2.2.1 Harvard Mark 1

Harvard Mark 1, The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) was devised by Howard H. Aiken and shipped to Harvard. It was used for computations for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships. It was described as being the “beginning of the era of the modern computer”

2.2.2 Collosus Mark 1/2

The Collosus Mark 1/2 computer was created. They were used to help decipher teleprinter encrypted messages that were written on Lorenz SZ 40/42.

2.3 1946

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. When ENIAC was announced in 1946 it was heralded in the press as a “Giant Brain”. It boasted speeds one thousand times faster than electro-mechanical machines, a leap in computing power that no single machine has since matched.

2.4 1948

2.4.1 IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator

The IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) was the first operational machine able to treat its instructions as data. As the last large electromechanical computer ever built, its greatest success was the publicity it provided for IBM.

2.4.2 Small-Scale Experimental Machine

The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the world’s first stored-program computer. It was built at the Victoria University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.

2.5 1949

The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester from the Small-Scale Experimental Machine.

3 1950s

3.1 1951

3.1.1 Ferranti Mark 1

Ferranti Mark 1 was the world’s first commercial computer. One of the oldest video games, a chess-playing program, was written by Dr. Dietrich Prinz for the Ferranti Mark 1.

3.1.2 LEO 1

The LEO 1 (Lyons Electronic Office 1), the first business computer, was built. It was used for payroll and inventory. It was used to calculate the overnight production requirements, assembly instructions, delivery schedules, invoices, costings and management reports.

3.1.3 UNIVAC 1

The UNIVAC 1 (Universal Automatic Computer 1) was the first commercial computer produced in the United States. It was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. This machine was used to predict the 1952 presidental election with only a 1% sample of the voting population.

3.1.4 Whirlwind

The Whirlwind computer was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is the first computer that operated in real time, used video displays for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems. Its directly led to the United States Air Force’s Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) systems and to almost all business computers and minicomputers in the 1960’s.

3.2 1952

The IBM 701 was introduced. It was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer

3.3 1954

3.3.1 IBM 650

The IBM 650 was one of IBM’s early computers and the world’s first mass-produced computer. Over 2000 systems were manufactured in less than 10 years!

3.3.2 IBM 704

The IBM 704 was the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware. It used core memory and had 3 more index registers. The programming languages FORTRAN and LISP were developed for the 704.

3.4 1955

The Harwell CADET  was the first fully computer in Europe that used only transistors instead of vacuum tubes, and may have been the first in the world. It has 64 kilobytes of memory

3.5 1956

The IBM 305 RAMAC was the first commercial computer to use a moving head hard disk drive (magnetic disk storage) for secondary storage.. The IBM 350 disk system stored 5 million 8-bit characters.

3.6 1958

The AN/FSQ-7 are the largest computers ever built. It contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, occupied about half an acre of floor space, weighed 275 tons, and used up to three megawatts of power. Performance was about 75,000 instructions per second.

4 1960s

4.1 1960

The PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporations PDP series. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT and elsewhere. It was also the original hardware for playing history’s first game on a minicomputer.

4.2 1962

The LINC (Laboratory Instrumentation Computer) offered the first real time laboratory data processing. Designed by Wesley Clark at Lincoln Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp. later commercialized it as the LINC-8.

4.3 1964

4.3.1 System/360

IBM announced the System/360, a family of six mutually compatible computers and 40 peripherals that could work together.

4.3.2 CDC 6600

The CDC 6600 was built. It was the 1st supercomputer. It was designed by Seymour Cray and was able to perform up to 3 million instructions per second.

4.4 1965

Digital Equipment Corp. introduced the PDP-8 the first commercially successful minicomputer. The PDP-8’s small size, speed, and reasonable cost enabled it to go into thousands of manufacturing plants, small businesses and scientific laboratories.

4.5 1966

4.5.1 ILLIAC IV

The ILLIAC IV is built but wasn’t fully operational until 1972. It was able to achieve a computation speed of 200 million instruction per second, about 300 million loperations per seconds and 1 billion bits per second of I/O transfer via parallel architecture and pipe-lining.

4.5.2 Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard entered the computer business with the HP-2115. It supported a wide variety of languages including BASIC, and FORTRAN.

5 1970s

5.1 1971

5.1.1 Kenbak-1

The Kenbak-1 was the first personal computer. It was designed by John V. Blankenbaker. It relied on switches for input and lights for output.

5.1.2 Intel 4004

The Intel 4004 was a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU) released by Intel Corporation in 1971. It was the first complete CPU on one chip, and also the first commercially available microprocessor.

5.2 1972

The Intel 8008 was a microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It was an 8-bit CPU with an external 14-bit address bus that could address 16KB of memory.

5.3 1975

The Tandem-16 was first introduced for online transaction processing. The banking industry quickly started using this machine.

5.4 1976

5.4.1 Apple 1

The Apple 1 was introduced. It was designed by Steve Wozniak and had a single board. You still had to add a case, power supply transformers, power switch, ASCII keyboard, and composite video display to make a fully functioning computer.

5.4.2 Cray 1

The Cray 1 was introduced as the first commercially successful vector processor. It was the fastest machine of its day. It was able to do 166 million floating-point operations per second.

5.5 1977

5.5.1 Commodore PET

The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) came fully assembled. It had either 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, two built-in cassette drives and a membrane “chiclet” keyboard.

5.5.2 Apple II

The Apple II was also introduced that year and it became an instant sucss. It had a printed circuit motherboard, switching power supply, a keyboard, a case assembly, an A/C powercord, and a bunch of other things. When hooked up to a color tv it produced color graphics.

6 1980s

6.1 1981

IBM introduced its PC. The first PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intell 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.

The first portable computer, the Osborne I, was created by Adam Osborne. The machine featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drives.

6.2 1982

The Commodore 64 is introduced. It came with 64KB of RAM .

6.3 1983

Apple introduced its Lisa. The first personal computer with a graphical user interface. The Lisa ran on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor and came equipped with a 1 megabyte of RAM, a 12-inch black and white monitor, dual 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drives and a 5 megabyte Profile hard drive.

6.4 1984

Apple introduced the Macintosh. It was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphic user interface. Some of the applications that came with the Macintosh included MacPaint, and MacWrite.

6.5 1985

The Amiga 1000 is released. It had audio and video capabilities that were beyond what most other personal computers offered.

6.6 1986

The Connection Machine was released. It used up to 65,536 processors and could complete several billion operations per second.

6.7 1987

IBM introduced the PS/2 machines, which made the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drive and video graphics array standard for IBM computers.

7 1990s

7.1 1990

Commodore releases the Amiga 3000 the first 32-bit Amiga. The A3000T was the first Amiga to use a tower form which increased expansion potential.

7.2 1991

The Amiga CDTV is released by Commodore. It had a CD-ROM drive but no floppy drive.

7.3 1992

The PowerPC 601, developed by IBM, Motorola and Apple Computer, was released. This was the first generation of PowerPC processors.

7.4 1993

Intel releases the P5-based Pentium processor, with 60 and 66 MHz versions. The Pentium has over 3.1 million transistors and can achieve up to 100 MIPS. John H. Crawford co-managed the design of the P5; Donald Alpert managed the architectural team. Vinod K. Dham was general manager of the P5 group

7.5 1996

Toshiba released the “Libretto” sub-notebook. With a volume of 821.1 cm³ and a weight of just 840 g, it was the smallest PC compatible computer to be released.

7.6 1998

Apple introduces the iMac. It was an all-in-one computer with a 15 inch monitor, a CDROM, 2 USB ports, a 56 kbit/s modem, 2 speakers, and Ethernet.

7.7 1999

Apple releases the PowerMac G4. It is claimed to be the first personal computer capable of over one billion floating-point operations per second.

8 2000s

8.1 2002

The first BlackBerry smartphone is released.

8.2 2003

Intel releases the Pentium M for notebooks and the Centrino mobile platform. The Pentium M delivers similar or higher performance than the Pentium 4-M while consuming less power.

8.3 2004

Sony released Librié EBR-1000EP in Japan, the first e-book reader with an electronic paper display.

8.4 2005

Intel releases the Pentium D, their first dual-core 64-bit desktop processor.

8.5 2006

Apple Computer introduces the MacBook Pro, their first Intel-based, dual-core mobile computer, as well as an Intel-based iMac.

8.6 2007

AMD releases the Phenom line of high performance processors.

ASUS announces the first ASUS Eee PC, launching the netbook category of mobile computers.

The first iPhone is introduced by Apple.

8.7 2008

The first version of Android is introduced by Google.

8.8 2009

Microsoft releases Windows 7

Apple launches the Mac OS X Snow Leopard

9 2010s

9.1 2010

Apple introduces the iPhone 4

9.2 2011

Watson, an IBM super computer beats the two best human Jeopardy players in a three day event.

10 After 2011