Computer History Timeline

Hewlett-Pickard

Mar 28, 1939

David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers.

Z3

Mar 28, 1941

The Z3 was an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere. Using 2,300 relays, the Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length.

Harvard Mark-1

Mar 28, 1944

Conceived by Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized, relay-based calculator.

ERA 1101

Aug 15, 1950

First commercially produced computer w/ earliest magnetic storage devices

IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator

May 10, 1954

first mass-produced computer (sold 450 in one year, whoa so many)

System/360

May 10, 1964

could perform up to 3 million instructiones per second

PDP-8

May 10, 1965

first commercially successful minicpmputer

The Micral

May 10, 1973

earliest commercial, non-kit computer

Apple-1

May 10, 1976

first Apple computer

ST506

May 10, 1980

first hard disk drive for microcomputers- held 5 megabytes of data