Modern Day Computing

"A quantum computer defies common sense... Quantum computing is Twilight Zone technology." - Simon Singh.

Year Name Made by Comments
1623 Pascaline Pascal First mechanical calculator
1834 Analytical Engine Babbage First attempt to build a digital computer
1932 Differential Analyzer Bush Mechanical calculator for solving differential equations
1936 Z1 Zuse First working relay calculating machine
1942 ABC Iowa State One of the first electronic computers
1943 COLOSSUS British Government First electronic computer
1944 Mark I Aiken First American General Purpose Computer
1946 ENIAC I Eckert/Mauchley Modern computer history starts here
1949 EDSAC Wilkes First stored-program computer
1951 Whirlwind I MIT First real-time computer
1952 IAS Von Neumann Most current machines use this design
1953 650 IBM First massed produced computer
1960 PDP-1 DEC First minicomputer (50 sold)
1961 1401 IBM Enormously popular small business machine
1962 7094 IBM Dominated scientific computing in the early 1960's
1963 B5000 Burroughs First machine designed for a high-level language
1964 360 IBM First product line designed as a family for mainframes
1964 6600 CDC First scientific supercomputer
1965 PDP-8 DEC First mass-market minicomputer (50,000 sold)
1970 PDP-11 DEC Dominated minicomputers in the 1970's
1973 Alto Xerox First prototype of modern PC
1974 8080 Intel First general-purpose 8-bit computer on a chip
1974 CRAY-1 Cray First vector supercomputer
1978 VAX DEC First 32-bit superminicomputer
1981 IBM PC IBM Started the modern personal computer era
1985 MIPS MIPS First commercial RISC machine
1987 SPARC Sun First SPARC-based RISC workstation
1990 RS6000 IBM First superscaler machine
1996 UltraSparc Sun 64-bit RISC processor machine
1996 JavaStation Sun Network computer based on Java architecture
1999 Y-MP Cray Super computer for weather analysis and simulation
2000 Newton Apple First handheld computer

Software History.

The very first modern day, high-level computer programming language is "Plankalkül". It was developed for engineering by Konrad Zuse around 1945. It had sub routines, hierarchical record structures, assignment statements, iteration, floating point calculations, assertions, conditional statements, arrays, exception handling and a few other features.