History of Computing

• abacus
• John Napier - 1600s (logarithms)
• Blaise Pascal - 1642 (Pascaline)
• Joseph Jacquard - 1804 (punched card machine)
• Charles Babbage - 1840s (Difference Engine; Ada Lovelace)
• George Boole - 1850s (binary system)
• Herman Hollerith - 1880s (Tabulating Machine Company)
• Vannevar Bush - 1931 (differential analyzer)
• George Stibitz - 1937 (Complex Number Calculator - binary adder)
• John Atanasoff - 1939 (1st general-purpose elect. digital computer)
• Konrad Zuse - 1941 (vacuum tube instead of electromagnetic relays)
• Alan Turing - 1943 (Colossus - processed 25,000 characters/second)
• Howard Aiken - 1944 (completed Mark I - 52' x 8'; 750,000 parts, 500 miles of wire)
• John Mauchly & J. Presper Eckert - 1941-45 (ENIAC - 30 tons, 80' x 18', 100,000 electronic components, 17,468 vacuum tubes)
• John von Neumann - 1940s (EDVAC & stored programs)
• An Wang - 1949 (magnetic-core memories)
• UNIVAC - 1950s (first data-processing computer sold to U.S. Census Bureau; did first payroll)
• Jack Kirby & Robert Noyce - 1959 (integrated circuit)
• Gene Amdahl - 1965 (IBM System/360 family of computers)
• Ken Olsen - 1963 (DECs first minicomputer PDP-1)
• John Backus - 1956 (FORTRAN)
• Grace Murray Hopper - 1961 (COBOL & UNIVAC I compiler)
• John Kemeny & Thomas Kurtz - 1965 (BASIC - Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code)
• Niklaus Wirth - 1970-80s (Pascal & Modula-2, Oberon)
• Intel - 1970s (microprocessor , 8088 - 1979)
• Ed Roberts - 1975 (Altair 8800 sold for $395 with 1K)
• Seymour Cray - 1976 (super computer)
• Bill Gates - 1974 (Microsoft BASIC & DOS)
• Dan Bricklin - 1978 (VisiCalc)
• Jobs & Wozniak - 1977 (Apple)
• Adam Osborne - 1981 (portable micro - 24 lbs, 64K, $1795)

1. First Generation (1951-1959): vacuum tubes, punched card and paper, machine & assembler language
2. Second Generation (1959-1965): transistors, magnetic tape, high-level languages
3. Third Generation (1965-1971): ICs, monitors & keyboards, operating systems, family of computers, minicomputers
4. Fourth Generation (1971-): LSI & VSLI, magnetic disk, microcomputers, 4GLs
5. Fifth Generation: "true AI", CD-ROM, optical disks