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The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was built at Iowa State University between 1937 and 1942 by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. The ABC—designed to produce solution sets for linear physics equations—performed parallel processing , separated memory and computing functions for calculations, refreshed memory, converted numbers from base-10 to base-2 , and carried out binary arithmetic. -
ENIAC
The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was created in 1946 by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. ENIAC was the First large-scale electronic computer.* The 30-ton machine was built at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering on the University of Pennsylvania Campus with funding from the U.S. Army. The high-speed calculations it performed were used to accurately produce firing tables for artillery gunners. -
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Vacuum Tubes
In the first computers, CPUs were made of vacuum tubes and electric relays rather than microscopic transistors on computer chips. These early computers were immense and needed a great deal of power compared to today’s microprocessor-driven computers. Between 1946 and 1956 all computers had bulky CPUs that consumed massive amounts of energy and needed continual maintenance, because the vacuum tubes burned out frequently and had to be replaced. -
Transistors
In 1948, when American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley first demonstrated a revolutionary new electronic switching and amplifying device called the transistor. The transistor had the potential to work faster and more reliably and to consume much less power than a vacuum tube. Despite the overwhelming advantages transistors offered over vacuum tubes, it took nine years before they were used in a commercial computer. -
Microprcessors
Integrated circuits place many individual units of a processor on a single chip, known as "microchips" in practice. The amount of transistors per chip increased rapidly from tens in the early '60s to ten-thousands in the mid '70s. The development started with hundreds of thousands of transistors in the early 1980s, and continues beyond several billion transistors at the end of the first decade in the 21st century. -
The computer mouse
Douglass E. Invents the first computer mouse, because of the tail sticking our of the end of it, it was called a mouse. -
Internet has Arrived!
The first internet was created to allow multiple computers to communicate with each other which later on created the Internet. -
The first portable computer
The first portable computer was created in April 1981 by a company called Osborne, led by a journalist turned entrepreneur named Adam Osborne. -
The First Macintosh
Apple introduces the Macintosh with a television commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl, which plays on the theme of totalitarianism in George Orwell´s book 1984. The Macintosh was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface and was based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor. Its price was $2,500. Applications that came as part of the package included MacPaint, which made use of the mouse, and MacWrite, which demonstrated word processing. -
Multi Core Processors
As microprocessors proliferated at the end of the 20th century, processor design has continued to evolve. Multiple core processors have two or more processing units working in parallel on a single chip. In addition, cell phones and other small devices have pioneered the "micro controller:" a chip that contains a tiny processing unit as well as a small amount of memory and integrated I/O interfaces. These micro controllers can be the size of a fingernail or even smaller.
