy disk drive. The Bartle hard disk MUD1, on-line. Richard and Roy drive itself is a rigid metallic platter coated on both sides Trubshaw, two students at the University of with a Essex, thin layer of magnetic material that stores digital write a program that allows many data. people to play against each other on-line.
MUDs become popular with college students

Seagate Technology grew out of a 1979 conversation as a means of adventure gaming and for Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw circa 1999 between Alan Shugart and Finis Conner, who had socializing. By 1984, there are more than 100 worked together at Memorex. The two men decided to active MUDs and variants around the world. found the company after developing the idea of scaling 1980 storage revolution down a hard disk drive to the same size as the thenstandard 5 1/4-inch floppies. Upon releasing its first product, Seagate quickly drew such big-name customers as Apple Computer and IBM. Within a few years, it had sold 4 million units.

Shugart ST506 5MB Hard Disk Drive

IBM 3380 Disk System Hard disks are an essential part of the computer revolution, allowing fast, random access to large amounts of data. IBM announced its most successful mainframe hard disk (what IBM called a Direct Access Storage Device (DASD) in June of 1980, actually shipping units the following year. The 3380 came in six models initially (later growing to many more) and price at time of introduction ranged from $81,000 to $142,200. The base model stored 2.5 GB of data, later models extended this to 20GB. IBM sold over 100,000 3380s, generating tens of billions of dollars in revenue making the 3380 one of IBMs most successful products of all time.
1981 IBM introduced its PC, igniting a fast growth of the personal computer market. The first PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsofts MS-DOS operating system. Adam Osborne completed the first portable computer, the Osborne I, which weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795. The price made the machine especially attractive, as it included software worth about $1,500. The machine featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives.

Osborne I

Apollo Computer unveiled the first work station, its DN100, offering more power than some minicomputers at a fraction of the price. Apollo Computer and Sun Microsystems, another early entrant in the work station market, optimized their machines to run the computerintensive graphics programs common in engineering. The MS-DOS, or Microsoft Disk Operating System, the basic software for the newly released IBM PC, established a long partnership between IBM and Microsoft, which Bill Gates and Paul Allen had founded

Apollo DN100

Sony 3 1/2

Sony introduced and shipped the first 3 1/2" floppy drives and diskettes in 1981. The first signficant company to adopt the 3 1/2" floppy for general use was Hewlett-Packard in 1982, an event which was critical in establishing momentum for the format and which helped it prevail over the other contenders for the microfloppy standard, including 3", 3 1/4", and 3.9"

1982 The Cray XMP, first produced in this year, almost doubled the operating speed of competing machines with a parallel processing system that ran at 420 million floating-point operations per second, or megaflops. Arranging two Crays to work together on different parts of the same problem achieved the faster speed. Defense and scientific research institutes also heavily used Crays. Commodore introduces the Commodore 64. The C64, as it was better known, sold for $595, came with 64KB of RAM and featured impressive graphics. Thousands of software titles were released over the lifespan of the C64. By the time the C64 was discontinued in 1993, it had sold more than 22 million units and is recognized by the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest selling single computer model

Early Publicity still for the Commodore 64

Mitch Kapor developed Lotus 1-2-3, writing the software directly into the video system of the IBM PC. By bypassing DOS, it ran much faster than its competitors. Along with the immense popularity of the IBMs computer, Lotus owed much of its success to its working combination of spreadsheet capabilities with graphics and data retrieval capabilities.

Lotus 1-2-3

Kapor, who received his bachelors degree in an individually designed cybernetics major from Yale University in 1971, started Lotus Development Corp. to market his spreadsheet and served as its president and CEO from 1982 to 1986. He 1983 Thinking Machines is founded. Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) was formed by MIT graduate student Danny Hillis and others to develop a new type of supercomputer. Their idea was to use many individual processors of moderate power rather than one extremely powerful processor. Their first machine, called The Connection Machine (CM-1), had 64,000 microprocessors, and began shipping in 1986. TMC later produced several larger computers with more powerfulthe CM-2 and CM-5. Competition from more established Apple introduced its Lisa. The first personal computer with a graphical user interface, its development was central in the move to such systems for personal computers. The Lisas sloth and high price ($10,000) led to its ultimate failure.

Connection Machine 2 with DataVault

Compaq PC clone Compaq Computer Corp. introduced first PC clone that used the same software as the IBM PC. With the success of the clone, Compaq recorded first-year sales of $111 million, the most ever by an American business in a single year. With the introduction of its PC clone, Compaq launched a market for IBM-compatible computers that by 1996 had achieved a 83-percent share of the personal computer market. Designers reverse-engineered the Compaq clone, giving it The ARPANET splits into the ARPANET and MILNET. Due to the success of the ARPANET as a way for researchers in universities and the military to Word, collaborate, it was split into military Microsoft announced originally called Multi-Tool Word, and (MILNET) and civilian (ARPANET) segments. This was made Windows. The latter doesnt ship until 1985, although the company possible by the TCP/IP, a networking standard, said it would be onadoption track for of an April 1984 release. In a marketing three years earlier. The450,000 ARPANET wasdemonstrating renamed the Internet blitz, Microsoft distributed disks its Word

Richard Stallman announces GNU. Richard Stallman, a programmer at MITs Artificial Intelligence Lab, experienced a significant shift in attitudes during the late 1970s. Whereas the MIT hacker culture was one of sharing and openness, the commercial software world moved towards secrecy and access to source code became ever more restricted.

Richard Stallman

Stallman set out to develop a free alternative to the popular Unix operating system. This operating system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix) was going to be free of charge but also allow users the freedom to change and share it. Stallman founded the Free

Able to hold 550 megabytes of prerecorded data, CD-ROMs grew out of music Compact Disks (CDs). The first general-interest CD-ROM product released after Philips and Sony announced the CD-ROM in 1984 was "Groliers Electronic Encyclopedia," which came out in 1985. The 9 million words in the encyclopedia only took up 12 percent of the available space. The same year, computer and electronics companies worked together to set a standard for the disks so any computer would be able to access the information. The Bernoulli Box is released. Using a special cartridge-based system that used hard disk technology, the Bernoulli Box was a type of removable storage that allowed people to move large files between computers when few alternatives (such as a network) existed. Allowing for many times the amount of storage afforded by a regular floppy disk, the cartridges came in capacities ranging from

Original Bernoulli Box

1984 Apple Computer launched the Macintosh, the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphic user interface, with a single $1.5 million commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl. Based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, the Macintosh included many of the Lisas features at a much more affordable price: $2,500.

Apple Macintosh

IBM PC Jr

Apples commercial played on the theme of George Orwells "1984" and featured the destruction of Big Brother with the power of personal computing found in a Macintosh. Applications that came as part of the package included MacPaint, which made use of the mouse, and MacWrite, demonstrated IBM released its PC Jr. which and PC-AT. The PC Jr.WYSIWYG failed, but the PC-AT, several times faster than original PC and based on the Intel 80286 chip, claimed success with its notable increases in performance and storage capacity, all for about $4,000. It also included more RAM and accommodated highdensity 1.2-megabyte 5 1/4-inch floppy disks. Magnetic tape allows for inexpensive mass storage of information and so is a key part of the computer revolution. Announced in March 1984, IBMs new 3480 cartridge tape system sought to replace the traditional reels of magnetic tape in the computer center with a 4 x 5 cartridge that held more information (200MB) and offered faster access to it. IBM withdrew the system in 1989 but the new format caught on with other computer makers who began making 3480-compatible storage systems for several years after that, offering increased

IBM 3480 Cartridge Tape System

1985 The Amiga 1000 is released. Commodores Amiga 1000 sold for $1,295 dollars (without monitor) and had audio and video capabilities beyond those found in most other personal computers. It developed a very loyal following and add-on components allowed it to be upgraded easily. The inside of the case is engraved with the signatures of the Amiga designers, including Jay Miner as well as the paw print of his dog Mitchy.

The modern Internet gained support when the National Science foundation formed the NSFNET, linking five supercomputer centers at Princeton University, Pittsburgh, University of California at San Diego, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Cornell University. Soon, several regional networks developed; eventually, the government reassigned pieces of the ARPANET to the NSFNET. The NSF allowed commercial use of the Internet for Amiga 1000 with Seiko Music Keyboard the first time in 1991, and in 1995, it decommissioned the backbone, leaving the Internet a self-supporting industry. Aldus announced its PageMaker program for use on Macintosh computers, launching an interest in desktop publishing. Two years later, Aldus released a version for IBMs and IBMcompatible computers. Developed by Paul Brainerd, who founded Aldus Corp., PageMaker allowed users to combine graphics and text easily enough to make desktop publishing The C++ programming language emerged as the dominant object-oriented language in the computer industry when Bjarne Stroustrup published "The C++ Programming Language." Stroustrup, at AT&T Bell Laboratories, said his motivation stemmed from a desire to write event-driven simulations that needed a language faster than Simula. He developed a preprocessor that allowed Simula style programs to be implemented efficiently in C. 1986 David Miller of AT&T Bell Labs patented the optical transistor, a component central to digital optical computing. Called Self-ElectroOptic-Effect Device, or SEED, the transistor involved a light-sensitive switch built with layers of gallium arsenide and gallium aluminum arsenide. Beams of light triggered electronic events that caused the light either to be transmitted or absorbed, thus turning the switch on or off. Within a decade, research on the optical transistor led to successful work on the first all-optical processor and the first general-purpose all-optical computer. Bell Labs researchers first demonstrated the processor there in 1990. A computer using the SEED also contained lasers, lenses, and fast light switches, but it still required programming by a separate, non-optical computer. In 1993, researchers at the University of Colorado unveiled the first all-optical computer capable of being programmed and of manipulating instructions internally.

Compaq beat IBM to the market when it announced the Deskpro 386, the first computer on the market to use Intels new 80386 chip, a 32-bit microprocessor with 275,000 transistors on each chip. At 4 million operations per second and 4 kilobytes of memory, the 80386 gave PCs as much speed and power as older mainframes and minicomputers. The 386 chip brought with it the introduction of a 32-bit architecture, a significant improvement over the 16-bit architecture of previous microprocessors. It had two operating modes, one that mirrored the segmented memory of older x86 chips, allowing full backward compatibility, and one that took full advantage of its more advanced technology. The new chip made graphical operating environments for IBM PC and PC-compatible computers practical. The architecture that allowed Windows and IBM OS/2 has remained in subsequent chips. Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corp. moved artificial intelligence a step forward when he developed the controversial concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine. The machine used up to 65,536 processors and could complete several billion operations per second. Each processor had its own small memory linked with others through a flexible network that users could alter by reprogramming rather than rewiring.

Connection Machine

The machines system of connections and switches let processors broadcast information and requests for help to other processors in a simulation of brainlike associative recall. Using this system, the machine could IBM and MIPS released the firstwork RISC-based workstations, PC/RT and faster than any other the at the time on R2000a problem that based systems. Reduced instruction set computers grew out of the observation could be parceled out among the many processors. that the simplest 20 percent of a computers instruction set does 80 percent of the work, including most base operations such as add, load from memory, and store in memory. The IBM PC-RT had 1 megabyte of RAM, a 1.2-megabyte floppy disk drive, and a 40-megabyte hard drive. It performed 2 million instructions per second, but other RISC-based computers worked significantly faster. Pixar is founded. Pixar was originally called the Special Effects Computer Group at Lucasfilm (launched in 1979). The group created the computer animated segments of films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Young Sherlock Holmes. In 1986, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs paid 10 million dollars to Lucasfilm to purchase the Group and renamed it Pixar. Over the next decade, Pixar made highly-successful (and Oscar-winning) animated films. It was bought by Disney in 2006.

Pixar Headquarters
1987

Motorola unveiled the 68030 microprocessor. A step up from the 68020, it built on a 32-bit enhanced microprocessor with a central processing unit core, a data cache, an instruction cache, an enhanced bus controller, and a memory management unit in a single VLSI device all operating at speeds of at least 20 MHz.

Motorola 68030
IBM introduced its PS/2 machines, which made the 3 1/2inch floppy disk drive and video graphics array standard for IBM computers. The first IBMs to include Intels 80386 chip, the company had shipped more than 1 million units by the end of the year. IBM released a new operating system, OS/2, at the same time, allowing the use of a mouse with IBMs for the first time.

IBM PS/2 1988

Compaq and other PC-clone makers developed enhanced industry standard architecture better than microchannel and retained compatibility with existing machines. EISA used a 32-bit bus, or a means by which two devices can communicate. The advanced data-handling features of the EISA made it an improvement over the 16-bit bus of industry standard architecture. IBMs competitors developed the EISA as a way to avoid paying a fee to IBM for its MCA bus.
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who left Apple to form his own company, unveiled the NeXT. The computer he created failed but was recognized as an important innovation. At a base price of $6,500, the NeXT ran too slowly to be popular. The significance of the NeXT rested in its place as the first personal computer to incorporate a drive for an optical storage disk, a built-in digital signal processor that allowed voice recognition, and object-oriented languages to simplify programming. The NeXT offered Motorola 68030 microprocessors, 8 megabytes of RAM, and a 256-megabyte

NeXT
1989
Intel released the 80486 microprocessor and the i860 RISC/coprocessor chip, each of which contained more than 1 million transistors. The RISC microprocessor had a 32-bit integer arithmetic and logic unit (the part of the CPU that performs operations such as addition and subtraction), a 64bit floating-point unit, and a clock rate of 33 MHz. The 486 chips remained similar in structure to their predecessors, the 386 chips. What set the 486 apart was its optimized instruction set, with an on-chip unified instruction and data cache and an optional on-chip floating-point unit. Combined with an enhanced bus interface unit, the

Intel 80486

Motorola announced the 68040 microprocessor, with about 1.2 million transistors. Due to technical difficulties, it didnt ship until 1991, although promised in January 1990. A 32-bit, 25-MHz microprocessor, the 68040 integrated a floating-point unit and included instruction and data caches. Apple used the third generation of 68000 chips in Macintosh Quadra computers.

Motorola 68040
The World Wide Web was born when Tim BernersLee, a researcher at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, developed HyperText Markup Language. HTML, as it is commonly known, allowed Video Toaster is introduced by NewTek. The Video Toaster was a video editing the Internet to expand into the World Wide Web, and production system for the Amiga line of computers and included custom using specifications he developed such as URL hardware and special software. Much more affordable than any other (Uniform Resource Locator) and HTTP (HyperText computer-based video editing system, the Video Toaster was not only for home Transfer Protocol). A browser, such as Netscape or use. It was popular with public access stations and was even good enough to Microsoft Internet Explorer, follows links and sends be used for broadcast television shows like Home Improvement. a query to a server, allowing a user to view a site. 1990

VideoToaster Installed at Local Television Station

Berners-Lee based the World Wide Web on Enquire, a hypertext system he had developed for himself, with the aim of allowing people to work together by combining their knowledge in a global web of hypertext documents. With this idea in mind, Berners-Lee designed the first World Wide Web server and browser available to the general public in 1991. Berners-Lee founded the W3 Consortium, which coordinates World Wide Web development.

Berners-Lee proposal
Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0 on May 22. Compatible with DOS programs, the first successful version of Windows finally offered good enough performance to satisfy PC users. For the new version, Microsoft revamped the interface and created a design that allowed PCs to support large graphical applications for the first time. It also allowed multiple programs to run simultaneously on its Intel 80386 microprocessor. Microsoft released Windows amid a $10 million publicity blitz. In addition to making sure consumers knew about the product, Microsoft lined up a number of other applications ahead of time that ran under Windows 3.0, including versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. As a result, PCs moved toward the userfriendly concepts of the Macintosh, making IBM and IBM-compatible computers more popular. 1991 Designed by Finnish university student Linus Torvalds, Linux was released to several Usenet newsgroups on September 17th, 1991. Almost immediately, enthusiasts began developing and improving Linux, such as adding support for peripherals and improving its stability. In February 1992, Linux became free software or (as its developers preferred to say after 1998) open source. Linux typically incorporated elements of the GNU operating system and became widely used. Pretty Good Privacy is introduced. Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, is an e-mail encryption program. Its inventor, software engineer Phil Zimmermann, created it as a tool for people to protect themselves from intrusive governments around the world. Zimmermann posted PGP on the Internet in 1991 where it was available as a free download. The United States government, concerned about the strength of PGP, which rivaled some of the best secret codes in use at the

time, prosecuted Zimmermann but dropped its investigation in 1996. PGP is now the most widely used encryption system for e-mail in the world. 1992 No remarkable breakthroughs 1993

The Pentium microprocessor is released. The Pentium was the fifth generation of the x86 line of microprocessors from Intel, the basis for the IBM PC and its clones. The Pentium introduced several advances that made programs run faster such as the ability to execute several instructions at the same

Intel Pentium Processor diagram

The Mosaic web browser is released. Mosaic was the first commercial software that allowed graphical access to content on the internet. Designed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinoiss National Center for Supercomputer Applications, Mosaic was originally designed for a Unix system running X-windows. By 1994, Mosaic was available for several other operating systems such as the Mac OS,
Netscape Communications Corporation is founded. Netscape was originally founded as Mosaic Communications Corporation in April of 1994 by Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark and others. Its name was soon changed to Netscape and it delivered its first browser in October of 1994. On the day of Netscape's initial public offering in August of 1995, its share price went from $28 to $54 in the first few minutes of trading, valuing the company at $2 billion. Netscape hired many of Silicon Valleys programmers to provide new features and products and began

Screen Capture from Original Mosaic Browser

1994

Early Netscape diskette

The Iomega Zip Disk is released. The initial Zip system allowed 100MB to be stored on a cartridge roughly the size of a 3 inch floppy disk.

Yahoo is founded. Founded by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" before being renamed. Yahoo originally resided on two machines, Akebono and Konishiki, both named after famous Sumo wrestlers. Yahoo would quickly expand to become one of the Internets most popular search engines.

Computer History Year/Enter

1936 1942 1944 1946

Computer History Inventors/Inventions

Konrad Zuse - Z1 Computer John Atanasoff & Clifford Berry ABC Computer Howard Aiken & Grace Hopper Harvard Mark I Computer John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly ENIAC 1 Computer Frederic Williams & Tom Kilburn Manchester Baby Computer & The Williams Tube John Bardeen, Walter Brattain & Wiliam Shockley The Transistor John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly UNIVAC Computer International Business Machines IBM 701 EDPM Computer John Backus & IBM FORTRAN Computer Programming Language

Computer History Description of Event

First freely programmable computer. Who was first in the computing biz is not always as easy as ABC. The Harvard Mark 1 computer. 20,000 vacuum tubes later... Baby and the Williams Tube turn on the memories. No, a transistor is not a computer, but this invention greatly affected the history of computers. First commercial computer & able to pick presidential winners. IBM enters into 'The History of Computers'. The first successful high level programming language.

1948

1947/48

1951 1953 1954

1955 (In Use 1959)

The first bank industry Stanford Research Institute, Bank computer - also MICR of America, and General Electric (magnetic ink character ERMA and MICR recognition) for reading checks. Jack Kilby & Robert Noyce The Integrated Circuit Steve Russell & MIT Spacewar Computer Game Douglas Engelbart Computer Mouse & Windows ARPAnet Intel 1103 Computer Memory Faggin, Hoff & Mazor Intel 4004 Computer Microprocessor Alan Shugart &IBM Otherwise known as 'The Chip' The first computer game invented. Nicknamed the mouse because the tail came out the end. The original Internet. The world's first available dynamic RAM chip. The first microprocessor. Nicknamed the "Floppy" for

1958 1962 1964 1969 1970 1971 1971

The "Floppy" Disk 1973 1974/75 1976/77 1978 Robert Metcalfe & Xerox The Ethernet Computer Networking Scelbi & Mark-8 Altair & IBM 5100 Computers Apple I, II & TRS-80 & Commodore Pet Computers

its flexibility. Networking. The first consumer computers. More first consumer computers.

Any product that pays for Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston itself in two weeks is a VisiCalc Spreadsheet Software surefire winner. Seymour Rubenstein & Rob Barnaby WordStar Software IBM The IBM PC - Home Computer Microsoft MS-DOS Computer Operating System Apple Lisa Computer Apple Macintosh Computer Microsoft Windows TO BE Word Processors. From an "Acorn" grows a personal computer revolution From "Quick And Dirty" comes the operating system of the century. The first home computer with a GUI, graphical user interface. The more affordable home computer with a GUI. Microsoft begins the friendly war with Apple. CONTINUED

1979

1981

1981

1983 1984 1985 SERIES