Milestones in Computer DevelopmentMilestones in Computer Development| 2000 B.C. | The abacus is first used for computations. |
|---|---|
| 1642 A.D. | Blaise Pascal creates a mechanical adding machine for tax computations. It is unreliable. |
| 1670 | Gottfried von Liebniz creates a more reliable adding machine that adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, and calculates square roots. |
| 1842 | Charles Babbage designs an analytical engine to perform general calculations automatically. Ada Augusta (a.k.a. Lady Lovelace) is a programmer for this machine. |
| 1890 | Herman Hollerith designs a system to record census data. The information is stored as holes in cards, which are interpreted by machines with electrical sensors. Hollerith starts a company that will eventually become IBM. |
| 1939 | John Atanasoff, with graduate student Clifford Berry, designs and builds the first electronic digital computer. His project was funded by a grant for 650$. |
| 1946 | J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly design and build the ENIAC computer. It used 18,000 vacuum tubes and cost $500,000 to build. |
| 1946 | John von Neumann proposes that a program be stored in a computer in the same way that data are stored. His proposal, called the "von Neumann architecture," is the basis for modern computers. |
| 1951 | Eckert and Mauchly build the first general-purpose commercial computer, the UNIVAC. |
| 1957 | An IBM team, led by John Backus, designs the first successful high-level programming language, FORTRAN, for solving engineering and science problems. |
| 1958 | The first computer to use the transistor as a switching device, the IBM 7090, is introduced. |
| 1964 | The first computer to use integrated circuits, the IBM 360, is announced. |
| 1965 | The CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) operating system is introduced. It allows several users simultaneously to use, or share, a single computer. |
| 1970 | A first version of the UNIX operating system is running on the DEC PDP-7. |
| 1971 | Nicklaus Wirth designs the Pascal programming language as a language for teaching structured programming concepts. |
| 1972 | Dennis Ritchie of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey develops the language C. |
| 1973 | Part of the UNIX operating system is implemented in C. |
| 1975 | The first microcomputer, the Altair, is introduced. |
| 1975 | The first supercomputer, the Cray-1, is announced. |
| 1976 | Digital Equipment Corporation introduces its popular minicomputer, the DEC VAX 11/780. |
| 1977 | Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs found Apple Computer. |
| 1978 | Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston develop the first electronic spreadsheet, called VisiCalc, for the Apple computer. |
| 1979-82 | Bjarne Stroustrup of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey introduces "C with Classes." |
| 1981 | IBM introduces the IBM PC. |
| 1983-85 | C with Classes is redesigned and reimplemented as C++. |
| 1984 | Apple introduces the Macintosh, the first widely available computer with a "user-friendly" graphical interface using icons, windows, and a mouse device. |
| 1988 | Work on standardization of C++ begins. |
| 1989 | Microsoft Corporation introduces Windows for IBM computers. |
| 1989 | The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) publishes the first standard for the C programming language. |
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