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Charles Babbage
Analytical Engine, generally considered the first computer, designed and partly built by the English inventor Charles Babbage in the 19th century (he worked on it until his death in 1871). While working on the Difference Engine, a simpler calculating machine commissioned by the British government, Babbage began to imagine ways to improve it. -
Hollerith Punchcard
In 1881, Herman Hollerith began designing a machine to tabulate census data more efficiently than by traditional hand methods. The U.S. Census Bureau had taken eight years to complete the 1880 census, and it was feared that the 1890 census would take even longer. Hollerith invented and used a punched card device to help analyze the 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. -
Turing
Turing machines, first described by Alan Turing in Turing 1936–7, are simple abstract computational devices intended to help investigate the extent and limitations of what can be computed. Turing's 'automatic machines', as he termed them in 1936, were specifically devised for the computing of real numbers -
HP
When the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) was founded in 1939, the world was a very different place. 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. HP’s innovations were instrumental in making home computers and printers more affordable for the average consumer, and their success inspired a wave of electronics companies to start-up in Santa Clara County, California. -
Grace Hopper and COBOL
COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC, designed by Grace Hopper. It was created as part of a U.S. Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. -
Engelbart GUI
Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) invented the graphical user interface (GUI) in the 1960s. Engelbart's work was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE) Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 9, 1968. This demonstration is known as "The Mother of All Demos". -
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. — originally known as Apple Computers — began in 1976. Founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked out of Jobs' garage at his home in Los Altos, California. -
Windows
Microsoft invented Windows in the 1980s as a graphical user interface (GUI) for MS-DOS. The name "Windows" comes from the graphical boxes used to represent programs, which were called "windows" in the industry -
Tim Berners Lee
An English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. -
WiFi
Vic Hayes has been called the "father of Wi-Fi" because he chaired the IEEE committee that created the 802.11 standards in 1997. Before the public even heard of Wi-Fi, Hayes established the standards that would make Wi-Fi feasible -
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 Chromebook was Google's CR-48 prototype, which was released in 2010 for a pilot program. The first Chromebooks available for purchase were the Samsung Series 5 and the Acer AC700, which were announced in 2011. -
Apple Watch
Released in April of 2015, the original Apple Watch set the foundations for what modern smartwatches now build upon. While other companies has attempted to create a smartwatch in the past, they were often bulky, impractical and had limited functionality - Apple seemed to set the bar for what a "Smart Watch" would be defined as. A rectangular watch that was available in two sizes, including a smaller size which is something that other companies seemed to be lacking at the time. -
Quantum Computers
Quantum computers are machines that use the properties of quantum physics to store data and perform computations. This can be extremely advantageous for certain tasks where they could vastly outperform even our best supercomputers.