History of Computers

1930’s Z1 Developed and built the world’s first binary digital computer, the Z1. He completed the first fully functional program-controlled electromechanical digital computer, the Z3, in 1941. Only the Z4 - the most sophisticated of his creations - survived World War II.

1943 - Colossus Designed by British engineer Tommy Flowers, the Colossus was designed to break the complex codes 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 pulleys transported continuous rolls of punched paper tape containing possible solutions to a particular code. Colossus reduced the time to break codes from weeks to hours. The machine’s existence was not made public until the 1970s

1944 - The Mark I Harvard Mark-1 is completed. Conceived by Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized, relay-based calculator. The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machine’s thousands of component parts. The Mark-1 was used to produce mathematical tables but was soon superseded by stored program computers.

1951 - UNIVAC I The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau was the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer.

1955 - 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.

1970 - ARPANET Computer-to-computer communication expanded when the Department of Defense established four nodes on the ARPANET: the University of California Santa Barbara and UCLA, SRI International, and the University of Utah. Viewed as a comprehensive resource-sharing network, ARPANET’s designers set out with several goals: direct use of distributed hardware services; direct retrieval from remote, one-of-a-kind databases; and the sharing of software subroutines and packages not available on the usersｴ primary computer due to incompatibility of hardware or languages.

1971 - Microprocessor 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. Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture

1972 - Pong Pong is released. In 1966, Ralph Baer designed a ping-pong game for his Odyssey gaming console. Nolan Bushnell played this game at a Magnavox product show in Burlingame, California. Bushnell hired young engineer Al Alcorn to design a car driving game, but when it became apparent that this was too ambitious for the time, he had Alcorn to design a version of ping-pong instead. The game was tested in bars in Grass Valley and Sunnyvale, California where it proved very popular. Pong would revolutionize the arcade industry and launch the modern video game era.

1977 - Apple II 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.

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

1990 - World Wide Web The World Wide Web was born when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, developed HyperText Markup Language. HTML, as it is commonly known, allowed the Internet to expand into the World Wide Web, using specifications he developed such as URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). A browser, such as Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer, follows links and sends a query to a server, allowing a user to view a site.

1998 - Google Software that searches the world wide web for specific web pages