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Pascaline--a mechanical calculator built by Blaise Pascal, a 17th century mathematician, for whom the Pascal computer programming language was named .
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Jacquard loom - a loom programmed with punched cards invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard.
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Charles Babbage designed the Anaytical Engine which though not built in his time was the forerunner of the modern computer. It was a mechanical device that would take instructions from a program instead of being designed to do only one task In 1842 Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, released a translation of “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” with extensive commentary of her own.
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George Boole develops symbolic and logical reasoning. He publishes “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought”.which contributes to the foundations of computational thinking.
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The Hollerith machine, an electric tabulator developed by Herman Hollerith, calculates the census in one year, a job that previously took eight years.
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Considered the first computer game in history, 100 years old! With an electromagnet system under the board, it was able to give checkmate to a king guided by a human with a king and a rook guided by the machine.
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Alan Turing wrote his paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”, where he first describes Turing Machines. This mathematical construct showed the strengths - and fundamental limitations - of computer software. For example, it showed that there were some kinds of problems that could not be solved.
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The Government Code and Cypher School was established at Bletchley Park, starting work in 1939. Here Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers developed machines to decode German signals which were early versions of modern computers: the Bombe and Colossus.
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Hypertext was first described in Vannevar Bush’s “As we may think”. He envisioned a memex system for global resource retrieval.The term hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965.
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Also known as Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM). The first computer with the components of a modern computer. Soon after, Mark 1 would come,
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The concept of storing a program in the same memory as data was described by John von Neumann. Alan Turing went further in showing that computers could be used for the logical manipulation of symbols of any kind. The approach was first implemented (in a race) by the prototype Mark I computer at Manchester in 1948.
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First commercial computer. First units sold to big companies and the US government.
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A character-encoding scheme based on the English alphabet, created under the mandate of the American Standards Association. Computers were then able to represent text on screens. Most character codes are now based on ASCII.
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The Stanford Research Institute creates Shakey, the first mobile robot that can reason about its surroundings. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze the command and break it down into basic chunks by itself. It was the first project that melded logical reasoning and physical action.
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Arpanet, the first computer network, designed by BBN Technologies for the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, goes into service. The first message on the Arpanet was sent by a student programmer at U.C.L.A. at 10:30 p.m, on Oct. 29.
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Intel produces the first microprocessor, the 4004, which became the first general-purpose programmable processor on the market—a "building block" that engineers could purchase and then customize with software to perform different functions in a wide variety of electronic devices.
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Thinking Machines introduces the Connection Machine, a supercomputer that uses parallel computing and attempts to mimic the structure of the human brain.
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Cynthia Breazeal publishes a dissertation on social machines at M.I.T., describing Kismet, a robot capable of expressing emotions.
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Tianhe-1 was developed by the Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Changsha, Hunan. It was first revealed to the public on 29 October 2009, and was immediately ranked as the world's fifth fastest supercomputer in the TOP500 list released at the 2009 Supercomputing Conference (SC09) held in Portland, Oregon, on 16 November 2009. Tianhe achieved a speed of 563 teraflops in its first Top 500 test and had a peak performance of 1.2 petaflops.
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Nanorobotics is the emerging technology field creating machines or robots whose components are at or close to the scale of a nanometer. Nanomachines are largely in the research-and-development phase, but some primitive molecular machines have been tested.The first useful applications of nanomachines might be in medical technology, which could be used to identify and destroy cancer cells.
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The field of quantum computing was first introduced by Richard Feynman in 1982.Although it is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits (quantum bits). Both practical and theoretical research continues, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis
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The technological singularity is the theoretical emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means.The term was popularized by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement, or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity.
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