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| Most of the information and pictures found here are courtesy of the History of Computers website, whose efforts in documenting these milestones are greatly appreciated. |
| <1820 | 
The Abacus. |
| <1820 |
Blaise Pascal's calculating machine. |
| <1820 |
The Reckoning Machine developed
by Baron von Leibnitz. |
| 1833 |
Charles Babbage: Machine with Input, Storage, & Output. |
| 1886 |
Herman Hollerith: Founder of IBM (Use of Punched
cards). |
| 1932 | George
Stibitz built a digital calculator that displayed the result of the
addition of two bits. |
| 1939 | Atanasoff
and Berry designed the first digital computer. The Atanasoff
Berry Computer. |
| 1941 |
Konrad
Zuse developed the first fully functional, automatic, programmable,
general purpose, digital computer called Z3. |
| 1944 | Howard
Aiken and Grace
Hopper developed the MARK
I, a electro-mechanical computer, used by the US Navy for serious calculations. |
| 1946 | J.
Presper Eckert and John
W. Mauchly complete the ENIAC. |
| 1947 |
The first RAM
is used. |
| 1948 |
John
Bardeen, Walter
Brattain, and Wiliam
Shockley invented the transistor. |
| 1949 |
John
v. Neumann drafted a report on a stored-program computer (Neumann
computer). This led to the construction of the EDVAC. |
| 1958 | Jack
S. Kilby developed the first IC. |
| 1971 |
Intel
4004 First single chip 4-Bit CPU, built by Marcian
E. Hoff. |
| 1969 |
UNIX,
was first developed as a private research project of Ken Thompson. |
| 1974 | Altair
8800, the famous, affordable desktop computer. |
| 1976 | Apple
I put together in the garage of Steve Jobs. |
| 1981 | Microsoft
DOS, the operating system of the IBM PC. |
| 1985 | Microsoft
Windows, Microsoft develop an OS similar to that of Apple. |
| 1990 | Geoworks,
the promising competitor of Microsoft Windows, which didn't quite make it. |