“The path to modern-day computing is longer than many suspect and strewn with interesting nuggets of information,” Holden Frith blogs for Times Online’s “Tech Central.”
Top 25 Days in Computing History:
• December 23, 1834: Charles Babbage announces the analytical engine
• October 22, 1925: The transistor is patented
• January 1, 1939: Hewlett-Packard is founded, giving birth to Silicon Valley
• November 25, 1943: Colossus comes to life
• February 14, 1946: ENIAC is unveiled
• December 1954: Casio’s prototype desktop calculator
• September 4, 1956: The launch of the IBM 305 RAMAC (5MB hard drive weighed one ton)
• October 29, 1969: The dawning of the internet era
• November-December 1971: The first e-mail is sent
• April 16, 1977: Apple II heralds the age of the home computer
• May 22, 1980: The birth of Pac-Man
• April 3, 1981: The first portable computer (Osborne 1)
• August 12, 1981: IBM launches the “PC”
• March 3, 1981: The BBC Microcomputer
• January 24, 1984: Apple Mac popularises the graphical user interface
• November 13, 1990: Tim Berners-Lee writes the first web page (on a NeXT Computer, forerunner to Apple’s Mac OS X)
• March 14, 1993: Mosaic opens up the web
• March 16, 1995: The first Wiki is announced
• July 4, 1996: Hotmail arrives (launched in 1996; acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million)
• May 11, 1997: Machine takes on man, and wins (IBM’s Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster, in Chess)
• November 18, 1997: Wi-fi standards laid down (Apple’s iBook G3 was the first mainstream computer with integrated wireless networking, July 21, 1999)
• September 7, 1998: Google founded
• June 1, 1999: Shawn Fanning releases Napster
• January 1, 2000: The world continues (Y2K fizzle)
• February 15, 2005: YouTube comes online
• July 11, 2008: Apple launches the iPhone App Store
MacDailyNews Take: Uh, Holden, that was 26 days, but that’s easily forgiven as your list is refreshingly and rightfully Microsoft-free.
Full article here.