Timeline

How we got from counting on an abacus to a computer in your pocket.

1. Ancient times – 1800sBefore Computers: the Abacus and Mechanical Calculators
   Long before today's computers, people did arithmetic with the abacus, and from the 1600s with mechanical calculators made of gears and wheels, such as Blaise Pascal's machine of 1642.
2. 1830s–1840sBabbage and Lovelace
   In 1834, Charles Babbage began to design the Analytical Engine, a programmable calculating machine that was never finished, and in 1843 Ada Lovelace published notes that explained how it could be programmed.
3. 1800sThe Telegraph and the Telephone
   In 1844 Samuel Morse sent a telegraph message from Washington to Baltimore as pulses of electric current, and in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell's telephone carried a human voice over a wire.
4. 1930sTuring and the Universal Machine
   In 1936, the mathematician Alan Turing described an imaginary machine that follows simple rules on a long strip of paper, and showed that one single machine, the universal machine, could do the work of any other such machine.
5. 1943–1946ENIAC and Vacuum Tubes
   ENIAC, built in the United States between 1943 and 1945 and shown to the public in February 1946, was a room-sized computer that used about 18,000 vacuum tubes as electronic switches to calculate at electronic speed.
6. 1947The Transistor: an Electric Switch
   In December 1947, scientists at Bell Labs made the first transistor: a tiny solid part that controls electricity, and that later replaced the large, hot vacuum tubes in computers.
7. 1951–1957Grace Hopper and the First Compilers
   In 1952, Grace Hopper's team finished A-0, an early program that built machine code from a programmer's short instructions; her team's later FLOW-MATIC (dated 1957 by the Computer History Museum) used English words and led to COBOL.
8. 1958The Integrated Circuit
   On September 12, 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments showed the first working integrated circuit: several electronic parts made together on one small piece of semiconductor. Soon after, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor designed a more practical one, made of silicon.
9. 1969–1990ARPANET
   ARPANET was an early computer network that used packets, paid for by a research agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, and it sent its first message on October 29, 1969.
10. 1971The Microprocessor
    In 1971, Intel introduced the 4004, a microprocessor: the CPU, the part of a computer that follows a program's instructions, built on a single chip.
11. 1974–1983TCP/IP
    TCP/IP is the family of protocols that lets many different networks work together as one big network: the internet.
12. 1970s–1980sThe Personal Computer
    In 1975, the Altair 8800, a computer kit built around a microprocessor, helped start the personal computer: a computer that one person could own and use.
13. 1989–1991The World Wide Web
    Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web, a system of pages joined by links, at CERN in March 1989, and the first web server and browser were running there by the end of 1990.
14. 1990s–2000sThe Smartphone
    A smartphone is a mobile phone that is also a small computer, with an operating system and apps; the first one, says the Computer History Museum, came in 1993, and in 2007 Apple showed the iPhone, controlled with your fingers on a touch screen.