1. A Brief History of Computers

2. 3000 B.C. The abacus was invented and used for
quick, manual addition and subtraction
calculations.

3. Abacus

4. 1645 A.D. A mechanical adding and subtracting
machine called the Pascaline (after its
inventor, the French mathematician
Blaise Pascal) was invented.

5. Pascaline

6. 1830 Charles Babbage, the father of
computers, designed the first electronic
computer called the difference engine.
Unfortunately, the difference engine was
never actually built, but today’s
computers are based on it.

7. Difference Engine

8. 1890 The 1890 census was predicted to be so
vast that people-power alone could not
tabulate it. Therefore, an inventor
named Herman Hollerith invented the
punch card. Census data was punched
onto these cards , and tabulating
machines computed the totals.

9. Punch Cards

10. Tabulating Machine

11. 1937 An electromechanical calculator was
built with the help of IBM. Although not
truly an electronic computer because all
its parts were mechanical and moving,
the Mark I computer (as it was named)
proved the theory of computing
machines could be a reality and not just
a theory.

12. Mark I computer

13. 1939
The first vacuum tube calculating machine
was invented.

15. 1946 The first true general-purpose vacuum-tube,
first-generation computer, named ENIAC,
was invented.

16. ENIAC

17. 1957 FORTRAN, one of the oldest programming languages still in use
today, was developed to
aid scientific and mathematical
programmers.

18. 1959
The second-generation computers came on the
scene.

19. 1960 COBOL was developed to give business
programmers the language they needed
to write programs.

20. 1964 The first version of BASIC, the most
important language for start-up
programmers was written.

21. 1965
The third-generation computers were
perfected.

22. 1976 BASIC was ported to the early
microcomputers by Microsoft, a company
formed and run by two teenagers out of
their garage, (one of these guys was Bill
Gates)

23. 1976 - 1978 Two of the most important
microcomputers that started the true
trend of home computing, the Apple
computer and Radio Shack’s TRS-80
were invented.

24. 1981 The introduction of IBM’s first
microcomputer, the IBM PC, finally added
stability to microcomputers.

25. 1982 The American National Standards
Institute (ANSI) agreed to a universally
accepted standard for the C
programming language.
C would prove to be the most important
language of the 1980’s.

26. 1984
The Windows operating system began
spurring interest

27. 1989 The C++ programming language was
made available for a wide variety of
microcomputers, helping to spearhead
the object-oriented programming (OOP)
movement.

28. 1990 Visual Basic began taking shape to
provide Windows programming skills
without requiring huge investments in
time.

29. 1995 Windows 95 and Windows NT became
the dominate operating systems of PC’s
and server computers.