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A Timeline of Computer History and Development
December 15, 2023
Compared to other subjects, computer science is a subject still in its infancy, but thanks to the innovations that have been made since the 1800s, computer technology has grown by leaps and bounds. Within two centuries, humans have gone from doing everything manually to having pocket-sized devices that can connect people around the world and provide access to information that people in the past could only dream of. It's important to reflect on the development of computers and the history of computer science because it offers context for the work of professionals of today.
1840s: Ada Lovelace, commonly called the first computer programmer, first described how a routine could be written for machine-based problem-solving. This was the starting point for every development in the computing field.
1890: Herman Hollerith developed a punch card system to help the U.S. Census Bureau compile and process data on millions of Americans. His system was the predecessor of methods computers would later use, and it was the first time an electronic device was used for tabulation. This meant that census counting could be completed much faster. The company Hollerith formed would go on to become part of what would later be named IBM.
1936: Alan Turing developed the Turing Machine, a machine that calculated numbers. This was the start of both the computational science field and the theoretical computer science field.
1938: Friends William Hewlett and David Packard invented an audio oscillator, which would be used by Disney during the production of Fantasia. The pair would formally create Hewlett-Packard in 1939.
1941: World War II helped computing technology leap forward, and countries all over the world began investing money in creating their own computers. In Germany, Konrad Zuse built the first programmable computing machine, called the Z3 electric computer, which had a memory that could store 64 numbers.
1943: J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly began building the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). It was big enough to fill a large room, and programmers had to manually connect wires to perform calculations. The goal was for the U.S. to use it to calculate the trajectories of rockets during World War II, but it was not completed until 1945.
1947: Bell Telephone Laboratories created transistors to make electronics more powerful. The inventors behind this innovation, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, won the Nobel Prize in physics for the transistor.
1948: Tom Kilburn created the first computer program that could be stored inside a computer. Before this innovation, computer programmers had to manually program the machines by moving wires to connect vacuum tubes. Now, a computer could store 2,048 bits of information for a few hours without any extra work.
1953: COBOL, the first computer language that could run on machines made by different companies, was created by Grace Hopper. COBOL, which stands for "common business-oriented language," was written to be intelligible by humans rather than being written in machine language.
1958: Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce had the idea to create an integrated circuit capable of storing information. Using the transistor as a jumping-off point, they created a computer chip made of silicon.
1961: George Forsythe came up with the term "computer science" to describe the study of programming theory, data processing, numerical analysis, and computer system design.
1962: Purdue University started the first college computer science department. Students in that major used punch cards and flowcharts and studied from textbooks the faculty created, since there were no official textbooks about the subject yet.
1964: Douglas Engelbart created the computer mouse, which helped make computers easier to use. He also built a graphical user interface (GUI) that helped to shape those used in modern computers.
1970: The very first dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chip was unveiled by a new company named Intel.
1971: The floppy disk was created by IBM, giving people a way to store more data and the ability to take files from place to place.
1974: Personal computers hit the market for the very first time. The Altair was a build-it-yourself kit that cost $400. Thousands of copies were sold.
1978: Visicalc, the first computerized spreadsheet program, was introduced to the market.
1985: On March 15, years before the World Wide Web made its formal debut, the first dot-com domain name was registered by a small Massachusetts computer manufacturer called Symbolics Inc. They registered the name Symbolics.com. Within the next two years, 100 dot-coms had been registered.
1990: Tim Berners-Lee developed HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which helped make the World Wide Web possible.
1999: The term "Wi-Fi" became part of computer lingo as users gained the ability to connect to the Internet without wires.
Today, computer technology has given us mobile devices, millions of websites about everything under the sun, Bluetooth, artificial intelligence, and even self-driving cars. Developers are constantly working on the next big innovation in computing that will change our lives.
