History of Early Computing
A potted history of early computing devices
Last updated
Mar 14, 2026
Cards
14
Dates
14
Links
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Density
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Timelines published by our users.
A potted history of early computing devices
Last updated
Mar 14, 2026
Cards
14
Dates
14
Links
00
Density
0
[Created]
French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard developed a loom in which the pattern being woven was controlled by a paper tape constructed from punched cards. The paper tape could be changed without changing the mechanical design of the loom.
[Created]
Charles Babbage designed this automatic mechanical calculator to tabulate polynomial functions. He built a 1/7th model, but he never finished the complete machine.
[Programs]
An English mathematician and writer (and daughter of poet Lord Byron), Ada Lovelace translated a text on Babbage's Analyical Engine, adding many notes, including an app for calculating Bernoulli numbers.
[Commercial use]
Herman Hollerith invented data storage on punched cards that could then be read by a machine. His machines used electromechanical relays and counters and was used in many census programs around the world. Hollerith's company eventually became the core of IBM.
[Invented]
A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules.
[Completed]
Claude Shannon's work on relay and switching circuits established the application of Boolean algebra to digital circuit design; the work was later published as 'A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits'.
[Created]
The Z3 was a German electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The Z3 was built with 2,600 relays, implementing a 22-bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz. Program code was stored on punched film. Initial values were entered manually.
[Operational]
Colossus, developed at Bletchley Park for codebreaking, became operational in 1943 and was a pioneering large-scale programmable electronic digital computer system in practical use.
[Invented]
The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented by physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.
[Delivered]
UNIVAC I, the first commercially produced general-purpose electronic computer in the United States, was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau.
[Created]
The first planar, monolithic integrated circuits were developed by Fairchild Semiconductor based on the work of Lehovec, Hoerni, Kilby and Noyce, and tested on this date. NASA's Apollo Program was the largest single consumer of integrated circuits for the next 5 years.
[Announced]
IBM announced System/360, a compatible family of computers that standardized architecture across models and reshaped enterprise computing.
[First message sent]
The first message was sent between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute over ARPANET, a foundational milestone in the development of packet-switched networking and the modern Internet.
[Released]
Intel released the 4004, widely recognized as the first commercially available single-chip microprocessor.