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Charles Babbage
English mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage is credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer. During the mid-1830s Babbage developed plans for the Analytical Engine. Although it was never completed, the Analytical Engine would have had most of the basic elements of the present-day computer. -
Hollerith Punch card
Hollerith invented and used a punched card device to help analyze the 1890 U.S. census data. His great breakthrough was his use of electricity to read, count and sort punched cards whose holes represented data gathered by the census-takers. -
Alan Turing
n 1936 the mathematician Alan Turing wrote a seminal mathematics paper, 'On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem', which came to be seen as a theoretical basis for today’s computers. In it he imagined a single machine that could compute any problem, effectively uniting all human or problem-specific ‘computers’ into one universal device. -
HP
When the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) was founded in 1939, the world was a very different place. There were no fully electronic computers. The only printers were industrial-sized printing presses. Palo Alto, California was composed mostly of fruit orchards. The internet was decades away from fruition. The storied history of HP coincides with the development of home computing and the rise of Silicon Valley. -
Grace Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper was a mathematician, computer science pioneer, and retired Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy. Her contributions to computing include inventing the compiler, a program that translates English into computer code, and her work on the Mark I, II, and III computers. Hopper joined the Navy Reserve during World War II and used the Mark I to calculate weapon firing tables. -
Douglas Englebart
He went on to invent the computer mouse in 1964, with a prototype that consisted of a block of pine, a circuit board and two metal wheels. He also designed the Online System, or NLS, a computer collaboration system that was foundational to the development of personal computers and the internet. -
Apple Computer
The first Apple computer went on sale in 1976 and was designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. Since the release of the first computer, the company has evolved over the years to provide cutting-edge electronic gadgets for creative enthusiasts, educators, scientists, developers, businesses, and the general public around the world. -
Microsoft Windows
The first version of Windows, Windows 1.0, was released on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The name "Windows" is a reference to the windowing system in GUIs. -
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread. -
WiFi
Famous actress and part-time inventor Hedy Lemarr pioneered the technology that would one day be the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth comms systems. -
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at Macworld 2007, and launched later that year. -
Chromebook
The first Chromebooks for sale, by Acer Inc. and Samsung, were announced at the Google I/O conference in May 2011 and began shipping on June 15, 2011. Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard (now HP Inc.) and Google itself entered the market in early 2013. -
Apple Watch
Since the first inception of the Apple Watch back in 2015, the world of modern smartwatches has forever been revolutionized and the bar has continuously been placed higher and higher with each new iteration that's released! Seemingly with each year that passes, we're stepping further and further into the futuristic vision previously only seen in sci-fi films and media: Smart watches that can send calls, texts and even read your heartbeat! -
Gemini AI
Gemini is the result of large-scale collaborative efforts by teams across Google, including our colleagues at Google Research. It was built from the ground up to be multimodal, which means it can generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across and combine different types of information including text, code, audio, image and video.