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1837
Charles Babbage requests (and is denied) funding from the British government to build his Analytical Engine.
1843
Ada Lovelace, as part of a lengthy essay about the Analytical Engine, writes an algorithm that is credited as the first computer program.
1860s
The first telegraph networks are established in Great Britain.
1874
Remington sells the first commercially successful typewriters, invented by Christopher Sholes.
1889
Herman Hollerith creates punched card machines to tabulate the 1890 U.S. Census.
1924
The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company is renamed "International Business Machines" (IBM).
1931
Vannevar Bush invents the Differential Analyzer, a mechanical computer for solving differential equations.
1936
In his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Alan Turing describes a theoretical model of computation that is still studied today.
1941
In Germany, Konrad Zuse constructs the Z3 machine, an early electronic digital computer.
1942
John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry invent a device later known as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC).
April 9, 1943
John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert receive approval from the U.S. Army to build the ENIAC, the world's first electronic, programmable, general-purpose computer.
September 2, 1945
Japan signs a peace treaty, formally ending World War II.
February 15, 1946
The ENIAC is formally unveiled with much publicity.
1947
The transistor is invented, allowing computers to become smaller and more reliable.
December 1948
The first commercial computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, is incorporated.
November 4, 1952
Dwight D. Eisenhower's landslide victory in the 1952 U.S. presidential election is predicted on live television by a UNIVAC computer.
1953
The first installation of "core memory" is done on the Whirlwind computer.
April 1957
The first version of FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, is released.
1960
COBOL, a programming language intended for business applications, is released.
November 1961
CTSS, the first timesharing system, is installed at MIT.
1963
SAGE, the first real-time computer air defense surveillance system, is fully deployed at an estimated cost of $8 billion.
1963
Ted Nelson coins the term hypertext.
April 7, 1964
The IBM System/360 computer family is announced.
May 1, 1964
The BASIC programming language is invented by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College.
1964
After ten years of development, SABRE, the first computer-based airline reservations system, becomes fully operational.
March 22, 1965
The highly influential DEC PDP-8 minicomputer is announced.
October 1969
The Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet, is created with four nodes: the University of California Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
January 1970
The PDP-11 is announced. It becomes the best-selling minicomputer of all time and lays the architectural foundation for personal computers.
1970
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie create the first version of the Unix operating system at AT&T Bell Labs.
1972
The C programming language is created at AT&T Bell Labs, as the implementation language for Unix.
October 19, 1973
Judge Earl Larson invalidates the ENIAC patent, placing the invention of the computer in the public domain.
January 1975
The Altair 8800 personal computer is featured on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine, sparking the interest of Harvard student Bill Gates.
July 1975
Microsoft releases its first product, a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800.
1977
Three highly influential home computers are released: the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80. In contrast to many other microcomputers of that time, these three required very little configuration to get up and running.
December 1979
Steve Jobs visits Xerox PARC and learns about the Graphical User Interface (GUI) invented there.
July 27, 1980
Microsoft purchases 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000, which became the basis for MS-DOS.
April 27, 1981
In an attempt to commercialize the GUI, Xerox announces the Star computer.
August 12, 1981
IBM announces the IBM Personal Computer, made mostly of third-party hardware and software.
1982
The French government distributes Minitel terminals to thousands of families and businesses, thus creating the first widespread national online service.
August 1982
The Commodore 64, the best-selling personal computer of all time, is released.
November 1982
Compaq reverse-engineers the IBM BIOS and releases a 100 percent compatible PC clone.
January 24, 1984
Apple releases the Macintosh computer, introducing the GUI to a much wider audience than before.
September 17, 1985
Steve Jobs is forced out of Apple. He goes on to found a new computer company, NeXT.
November 20, 1985
Microsoft releases version 1.0 of the Windows operating system.
May 22, 1990
Microsoft announces version 3.0 of the Windows operating system. This is the first release of Windows that was considered good enough to be a competitive threat to the Macintosh.
December 1990
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, creates the world's first website, "info.cern.ch", at CERN, in Switzerland.
September 17, 1991
Linus Torvalds creates the first version of his open-source Unix clone, Linux. It is soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system.
April 22, 1993
Version 1.0 of Mosaic, the first widely used graphical web browser, is released.
January 1994
Jerry Yang and David Filo form Yahoo, a popular online directory of web pages.
July 5, 1994
Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.com as an online bookstore.
January 23, 1996
The Java programming language is released. It is rapidly adopted by universities for teaching computer science.
February 7, 1997
Apple acquires NeXT, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company he founded.
March 10, 1997
Announcement of the Palm Pilot, an influential Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) that supports a simple form of handwriting recognition
August 15, 1998
Apple releases the first generation of iMac computer.
September 4, 1998
Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
June 28, 2001
Judge Thomas P. Jackson declares Microsoft a monopoly and orders it to be split into two companies. This order was later appealed and softened.
October 23, 2001
Apple releases the iPod, a popular portable music player.
July 2002
Amazon launches Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the first providers of "cloud computing".
February 4, 2004
Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard.
January 9, 2007
Apple releases the iPhone.
September 2008
The first commercial Android-based smartphone, the HTC Dream, is released.
October 31, 2008
Satoshi Nakamoto publishes a paper describing blockchain and bitcoin.
January 20, 2010
Apple releases the iPad, quickly establishing a mass market for large-screen handheld "tablet" computers.
June 2012
Tesla announces the Model S electric car, which has been described by CEO Elon Musk as "a very sophisticated computer on wheels."
March 2014
Facebook acquires Oculus, a maker of virtual reality (VR) headsets.
2020
The COVID-19 pandemic forces many universities and workplaces to use remote communication technology such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
April 5, 2021
The U.S. Supreme Court rules that Google's use of the Java API in the Android operating system does not violate copyright.
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