YEAR 1832 :
BABBAGE’S DIFFERENCE ENGINE
Charles Babbage's calculating engines are among the most
celebrated icons in the prehistory of computing made in 1832. His
Di erence Engine No. 1 was the rst successful automatic
calculator and remains one of the nest examples of precision
engineering of the time.
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3. Alan Turing
1936 Alan Turing intelligent machine / A-machine
4. 1945: Two professors at the
University of Pennsylvania, John
Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert,
design and build the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and
Calculator (ENIAC). The machine
is the first "automatic, general-
purpose, electronic, decimal,
digital computer," according to
Edwin D. Reilly's book "Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology" (Greenwood
Press, 2003).
5. The first computer mouse was
invented in 1963 by Douglas C.
Engelbart and presented at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968 (Image credit: Getty / Apic)
6. 1971: A team of IBM engineers led by Alan Shugart invents the "floppy disk," enabling data to be
shared among different computers.
7. 1976: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-found Apple Computer on April Fool's Day. They unveil
Apple I, the first computer with a single-circuit board and ROM (Read Only Memory),
8. 1981: "Acorn," IBM's first personal
computer, is released onto the market
at a price point of $1,565, according
to IBM. Acorn uses the MS-DOS
operating system from Windows.
Optional features include a display,
printer, two diskette drives, extra
memory, a game adapter and more.
9. 1983: The Apple Lisa, standing
for "Local Integrated Software
Architecture" but also the name
of Steve Jobs' daughter,
according to the National
Museum of American History
(NMAH), is the first personal
computer to feature a GUI. The
machine also includes a drop-
down menu and icons. Also this
year, the Gavilan SC is released and is the first portable computer with a flip-form design and the very
first to be sold as a “laptop."
10. 1984: The Apple Macintosh is announced to the world during a Superbowl advertisement. The
Macintosh is launched with a retail price of $2,500, according to the NMAH.
11. 1985: As a response to the Apple Lisa's GUI, Microsoft releases Windows in November 1985
12. 1989: Tim Berners-Lee, a British researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research,
submits for what would become the World Wide Web. His paper details his ideas for Hyper Text Markup
Language (HTML), the building blocks of the Web.
13. 1996: Sergey Brin and Larry Page develop the Google search engine at Stanford University.
14. 1999: Wi-Fi, the abbreviated term for "wireless fidelity" is developed, initially covering a distance of
up to 300 feet (91 meters)
15. 2003: AMD's Athlon 64, the first 64-bit processor for personal computers, is released to customers.
16. 2004: The Mozilla Corporation launches Mozilla Firefox 1.0. The
Web browser is one of the first major challenges to Internet Explorer,
owned by Microsoft.
17. 2009: Microsoft launches Windows 7 on July 22.
The new operating system features the ability to pin
applications to the taskbar, scatter windows away by shaking
another window, easy-to-access jumplists, easier previews of tiles
and more,
18. 2010: The iPad, Apple's flagship handheld tablet, is unveiled.
19. 2015: Apple releases the Apple Watch. Microsoft releases Windows 10.
