Computer hardware

By trobeo
  • Period: to

    Computer Hardware

    The timeline of computer hardware.

  • Babbage and the first computer

    Charles Babbage designed his first mechanical computer, the first prototype of the decimal difference engine for tabulating polynomials.

  • information storage

    Semen Korsakov proposed the usage of punched cards for information storage and search. He designed several machines to demonstrate his ideas, including the so-called linear homeoscope.

  • electromechanical relay.

    Joseph Henry invented the electromechanical relay.

  • Tabulating Machine.

    To Babbage's delight, the Scheutzes completed the first full-scale difference engine, which they called a Tabulating Machine. It operated on 15-digit numbers and 4th-order differences, and produced printed output just as Babbage's would have. A second machine was later built to the same design by the firm of Bryan Donkin of London.

  • internal multiplication table

    Ramon Verea, living in New York City, invented a calculator with an internal multiplication table; this was much faster than the shifting carriage, or other digital methods of the time. He wasn't interested in putting it into production, however; it seems he just wanted to show that a Spaniard could invent as well as an American.

  • Integrating Tabulator

    Herman Hollerith introduced an Integrating Tabulator that could add numbers encoded on punched cards to one of several 7-digit counters. His earlier tabulators simply incremented counters based on whether a hole was punched or not.

  • Dalton adding machine

    Remington advertised the Dalton adding machine as the first 10-key printing adding machine.[42] The 10 keys were set on two rows. Six machines had been manufactured by the end of 1906

  • the 'mill'

    Henry Babbage, Charles's son, with the help of the firm of R. W. Munro, completed the 'mill' from his father's Analytical Engine, to show that it would have worked. It does. The complete machine was not produced.

  • IBM 601 Multiplying Punch

    IBM introduced the IBM 601 Multiplying Punch, an electromechanical machine that could read two numbers, up to 8 digits long, from a card and punch their product onto the same card.

  • symbolic logic

    Claude E. Shannon published a paper on the implementation of symbolic logic using relays as his MIT Master's thesis.

  • The S1

    Konrad Zuse developed the S1, the world's first process computer, used by Henschel to measure the surface of wings.

  • ENIAC

    ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer): One of the first totally electronic, valve driven, digital, program-controlled computers was unveiled although it was shut down on 9 November 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. Development had started in 1943 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, USA, by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. It weighed 30 tonnes and contained 18,000 electronic valves, consuming aro

  • SSEC

    IBM finished the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator). It was the first computer to modify a stored program. "About 1300 vacuum tubes were used to construct the arithmetic unit and eight very high-speed registers, while 23000 relays were used in the control structure and 150 registers of slower memory.

  • EDSAC

    This is considered the birthday of modern computing. Maurice Wilkes and a team at Cambridge University executed the first stored program on the EDSAC computer, which used paper tape input-output. Based on ideas from John von Neumann about stored program computers, the EDSAC was the first complete, fully functional von Neumann architecture computer.

  • CSIR Mk I

    CSIR Mk I (later known as CSIRAC), Australia's first computer, ran its first test program. It was a vacuum tube based electronic general purpose computer. Its main memory stored data as a series of acoustic pulses in 5 ft (1.5 m) long tubes filled with mercury.