MILESTONES IN COMPUTER AND TECHNOLOGY
Year Invention Inventor (s) Notes
16th Abacus China First Mechanical calculator
Century
- Antikythera mechanism First known analog computer
1617 Napier’s Bones John Napier It is used for calculation of products and
quotients of numbers and the technique
was also called Rabdology.
1620 – 30 Slide Rule : Slipstick in Circular Slide Rule : Edmund It is a mechanical analog computer.
United States Gunter
Modern Slide Rule : William
Oughtred
1642 Arithmetic Machine / Blaise Pascal It was a complicated set of gears that
Pascal"s Calculator / operated similarly to clock. It was designed
Pascaline to only perform addition.
1672 – 1694 Stepped Reckoner Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz First calculator that could perform all four
arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division.
1801 Jacquard loom Joseph Marie Jacquard It used card of holes for weaving pattern.
First mechanical loom. Introduced Punch
cards.
1823 Difference engine Charles Babbage It is an automatic mechanical calculator
designed to tabulate polynomial functions.
1837 Analytical Engine Charles Babbage First mechanical general-purpose
computer
1890 Tabulating Machine Herman Hollerith It was developed to help process data for
the 1890 U.S. Census.
1935 Z1 Konrad Zuse First freely programmable computer
1944 MARK - 1 Howard Aiken and Grace First electro-mechanical computer
Hopper
1939 ABC : Atanasoff Berry John Atanasoff & Clifford First automatic electronic digital computer.
Computer Berry It used the Binary Number system of 1s
and 0s.
1946 ENIAC : Electronic John Presper Eckert & John First electronic general-purpose computer
Numerical Integrator and W. Mauchly
Computer
1949 EDSAC : Electronic Delay John von Neumann First computer to store program
Storage Automatic
Calculator
1949 EDVAC : Electronic John Presper Eckert & John It was a binary serial computer with
Discrete Variable W. Mauchly automatic addition, subtraction,
Automatic Computer multiplication, programmed division and
automatic checking with an ultrasonic serial
memory.
1951 UNIVAC : Universal John Presper Eckert & John First general-purpose computer for
Automatic Computer W. Mauchly commercial use
1947 Transistors John Bardeen, Walter It is a semiconductor device that could
Brattain, and William Shockley replace a vacuum tube. First used in IBM
650.
1961 ICs : Integrated Circuits Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce It can replaced a hundred of transistors.
First used in IBM 360.
1970 Microprocessors Marcian Hoff, Masatoshi The Intel 4004 ("four-thousand-four") is a
Shima and Stanley Mazor 4-bit central processing unit (CPU)
released by Intel Corporation in 1971. It
was the first microprocessor.
1964 Computer Mouse & Douglas Engelbart This marks the evolution of the computer
graphical user interface from a specialized machine for scientists
(GUI) and mathematicians to technology that is
more accessible to the general public.
1970 Intel 1103 : DRAM chip Intel company First Dynamic Access Memory (DRAM)
chip
1971 Floppy Disk Alan Shugart & IBM team Nicknamed the "Floppy" for its flexibility.
1973 Ethernet Robert Metcalfe & Xerox Its connects multiple computers and other
hardware.
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