A Consise History of Computing

1. Early calculating aids
   Bones carved with notches - from 30,000 to 20,000 BCE
   The abacus - Chinese and Babylonians - around 1000 BCE
   Leonardo da Vinci - mechanical calculator described - 1500 CE
   Logarithms and the slide rule - Napier and Oughtred - 1600 and 1621
   Pascal's Arithmetic Machine - 1640
   Jacquard punched cards for weaving - 1800
   Babbage's Difference and Analytical Engines - 1822 and 1830
   Ada Byron Lovelace - described the machines and wrote programs
   Morse code and the telegraph - 1837
   Hollerith - tabulating machine for the US census - 1890
   Hollerith's company became IBM
   Vannever Bush's Differential Analyser
2. Theoretical contributions
   Place value number system - Babylonians - 1900-1800 BCE
   Aristotle and logic diagrams - 383-322 BCE
   First use of zero and negative numbers - 300 BCE to 600 CE
   Lull and Ockham - logical transformations - 1274, 1309-1319
   Leibniz - universal algebra - 1666
   Euler - logical systems - 1761
   Boole and DeMorgan - boolean algebra and logical laws - 1847-1854
   Venn diagrams - 1890
   Karel Capek's play, RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots) -1927
   Turing machine - 1936-37
   Shannon's communication theory - 1938
   Von Neumann's article about stored program computers - 1945
   Karnaugh maps - about 1950
3. Early electronic digital computers
   Atanasoff-Berry Computer - 1939
   Harvard Mark I - Aiken - 1939-1944
   Konrad Zuse - 1941 - worked in Germany during WWII
   Turing's Colossus - 1943
   ENIAC and EDVAC - Eckert and Mauchley - 1943-1952
   EDSAC - Cambridge, England - 1949
   UNIVAC - Eckert and Mauchley - 1951
4. Physical developments
   Point contact transistor - Brattain, Shockley, and Bardeen - 1947-48
   Integrated circuit - Kilby and Noyce - 1958
   Founded Intel Corporation
   4004 microprocessor (2,300 transistors) - Ted Hoff -1971
   8080 and 6800 microprocessors - 1974 - Intel and Motorola
5. Early personal computers
   Xerox Alto - 1973
   Altair 8800 - 1975
   Apple I and II - Jobs and Wozniak - 1976
   Commodore PET and TRS 80 - 1977
   Grid Compass Laptop Computer - 1979
   IBM PC - 1981
   Apple Macintosh - 1984
6. Computer languages
   First assembler - Initial orders for EDSAC - 1949
   FORTRAN - Backus at IBM - 1954
   COBOL - Committee with Grace Hopper - 1959
   Algol - Committee in Zurich - 1958, 60, 68
   First BNF description for a language
   Simula - Dahl and Nygaard in Norway - 1962-67
   BASIC - Kemeny and Kurtz - 1964
   Lisp - McCarthy - 1965 - used for AI - functional language
   Pascal - Wirth in Zurich - 1971 - used for teaching
   Ada - Department of Defense - 1977-1980 - based on Pascal
   C++ - Stroustrop - early 1980's - Object Oriented, influenced by Simula
   Java - Sun Microsystems - James Gosling -1995
   C# - Microsoft - 2000
7. Technical developments
   The modem - 1958
   Englebart - invented mouse and windows - Xerox PARC - 1964
   Compact disc - Russell - 1965
   ARPAnet - US Department of Defense - 1969
   Floppy disk - Shugart at IBM - 1971
   Dot matrix printer - 1971
   Ethernet - Metcalfe - Xerox PARC - 1973
   Laser printer - 1975
   Ink-jet printer - 1976
   Cray supercomputer - 1979
   Pentium processor - 1993
8. Application programs
   VisiCalc - Bricklin and Frankston - 1979
   Wordstar - 1979
   MSDOS - 1981
   MS Windows - 1985
   World Wide Web and HTML - Tim Berners-Lee - 1990

1. A History of Computers, Maxfield and Montrose Interactive Inc. http://www.maxmon.com/history.htm
2. Mary Bellis, The History of Computers, About.com, http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm
3. Timelines of Invention and Technology, About.com, http://inventors.about.com/od/timelines/
4. The Language Guide, University of Michigan-Dearborn, College of Engineering and Computer Science, http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/index.html
5. Computers Changed History, https://www.bookyourdata.com/computers-changed-history (reference due to Karen Kelly)