A Brief VERY Incomplete History of Noteworthy Achievements in the Field of Computering
(as researched almost exclusively on Wikipedia)
1820s — 1830s
Charles Babbage sets out to build the world's first mechanical calculator: The Difference Engine and Analytical Engine
1840s
Ada Lovelace wrote Note G, the first algorithm specifically tailored for implementation on a computer. For a machine that was never finished!
1935
Alonzo Church invented Lambda Calculus
1949
Grace Hopper invented COBOL and the first compiler
1958
John McCarthy invented Lisp
1963
Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse
1963
Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson both independently started exploring the ideas of "hypertext" and "hypermedia" coined by Nelson
1968
Douglas Engelbart does "The Mother of All Demos" showing his work on: GUI, Mouse, Video Conferencing, Teleconferencing, Hypertext, Hypermedia, Word Processing, Collaborative Real-Time Editor All in 1968! Before Unix or C
1969
ARPANET went live making use of packet switching and TCP
1969
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invented Unix at Bell Labs
1970s
Adele Goldberg and others at PARC created Smalltalk and re/invented ALL OF THE THINGS: Object-Oriented Programming, Ethernet, Laser Printing, GUI, Mouse, Modern personal computer
1972
As a skunk works project, Ray Tomlinson created networked email for ARPANET. So users could message each other between different hosts
1972
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invented C at Bell Labs
1976
Woz invented the Apple I
1976
Richard Stallman invented Emacs
1977
Jobs/Woz shipped the Apple II
1977
Bill Joy shiped BSD at UC Berkeley, later vi and C Shell
1978
Ward Christensen invented BBS
1979
Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis Conceived Usenet
1982
French government shipped Minitel. Which will be retired THIS YEAR! 30 years later
1983
Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris invented DNS
1984
Apple shipped the Mac
1987
Richard Stallman released GCC
1987
Larry Wall created Perl
1988
Jarkko Oikarinen invented IRC
1990
ARPANET removed, Internet! NPL, Merit Network, CYCLADES, X.25 and public data networks, UUCP and Usenet
1990
Tim Berners-Lee invented... ALL OF THE THINGS: WWW, HTML, HTTP, Browser, Server, URLs
1991
Linus Torvalds released Linux
1995
Matz shipped Ruby (0.9.5)
1995
Ward Cunningham invented the wiki
2001
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia
2004
DHH shipped Rails + 15 minute blog screencast
What Have I Done?
2012 Big Projects
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”