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Thomas Edison’s First Central Electricity Station
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Memory
Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, design a computer that can solve 29 equations simultaneously. This marks the first time a computer is able to store information on its main memory. -
Digital Forefathers
Two University of Pennsylvania professors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, build the ENIAC, or the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. it filled a 20-foot by 40-foot room and had 18,000 vacuum tubes. -
Bigger Things
Mauchly and Presper leave the University of Pennsylvania and receive funding from the Census Bureau to build the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer for business and government applications. -
It Doesn’t Suck
William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories invent the transistor. They discovered how to make an electric switch with solid materials that don’t require a vaccum. -
Common Business Oriented Language
Grace Hopper develops the first computer language, which eventually becomes known as COBOL.