Time Line
Study this timeline. Read through the information and check out some of the links provided. You will be tested on both the information (facts) and the dates.
| 3000 BC | The Abacus is invented,1 consisting of beads on a frame used for calculating large numbers. |
| 1622 | William Oughtred develops the slide rule in England.1 |
| 1673 | Gottfried Leibniz builds a mechanical calculating machine that multiplies, divides, adds, and subtracts.1 |
| 1833 | Charles Babbage designs the Analytical Machine that follows instructions from punched-cards. It is the first general purpose computer.1 |
| 1867 | First Commercial Typewriter invented by Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, & Samuel W. Soule.5 |
| 1886 | William Burroughs develops the first commercially successful mechanical adding machine.1 |
| 1931 | First calculator, the ZI is built in Germany by Konrad Zuse.1 |
| 1933 | First electronic talking machine, the Voder, is built by Dudley, who follows in 1939 with the Vocoder (Voice coder).1 |
| 1940 | At Bell Labs, George Stibitz demonstrates the Complex Number Calculator, which may be the first digital computer.1 |
| 1941 | Colossus computer is designed by Alan M. Turing and built by M.H.A. Neuman at the University of Manchester, England.1 |
| 1944 | Mark I (IBM ASCC) is completed, based on the work of Professor Howard H. Aiken at Harvard and IBM. It is a relay-based computer. Grace Murray Hooper is the first computer programmer for the Mark I.1 |
| 1946 | ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), with 18,000 vacuum tubes, is dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania. It was 8 by 100 feet and weighed 80 tons. It could do 5,000 additions and 360 multiplications per second.1 Term bit for binary digit is used for the first time by John Tukey.1 |
| 1948 | EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) is developed at the University of Cambridge by Maurice V. Wilkes.1 Transistor is invented by William Bradford Shockley with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain.1 |
| 1949 | EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) supports the first tests of magnetic disks.1 |
| 1951 | UNIVAC I is installed at the Bureau of Census using a magnetic tape unit as a buffer memory.1 It becomes the first commercial computer.4 |
| 1958 | Seymour Cray builds the first fully transistorized supercomputer for Control Data Corp., the CDC 1604.1 |
| 1960 | Benjamin Curley develops the first minicomputer, the PDP-1, at Digital Equipment Corporation.1 The first commercial computer equipped with a keyboard and monitor.2 |
| 1961 | Silicon chips first appear.4 |
| 1963 | Douglas Engelbart invents the mouse pointing device for computers.2 |
| 1964 | At Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, the BASIC programming language runs for the first time.2 |
| 1970 | Bell Labs develops Unix. Unix will become the dominant operating system of high end microcomputers, or workstations.2 |
| 1971 | Floppy disks are introduced to load the IBM 370 microcode.1 John Blankenbaker builds the first personal computer, the Kenbak I.1 |
| 1973 | Xerox develops first Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN) technology.4 |
| 1975 | Microsoft is founded after Bill Gates and Paul Allen adapt and sell BASIC to MITS for the Altair PC.1 |
| 1977 | Apple Computer is founded and introduces the Apple II personal computer.1 Founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.2 |
| 1981 | Commodore introduces the VIC-20 home computer, which sells over one million units.1 |
| 1982 | Microsoft licenses MS-DOS to 50 microcomputer manufacturers in the first 16 months of availability.1 |
| 1984 | Apple introduces the Macintosh computer.1 The Tandy 1000 personal computer becomes the #1 selling IBM PC-compatible in its first year.1 |
| 1988 | A nondestructive worm spreads via the Internet network and brings several thousand computers to their knees.1 |
| 1989 | Apple introduces its long awaited portable Macintosh.1 Grid introduces a laptop computer with a touch sensitive pad that recognizes handwriting -- the GridPad.1 The battery-powered notebook computer becomes a full function computer including hard and floppy disk with the arrival of Compaq's LTE and LTE/286.1 |
| 1990 | Microsoft introduces Windows 3.0.1 |
| 1995 | The first Online bookstore, Amazon.com, is launched in Seattle by Jeffrey P. Bezos. By late 1998 the cyberstore sold books to 4.5 million people from more than 160 countries.3 |
| 1999 | Computer users around the world are worried about Y2K. The Millenium Bug is on its way! Very few errors were actually encountered when Jan. 1, 2000 rolled around. |
References:
by: Casey Jo Burrus
Last Updated:
December 28, 2013
The background
for this page can be downloaded at: http://members.dodo.com.au/~cooindaonline/compclipart/iconindex.htm
The Herrick Grade School logo was created using the Logo Generator at http://www.coolarchive.com/
The Mouse Bar graphics can be downloaded at: http://members.dodo.com.au/~cooindaonline/compclipart/iconindex.htm
The Email Icon can be downloaded
at: http://www.grsites.com/
