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Charles Babbage
Designed the first automatic calculator. His date of birth was given in his obituary in The Times as 26 December 1792; but then a nephew wrote to say that Babbage was born one year earlier, in 1791. -
Herman Hollerith
was the first to take the punch card idea into computing. He was the founder of the Tabulating Machine Company that later merged to become IBM. -
Z1 Computer
1st freely programmable computer in the world. This computer was destroyed in the bombardment of Berlin in December 1943, during World War II, together with all construction plans. -
Eniac
developed to calculate the settings used for weapons. It was actually financed by the US Army. -
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1st Generation Computers
Were the last to use vaccum tubes to store data. It took up an entire room. -
Univac
1st commercially successful electronic digital computer. The computer predicted an Eisenhower landslide when traditional pollsters all called it for Adlai Stevenson. -
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2nd Generation Computers
computers than ran off the ENIAC program. Diode and transistor technology formed the basis of the electronic switches and the switching time came down to around 0.3 microseconds. -
Jack Kilby
Invented the world's first integrated software. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on December 10, 2000.To congratulate him, US President Bill Clinton wrote, "You can take pride in the knowledge that your work will help to improve lives for generations to come." -
Period: to
3rd Generation Computers
computers in the early integrated circuit. n this era, there were several innovations in various fields of computer technology. These include Integrated Circuits (ICs), Semiconductor Memories, Microprogramming, various patterns of parallel processing and introduction of Operating Systems and time-sharing. In the Integrated Circuit, division there was gradual progress. -
BASIC
first basic language for computer programs. The acronym BASIC comes from the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz. -
Period: to
4th Generation Computers
computers that used the micrprocessor chip. Core memories now were replaced by semiconductor memories and high-speed vectors dominated the scenario. -
Altair Computer
marked the start of personal computer boom. The first time it was run, it displayed "READY" then Allen typed "PRINT 2+2" and it immediately printed the correct answer: "4". -
Steve Jobs
Worked on the famous video game Atari. He also was the founder of Apple. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar. -
Wordstar
First word processing program. -
Visicalc
first electronic spreadsheet application -
Osborne Computer
first portable computer. It is now classified as a luggage computer. -
Pagemaker
1st desktop publishing GUI. -
Excel
One of the 1st spreadsheets to use GUI -
Bill Gates
Was the co-founder of Micrsoft. Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with "a disproportionate number of interesting girls." -
Mosaic
allowed users to view multimedia on the web. Web browsers such as Mosaic became the killer applications of the 1990s. -
Apple II
featured color, sound, and an optional floppy disk. The first were assembled in Silicon Valley. -
Netscape
became a predominant player in browser software. -
GUI
allowed users to interact with the computer at an easier rate. Found in MP3's and other portable media
