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The first mechanical computer, created by Charles Babbage in 1822, doesn't really resemble what most would consider a computer today. Therefore, this document has been created with a listing of each of the computer firsts, starting with the Difference Engine and leading up to the computers we use today.
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The Turing machine was first proposed by Alan Turing in 1936 and became the foundation for theories about computing and computers. The machine was a device that printed symbols on paper tape in a manner that emulated a person following a series of logical instructions. Without these fundamentals, we wouldn't have the computers we use today.
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The Z1 was created by German Konrad Zuse in his parents' living room between 1936 and 1938. It is considered to be the first electromechanical binary programmable computer, and the first really functional modern computer.
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Jan Rajchman began his work on developing the Selectron tube that was capable of storing 256 bits. Because of the popularity of magnetic core memory at the time, the Selectron tube was never put into mass production.
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The computer is known as the EDSAC, the first stored-program electronic computer, performed its first calculation on 1949, the computer that ran the first graphical computer game, nicknamed "Baby". Manchester Mark 1 was another computer that could run stored programs. Built at the Victoria University of Manchester, the first version of the Mark 1 computer became operational in April 1949. Mark 1 was used to run a program to search for Mersenne primes for nine hours without error.
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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.
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The United States government received the UNIVAC 1101 or ERA 1101. This computer was considered to be the first computer that was capable of storing and running a program from memory.
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Jay Forrester applies for a patent for magnetic-core memory, an early type of random access memory (RAM) on May 11, 1951.
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Konrad Zuse completes the Z22, the seventh computer model and the first computer that used magnetic storage memory.
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John Schmidt designed a 64-bit MOS p-channel Static RAM while at Fairchild in 1964.
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On June 4, 1968, Dr. Robert Dennard at the IBM T.J. Watson Research center was granted U.S. patent #3,387,286 describing a one-transistor DRAM cell. DRAM will later replace magnetic core memory in computers.
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Intel released its first product, the 3101 Schottky TTL bipolar 64-bit static random-access memory (SRAM). In the same year, Intel released the 3301 Schottky bipolar 1024-bit read-only memory (ROM).
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Intel released its first commercially available DRAM, the Intel 1103 in October 1970. Capable of storing 1024 bytes or 1 KB of memory.
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In 1975, Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced the Altair 8800. Although the first personal computer is considered by many to be the KENBAK-1, which was first introduced for $750 in 1971. The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights.
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George Perlegos with Intel developed the Intel 2816, the first EEPROM in 1978.
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Fujio Masuoka invented flash memory in 1984.
