The History of Computers

1936-06-01 00:00:00

First programmable computer

The Z1 originally created by Germany's Konrad Zuse in his parents living room in 1936 to 1938 is considered to be the first electrical binary programmable computer.

1949-06-01 00:00:00

First Computer Company

The first computer company was the Electronic Controls Company and was founded in 1949 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the same individuals who helped create the ENIAC computer. The company was later renamed to EMCC or Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and released a series of mainframe computers under the UNIVAC name.

1972-01-11 08:06:48

First Gaming System

The Magnavox Odyssey is the first home video game console, predating the Atari PONG home consoles by three years. The Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, who had a working prototype finished by 1968. This prototype is affectionately known as the "Brown Box" to classic video game hobbyists. Unlike most video game consoles, the Odyssey is analog rather than digital, which makes its invention all the more amazing in spite of its rather crude graphics and controller responsiveness. Also, unlike any conventional console today, this system was powered by batteries. The Odyssey and its variants also lack sound capability (hence a silent console), which was not uncommon in early PONG systems of that era.

1973-06-01 00:00:00

First Cell Phone

Dr Martin Cooper, a former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, is considered the inventor of the first portable handset and the first person to make a call on a portable cell phone in April 1973. The first call he made was to his rival, Joel Engel, Bell Labs head of research.

1974-06-01 00:00:00

First Workstation Computer

Although never sold the first workstation is considered to be the Xerox Alto, introduced in 1974. The computer was revolutionary for its time and included a fully functional computer, display, and mouse. The computer operated like many computers today utilizing windows, menus and icons as an interface to its operating system.

1975-06-01 00:00:00

First Personal Computer

In 1975 Ed Roberts coined the term personal computer when he introduced the Altair 8800.

1976-06-01 00:00:00

First Apple Computer

Steve Wozniak designed the first Apple known as the Apple I computer in 1976.

1981-06-01 00:00:00

First Portable Computer

The IBM 5100 is the first portable computer, which was released on September 1975. The computer weighed 55 pounds and had a five inch CRT display, tape drive, 1.9MHz PALM processor, and 64KB of RAM. The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be the Osborne I, which was released on April 1981. The Osborne I was developed by Adam Osborne and weighed 24 pounds, had a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, two 5 1/4" floppy drives, and a modem.

1993-06-01 00:00:00

First Smartphone

The first smartphone was the IBM Simon; it was designed in 1992 and shown as a concept product[9] that year at COMDEX, the computer industry trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was released to the public in 1993 and sold by BellSouth. Besides being a mobile phone, it also contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, send and receive fax, and games. It had no physical buttons to dial with. Instead customers used a touchscreen to select telephone numbers with a finger or create facsimiles and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with a unique on-screen "predictive" keyboard. By today's standards, the Simon would be a fairly low-end product, lacking for example the camera now considered usual. However, its feature set at the time was highly advanced.

1999-06-01 00:00:00

First Portable MP3 Player

Timeline - History of MP3 •1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). •January 1988 - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC. •April 1989 - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3. •1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1. •1993 - MPEG-1 standard published. •1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later. •November 26, 1996 - United States patent issued for MP3. •September 1998 - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer. •February 1999 - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format. •1999 - Portable MP3 players appear.

2010-06-01 00:00:00

First iPad

The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc. primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. Its size and weight falls between those of contemporary smartphones and laptop computers. The iPad runs the same operating system as the iPod Touch and iPhone—and can run its own applications as well as iPhone applications. Without modification, the iPad will only run programs approved by Apple and distributed via the Apple App Store (with the exception of programs that run inside the iPad's web browser). Like iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad is controlled by a multitouch display—a departure from most previous tablet computers, which used a pressure-triggered stylus—as well as a virtual onscreen keyboard in lieu of a physical keyboard. The iPad uses a wireless local area network ("Wi-Fi") connection to access local area networks and the Internet. Some models also have a 3G wireless network interface which can connect to HSPA or EV-DO data networks and on to the Internet. The device is managed and synced by iTunes running on a personal computer via USB cable. Apple released the first iPad in April 2010, and sold 3 million of the devices in 80 days. During 2010, Apple sold 14.8 million iPads worldwide, representing 75 percent of tablet PC sales at the end of 2010.

The History of Computers

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