History of Computer Programming

Around 4000 BC

Clay tablets are used to keep track of transactions.

Around 3000 BC

Abacus invented in Babylonia.

Around 800 AD

The Chinese start to use the number 0, although some historians believed it was introduced from India.

1612-1617

John Napier uses the decimal point, devises logarithms, and uses numbered sticks for calculation.

1622

William Oughtred invents the circular slide rule based on Napier's logarithms.

1786

J.H.Mueller dreams up his "Difference Engine," but like many dot com companies, he cannot get the funds from investors to build it.

1822

Charles Babbage begins to redesign and build Mueller's Difference Engine with funding from the British government.

1834-35

Babbage changes his focus from the Difference Engine to a new version called the Analytical Engine.

1840s

Ada Lovelace becomes the world's first programmer by putting together methods of computing using Babbage's notes on the Analytical Engine.

1842

The British government pulls funding for the construction of the Difference Engine.

1847-49

Babbage completes 21 drawings for a new improved second version of the Difference Engine but still does not complete construction.

1853

The Difference Engine is finally completely built, but by another group not including Babbage.

1854

Herman Hollerith, whose electric tabulating system was used for the 1890 census, establishes the Tabulating Machine Company. TMC will later become IBM.

1941

Atanasoff and Berry build the first electronic (and non-programmable) computer named ABC. Zuse completes the Z3 machine, the world's first fully functional program in an automatically controlled electro-mechanical computer. It has a 64-word memory and computes at three seconds per multiplication.

1944

Howard Aiken completes the first programmable computer, the Mark I, using punched paper tape for programming and vacuum tubes and relays to calculate problems.

1945

Zuse develops "Plankalkul" (short for plain calculus), which is considered the first programming language and was designed to be a chess-playing (i.e. game) program. Also, on Sept 9th, working on a prototype of the Mark II, Grace Murray finds the first computer "bug," an actual moth that caused a relay failure.

1951

Betty Holberton creates a "Sort Merge Generator," a predecessor to modern compilers.

1957

FORTRAN appears, short for Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System. Heading the FORTRAN team is John Backus, who also goes on to contribute to the development of ALGOL and BNF.

1958

John McCarthy introduces the Lisp programming language.

1958

First computers to be built with transistors instead of vacuum tubes.

1959

There are now over 200 programming languages in existence.

1960

COBOL, created by the Conference on Data Systems and Languages, is launched for business applications.

1962

Spacewar, arguably the first video game ever, is invented at MIT by a graduate student named Steve Russel.

1964

At Dartmouth University, professors John G.Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz invent BASIC. The first BASIC program runs on May 1, 1964 (at around 4 a.m.).

1965

Ken Iverson develops the APL language at IBM.

1967

IBM announces that it will no longer bundle software and hardware together, but rather will sell them separately. This business move is considered the beginning of the software industry.

1968

Edsgar Dijkstra first writes about the harmful effects of the goto statement. Intel is formed and incorporated on July 18th.

1968

ALTRAN, a FORTRAN variant, appears. COBOL is officially defined by ANSI.

1969

Kenneth Thornson and Dennis Ritchie formulate UNIX at AT&T Bell Labs. Donald Knuth writes Volume 1 of the Art of Computer Programming, considered the first computer programming book.

1971

Niklaus Wirth develops Pascal, a predecessor of Modula-2.

1972

Nolan Buchnell's game Pong is so popular that he founds Atari.Rary Tarnlinson creates e-mail to send personal messages across Arpnet (Arpnet will become the Internet;currently it is used only by the military). Smalltalk is developed by Xerox PARC's learning research group. Denis Ritchie develops C at Bell Labs.

1975

The Altair 8800 is available in January as a kit you can order and build from Popular Mechanics, and the PC is born.Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a version of BASIC that they sell to MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) on a per-copy royalty basis.Scheme, a Lisp dialect by G.L.Steele and G.J.Sussman, appears.

1976

Crowther and Woods create the first adventure game calledyou guessed itAdventure. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak design and build the Apple I.

1977

Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

1979

Pac Man appears.

1980

IBM selects PC-DOS from the Microsoft Corporation as the operating system for its new PC. Smalltalk-80 appears.Bjarne Stroustrup develops a set of languages, collectively referred to as "C With Classes," which serves as the breeding ground for C++.

1981

Japan begins the Fifth Generation Computer System project using Prolog as the primary language.

1983

Microsoft announces "Windows," a graphical user interface for PCs. Windows doesn't actually ship, however, until 1985. The first C compilers for microcomputers are released. In July the first implementation of C++ appears.

1984

The Macintosh is unveiled, with much glitter and hype, at the Super Bowl.William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in his novel Neuromancer.

1985

Windows finally launches. The C++ language is issued from Bell Labs. The Intel 80386 chip with 32-bit processing is released.

1986

The programming language Eiffel appears.

1987

The Perl programming language is released.

1989

The C programming language is standardized by ANSI.

1990

By now more than 54 million computers are in use in the United States alone, and the first commercially available dial-up Internet access appears.

1991

The Python programming language is released.

1992

The programming language Dylan is released by Apple.

1993

The Ruby programming language is released.

1994

The Lua programming language is released.Netscape's first browser becomes available.

1995

Sun Microsystems releases Java.

1996

One out of every three homes in the United States has a computer.