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Blaise Pascal creates a mechanical adding machine for tax computations. It is unreliable.
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Gottfried von Liebniz creates a more reliable adding machine that adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, and calculates square roots.
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Charles Babbage designs an analytical engine to perform general calculations automatically. Ada Augusta (a.k.a. Lady Lovelace) is a programmer for this machine.
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Herman Hollerith designs a system to record census data. The information is stored as holes in cards, which are interpreted by machines with electrical sensors. Hollerith starts a company that will eventually become IBM.
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Period: to
This begins in the year 2000BC until 1989.
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John Atanasoff, with graduate student Clifford Berry, designs and builds the first electronic digital computer. His project was funded by a grant for 650$.
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J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly design and build the ENIAC computer. It used 18,000 vacuum tubes and cost $500,000 to build.
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Eckert and Mauchly build the first general-purpose commercial computer, the UNIVAC.
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The first microcomputer, the Altair, is introduced.
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The abacus is first used for computations.