19th Century

  • 1801
    • French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard creates a loom that uses wooden punch cards to automate the design of woven fabrics.
    • His invention was called: The Jacquard’s Loom.
  • 1822
    • English mathematician Charles Babbage invents a calculating machine capable of computing tables of numbers
    • He also designed the Difference Engine, designed to compute logarithms and sine and cosine functions.
      • He only built a small portion of it during his lifetime.
    • He also designed the Analytical Engine.
      • It was capable of performing basic arithmetic, data storage and conditional branching.
      • It also uses punch cards similar to the Jacquard loom.
      • It was never constructed but the design served as groundwork for modern computers.
  • 1890
    • Herman Hollerith designs a punch card system to calculate the 1880 U.S census.
      • He would eventually establish a company that would become the IBM

Early 20th Century (1900-1949)

  • 1936
    • Alan Turing develops his idea of a universal machine called the Turing machine.
      • This computer has the ability to compute anything that is computable.
      • This concept is where modern computers is based out of.
  • 1937
    • J.V Atanasoff, a physics and mathematics professor at Iowa State University, attempts to build the first computer without cams, belts, gears or shafts.
  • 1939
    • Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded Hewlett-Packard in a garage at Palo Alto, California
    • George Stibitz designed for Bell Telephone Laboratories the Complex Number Calculator
  • 1941
    • J.V Atanasoff with his student Clifford Berry designs a computer that can solve 29 equations simultaneously.
      • This was also the first computer to house data in its memory
    • German engineer Konrad Zuse creates the Z3 Computer, which uses 2,300 relays, performs floating-point binary arithmetic, and had a 22-bit word length.
    • Alan Turing and Harold Keen built the British Bombe.
      • It decrypted the ENIGMA used in Nazi military communications during the Second World War.
  • 1943
    • John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert built the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator