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Bill Gates
Gates and Allen form a partnership called Microsoft. Like most start-ups, Microsoft begins small, but has a huge vision—a computer on every desktop and in every home. During the next years, Microsoft begins to change the ways we work. -
Blaise Pascal
Young Blaise decided to build an adding and subtraction machine that could aide in such a tedious and time consuming process. The machine Blaise made had a set of eight gears that worked together much like an odometer keeps track of a car's mileage. His machine encountered many of problems. For one, it was always breaking down. Second, the machine was slow and extremely costly. And third, people were afraid to use the machine thinking it might replace their jobs. -
Charles Babbage
Decided to build a machine to help him complete and print mathematical tables so he began planning his calculating machine calling it the Analytical Engine -
Augusta Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada Lovelace anticipated by more than a century most of what we think is brand-new computing. Her work with Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines produced what she called "the plan". In hindsight what Ada had proposed was a program stored on punch cards for use on an early computer, The Analytical Engine -
Konrad Zuse
Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 computer. The Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length. The original Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid of Berlin in late 1943. -
Howard Aiken
Harvard Mark-1 is completed. Conceived by Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized, relay-based calculator. The Mark-1 was used to produce mathematical tables but was soon superseded by stored program computers. -
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.
The first all electronic computer was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). ENIAC was a general purpose digital computer built in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. -
ALan Turing
Turing had previously been involved with the construction of both the Colossus, the electronic computer built at Bletchley Park during WW2, and, later, the Automatic Computing Engine -
Grace Hopper
Develops the first computer language, which eventually becomes known as COBOL -
Jack Kilby
Otherwise known as 'The Chip' -
Tommy Flowers
The first Colossus is operational at Bletchley Park. Designed by British engineer Tommy Flowers, the Colossus was designed to break the complex Lorenz ciphers used by the Nazis during WWII. -
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak start Apple Computers on April Fool’s Day and roll out the Apple I, the first computer with a single-circuit board. -
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. who were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies -
John Napier
Napier is famous for creating mathematical logarithms, creating the decimal point, and for inventing Napier's Bones, a calculating instrument.
