Computer History (Time line)

The following is a timeline of some significant events in computer history. It is not meant to be complete, just a representation of some of the major landmarks in computer development: 1617 John Napier creates “Napier’s Bones,” wooden or ivory rods used for calculating.

1642 Blaise Pascal introduces the Pascaline digital adding machine.

1822 Charles Babbage conceives the Difference Engine and later the Analytical Engine, a true generalpurpose computing machine.

1906 Lee De Forest patents the vacuum tube triode, used as an electronic switch in the first electronic computers.

1937 John V. Atanasoff begins work on the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), which would later be officially credited as the first electronic computer.

1943 Alan Turing develops the Colossus, a secret British code-breaking computer designed to decode German secret messages.

1945 John von Neumann writes “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” in which he outlines the architecture of the modern stored-program computer.

1946 ENIAC is introduced, an electronic computing machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.

1947 On December 23, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen successfully test the point-contact transistor, setting off the semiconductor revolution.

1949 Maurice Wilkes assembles the EDSAC, the first practical storedprogram computer, at Cambridge University.

1950 Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis builds the ERA 1101, one of the first commercially produced computers.

1952 The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau is the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention.

1953 IBM ships its first electronic computer, the 701.

1954 A silicon-based junction transistor, perfected by Gordon Teal of Texas Instruments, Inc., brings a tremendous reduction in costs.

1954 The IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator establishes itself as the first massproduced computer, with the company selling 450 in one year.

1955 Bell Laboratories announces the first fully transistorized computer, TRADIC.

1956 MIT researchers build the TX-0, the first general-purpose, programmable computer built with transistors.

1956 The era of magnetic disk storage dawns with IBM’s shipment of a 305 RAMAC to Zellerbach Paper in San Francisco.

1958 Jack Kilby creates the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments to prove that resistors and capacitors can exist on the same piece of semiconductor material.

1959 IBM’s 7000 series mainframes are the company’s first transistorized computers.

1959 Robert Noyce’s practical integrated circuit, invented at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., allows printing of conducting channels directly on the silicon surface.

1960 Bell Labs designs its Dataphone, the first commercial modem, specifically for converting digital computer data to analog signals for transmission across its long-distance network.

1960 The precursor to the minicomputer, DEC’s PDP-1, sells for $120,000.

1961 According to Datamation magazine, IBM has an 81.2% share of the computer market in 1961, the year in which it introduces the 1400 Series.

1964 CDC’s 6600 supercomputer, designed by Seymour Cray, performs up to three million instructions per second—a processing speed three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM Stretch.

1964 IBM announces System/360, a family of six mutually compatible computers and 40 peripherals that can work together.

1964 Online transaction processing makes its debut in IBM’s SABRE reservation system, set up for American Airlines.

1965 Digital Equipment Corp. introduces the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer.

1966 Hewlett-Packard enters the generalpurpose computer business with its HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational power formerly found only in much larger computers.

1969 The root of what is to become the Internet begins when the Department of Defense establishes four nodes on the ARPAnet: two at

University of California campuses (one at Santa Barbara and one at Los Angeles) and one each at SRI International and the University of

Utah.

1971 A team at IBM’s San Jose Laboratories invents the 8'' floppy disk.

1971 The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appears in Electronic News.

1971 The Kenbak-1, one of the first personal computers, advertises for $750 in Scientific American.

1972 Hewlett-Packard announces the HP-35 as “a fast, extremely accurate electronic slide rule” with a solidstate memory similar to that of a computer.

1972 Intel’s 8008 microprocessor makes its debut.

1972 Steve Wozniak builds his “blue box,” a tone generator to make free phone calls.

1973 Robert Metcalfe devises the Ethernet method of network connection at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

1973 The Micral is the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a microprocessor, the Intel 8008.

1973 The TV Typewriter, designed by Don Lancaster, provides the first display of alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set.

1974 Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center design the Alto, the first workstation with a built-in mouse for

1974 Scelbi advertises its 8H computer, the first commercially advertised U.S. computer based on a microprocessor, Intel’s 8008.

1975 Telenet, the first commercial packetswitching network and civilian equivalent of ARPAnet, is born.

1975 The January edition of Popular Electronics features the Altair 8800, which is based on Intel’s 8080 microprocessor, on its cover.

1975 The visual display module (VDM) prototype, designed by Lee Felsenstein, marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped

alphanumeric video display for personal computers.

1976 Steve Wozniak designs the Apple I, a single-board computer.

1976 The 5 1/4'' flexible disk drive and disk are introduced by Shugart Associates.

1976 The Cray I makes its name as the first commercially successful vector processor.

1977 Tandy Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80.

1977 Apple Computer introduces the Apple II.

1977 Commodore introduces the PET (Personal Electronic Transactor).

1978 The VAX 11/780 from Digital Equipment Corp. features the capability to address up to 4.3GB of virtual memory, providing hundreds of times the capacity of most minicomputers. 1979 Motorola introduces the 68000 microprocessor.

1980 John Shoch, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, invents the computer “worm,” a short program that searches a network for idle processors.

1980 Seagate Technology creates the first hard disk drive for microcomputers, the ST-506.

1980 The first optical data storage disk has 60 times the capacity of a 5 1/4'' floppy disk.

1981 Xerox introduces the Star, the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI).

1981 Adam Osborne completes the first portable computer, the Osborne I, which weighs 24lbs. and costs $1,795.

1981 IBM introduces its PC, igniting a fast growth of the personal computer market. The IBM PC is the grandfather of all modern PCs.

1981 Sony introduces and ships the first 3 1/2'' floppy drives and disks.

1981 Philips and Sony introduce the CD-DA (Compact Disc Digital Audio) drive. Sony is the first with a CD player on the market.

1983 Apple introduces its Lisa, which incorporates a GUI that’s very similar to the one first introduced on the Xerox Star.

1983 Compaq Computer Corp. introduces its first PC clone that uses the same software as the IBM PC.

1984 Apple Computer launches the Macintosh, the first successful mouse-driven computer with a GUI, with a single $1.5 million commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl.

1984 IBM releases the PC-AT (PC Advanced Technology), three times faster than original PCs and based on the Intel 286 chip. The AT introduces the 16-bit ISA bus and is the computer all modern PCs are based on.

1985 Philips introduces the first CD-ROM drive.

1986 Compaq announces the Deskpro 386, the first computer on the market to use what was then Intel’s new 386 chip.

1987 IBM introduces its PS/2 machines, which make the 3 1/2'' floppy disk drive and VGA video standard for PCs. The PS/2 also introduces the MicroChannel Architecture (MCA) bus, the first plug-and-play bus for PCs.

1988 Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who left Apple to form his own company, unveils the NeXT.

1988 Compaq and other PC-clone makers develop Enhanced Industry Standard Architecture (EISA), which unlike MicroChannel retains backward compatibility with the existing ISA bus.

1988 Robert Morris’s worm floods the ARPAnet. The 23-year-old Morris, the son of a computer security expert for the National Security

Agency, sends a nondestructive worm through the Internet, causing problems for about 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts linked to the network.

1989 Intel releases the 486 (P4) microprocessor, which contains more than one million transistors. Intel also introduces 486 motherboard

chipsets.

1990 The World Wide Web (WWW) is born when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN—the high-energy  physics laboratory in Geneva— develops Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

1993 Intel releases the Pentium (P5) processor. Intel shifts from numbers to names for its chips after it learns it’s impossible to trademark a number. Intel also releases motherboard chipsets and, for the first time, complete motherboards as well.

1995 Intel releases the Pentium Pro processor, the first in the P6 processor family.

1995 Microsoft releases Windows 95, the first mainstream 32-bit operating system, in a huge rollout.

1997 Intel releases the Pentium II processor, essentially a Pentium Pro with MMX instructions added.

1997 AMD introduces the K6, which is compatible with the Intel P5 (Pentium).

1998 Microsoft releases Windows 98.

1998 Intel releases the Celeron, a low-cost version of the Pentium II processor. Initial versions have no cache, but within a few months Intel introduces versions with a smaller but faster L2 cache.

1999 Intel releases the Pentium III, essentially a Pentium II with SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) added.

1999 AMD introduces the Athlon.

2000 Microsoft releases Windows Me (Millennium Edition) and Windows 2000.

2000 Both Intel and AMD introduce processors running at 1GHz.

2000 AMD introduces the Duron, a lowcost Athlon with reduced L2 cache.

2000 Intel introduces the Pentium 4, the latest processor in the Intel Architecture 32-bit (IA-32) family.

2001 Intel releases the Itanium processor, its first 64-bit (IA-64) processor for PCs.

2001 The industry celebrates the 20^th anniversary of the release of the original IBM-PC.

2001 Intel introduces the first 2GHz processor, a version of the Pentium 4. It took the industry 28 1/2 years to go from 108KHz to 1GHz, but only 18 months to go from 1GHz to 2GHz.

2001 Microsoft releases Windows XP Home and Professional, for the first time merging the consumer (9x/Me) and business (NT/2000) operating system lines under the same code base (an extension of Windows 2000).