1623 - Wilhelm Schikard's sprocket "computer" could add, multiply and divide using 11 complete and six incomplete sprocketed wheels
1642 - Blaise Pascal develops a machine in that adds and subtracts, automatically carrying and borrowing digits from column to column. Later, Gottfried Leibniz designs a special gearing system to enable multiplication on Pascal's machine.
1800's - Joseph-Marie Jacquard invents an automated loom which uses punch cards. Mobs of weavers chase him out of Lyon, but his designs are still used today for some fabrics.
1820's - Charles Babbage designs the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. Although neither is completed, their key concepts of storing instructions, use of punch cards and ability to print can be found in many modern computers.
1890 - Herman Hollerith borrows ideas from Jacquard's loom to produce a tabulator used in the US census. Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company merges with others to form IBM in 1924
1920's - Solid state physicists throughout the world begin investigating semiconductor materials
1936 - Alan Turing proposes a machine resembling an automatic typewriter using symbols for math and logic instead of letters. Turing's machine was the theoretical precursor to the digital computer.
1930's - Howard Aiken develops the Mark I calculating machine, built by IBM.
1945 - John von Neumann develops EDVAC, the first electronic computer to store programs within its memory.
1945 - ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) developed by a team at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. The same team goes on to Rand Corp., to develop UNIVAC (the Universal Automatic Computer).
1948 - William Shockley leads a Bell Telephone Laboratories team to develop the transistor, which will eventually kill off the vacuum tube and form the basis for modern digital computers.
1965 - Semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore predicts that the number of transistors contained on a computer chip will double every year. Moore's Law has proven to be somewhat accurate. The number of transistors and the computational speed of microprocessors currently doubles approximately every 18 months. Components continue to shrink in size and are becoming faster, cheaper, and more versatile
1969 - Intel employee, Dr. Ted Hoff, meets with a group of Japanese engineers and convinces their company, Busicom, to buy an idea of his to integrate 12 discrete custom chips into one.
1971 - Intel advertises the 4004 microprocessor in Electronic News Magazine. 2300 transistors
1972 - Intel 8008 microprocessor, 3300 transistors.
1974 - Motorola 6800, 4000 transistors, destined for use in automotive and industrial applications
1974 - Intel 8080 microprocessor, 8-bit, 2 MHz, 6000 transistors. Ten times the performance of the 8008
1975 - MITS (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) of New Mexico releases the Altair 8800. Sold primarily in kit form, the Altair was based on the 8-bit Intel 8080 microprocessor, had 256 bytes of random access memory, received input through a bank of switches on the front panel, and displayed output via a row of light-emitting diodes (LEDs)
1978 - Intel 8086, 16-bit, 29,000 transistors, 5, 8 and 10 MHz. Ten times the performance of the 8080
1979 - Intel 8088, 8-bit, 29,000 transistors, identical to 8086 except for 8-bit internal operation.
1979 - Motorola 68000, which winds up in the first Apple Mac in 1984. It and others born from it go on to be part of products such as the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and NeXT. Only the Mac survives.
1981 - IBM releases the PC which underwhelms the CP/M community, but manages to wipe it out anyway. It uses the 8088.
1982 - Intel 80286, a 16-bit processor with 134,000 transistors. The heart of the AT (advanced technology) PC
1984 - Motorola 68020. 200,000 transistors, 32-bit processor
1985 - Intel 80386 DX, a 32-bit processor with 275,000 transistors.
1987 - Motorola 68030.
1988 - Intel 80386 SX, identical to the 386 DX, but with 16-bit external operation.
1989 - Intel 80486 DX, 32 bit processor with 1.2 million transistors. Copies of the 386 from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) begin to appear on the market and seriously erode Intel's share.
1990 - Motorola 68040 - 1.2 million transistors
1991 - Intel 80486 SX, identical to the 486, but lacks an internal floating point unit (i.e., math coprocessor). Intel's answer to the AMD 386.
1993 - Intel Pentium. Would have been called the 80586, but the company couldn't copyright a number. For a short time was known as the P5. 3.1 million transistors, 64-bit operation. Cyrix, AMD and others including IBM and Texas Instruments directly attack Intel's 486 market with their own versions.
1994 - Intel settles its suit with AMD and allows direct copies of the 486. Apple, Motorola and IBM combine forces to produce the PowerPC RISC processor line
1995 - Intel Pentium Pro. Would have been the 80686 and was known briefly as the P6. 64-bit processor optimized for applications with 32-bit code base. 5.5 million transistors.
1996 - By now, Motorola has produced several generations of its 600 series PowerPC processors, rivaling Intel's internal clock speeds. The Power Macintosh line is in full swing.
1997 - MMX - a set of multimedia code extensions for the Pentium that will directly handle 'natural data types' such as animation, sound, telecommunications, video accleration and 3-D rendering. Will first appear in Pentium processors, but expected to be throughout Intel's product line by late 1998.
1997 - or early 1998. Merced is the code name for what would have been the 80786 or P7. Jointly developed by Intel and Hewlett Packard, this new processor is designed for applications using a 64-bit code base. Microsoft has already announced they're working on a version of Windows NT to support it.
