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The mechanical calculator was invented in 1642 and the first commercially successful device was manufactured from 1851.
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Frenchman, Joseph-Marie Jacquard builds a loom that weaves by reading punched holes stored on small sheets of hardwood. These plates are then inserted into the loom which reads (retrieves) the pattern and creates(process) the weave. Powered by water, this "machine" came 140 years before the development of the modern computer.
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Shortly after the first mass-produced calculator, Charles Babbage begins his lifelong quest for a programmable machine.
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Difference Machine was an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions.
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Although Babbage was a poor communicator and record-keeper, his difference engine is sufficiently developed by 1842 that Ada Lovelace uses it to mechanically translate a short written work. She is generally regarded as the first programmer.
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The 1890 census is tabulated on punch cards similar to the ones used 90 years earlier to create weaves. Developed by Herman Hollerith of MIT, the system uses electric power(non-mechanical). The Hollerith Tabulating Company is a forerunner of today's IBM.
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William Burroughs introduces a commercially successful printing calculator. It is hand-powered but Burroughs quickly introduces an electronic model.
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An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. The first Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War IThis machine was used by the germans with great success in world war II, but we had Bletchly Park Code Breakers!
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The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), called the Mark I by Harvard University,[1] was the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the USA. It is considered by some to be the first universal calculator. It uses a paper tape to store instructions.
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The IBM 701, known as the Defense Calculator while in development, was announced to the public on April 29, 1952, and was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer
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The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet. The network was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense for use by its projects at universities and research laboratories in the US.
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It weighs 2.5 pounds, just a bit more than a bag of sugar!! Big pockets then? It was called the TI-58.
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Email was developed by Ray Tomlinson, who also made the decision to use the "@" symbol to separate the user name from the computer name (which later on became the domain name).
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Bill English, builder of Engelbart's original mouse, invented the ball mouse in 1972 while working for Xerox PARC
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With the popularity of emailing, the first modern email program was developed by John Vittal, a programmer at the University of Southern California. The biggest technological advance this program was the addition of "Reply" and "Forward" functionality.
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The Altair features 256 bytes of memory. Bill Gates, with others, writes a BASIC compiler for the machine. The next year Apple begins to market PC's, also in kit form. It includes a monitor and keyboard.
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The IBM SCAMP project (Special Computer APL Machine Portable), was demonstrated in 1973. This prototype was based on the PALM processor (Put All Logic In Microcode). The IBM 5100, the first commercially available portable computer, appeared in September 1975, and was based on the SCAMP prototype
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But they are very very expensive! Companies strive to reduce the size and price of PC's while increasing capacity. Entering the fray, IBM introduces it's PC in 1981(it's actually IBM's second attempt, but the first failed miserably). Time selects the computer as its Man of the Year in 1982. Tron, a computer-generated special effects extravaganza is released the same year.
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1977 was a big year for the development of the Internet as we know it today. It’s the year the first PC modem, developed by Dennis Hayes and Dale Heatherington, was introduced and initially sold to computer geeks!
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By 1987, there were nearly 30,000 hosts on the Internet. The original Arpanet protocol had been limited to 1,000 hosts, but the adoption of the TCP/IP standard made larger numbers of hosts possible.
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One of the first major Internet worms was released in 1988. Referred to as "The Morris Worm", it was written by Robert Tappan Morris and caused major interruptions across large parts of the Internet.
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One of the more interesting developments of this era, though, was the first webcam. It was deployed at a Cambridge University computer lab, and its sole purpose was to monitor a particular coffee maker so that lab users could avoid wasted trips to an empty coffee pot.
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First, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption was developed by Netscape, making it safer to conduct financial transactions (like credit card payments) online. In addition, two major online businesses got their start the same year. In addition, two major online businesses got their start the same year. The first sale on "Echo Bay" was made that year. Echo Bay later became eBay. Amazon.com also started in 1995, though it didn’t turn a profit for six years, until 2001.
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Google search engine launched
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Wikipedia launched in 2001, one of the websites that paved the way for collective web content generation/social media.
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The term "social media", believed to be first used by Chris Sharpley, was coined in the same year that "Web 2.0" became a mainstream concept. Social media–sites and web applications that allow its users to create and share content and to connect with one another–started around this period.
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YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos.
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The biggest innovation of 2007 was almost certainly the iPhone, which was almost wholly responsible for renewed interest in mobile web applications and design.
