Through the additional/optional links below to the Google search engine first display images, clicking the Web tab on the Google page also runs a search of web pages for that topic with the most relevant appearing at the top of the list. The green color below highlights computing developments that are especially significant to educators and school curriculum.
The most important development during this time period was not a thing but a concept that life could be improved and advantage gained by recalling things, remembering and using a set sequence of things and inventing a better sequence. This is the original meaning of calculate, and is still used today when the fictional literature refers to the phrase, "a calculating person."
35,00-30,000 BC. Lebombo Bone, oldest known mathematical artifact, is a kind of tally stick with counting notches, a baboon’s fibula that was found in the Lebombo mountains located between South Africa and Swaziland; need evidence of the museum that houses it; tally stick wolf bone in Morasvaske' Museum in Czechoslovakia [Flegg, G. (2012). Numbers: Their History and Meaning]
20,000 BC. The Ishango Bone, a baboon's fibula discovered in the 1970's, was a counting system, a list of prime numbers and even gives evidence of a multiplication table, on exhibit at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. Ishango is a town that is about 15 miles from the equator along the edge of Edward Lake in the Congo. [Flegg, G. (2012). Numbers: Their History and Meaning]
9,000 BC. Clay tokens, which could be given different shapes to count different kinds of things such as types of animals, and come in a wide variety of shapes and types.
but most scholars argue that it was invented by the Babylonians (Encyclopædia Britannica). The concept was first implemented with pebbles and sand or dust on a rock, hence its origins in the Phoenician word abak or sand. Of course if it was a windy day, you couldn't calculate the big figures. As the technology of that period improved, carrying a bag of pebbles, waiting for the right weather, then finding a nice pile of dust or sand and then placing a design on it was no longer necessary. The early Roman abacus (picture) to the right created a permanent sand pile grid, the clay tablet. This development led to something better to deal with the problem of easy to lose and displace pebbles. This tablet technology was improved on by putting the pebbles on a string or rod. This design put a number of thinking functions into one highly portable device where they could not get lost and made it easy to quickly move things to the beginning of the sequence. This was the first handheld computer. See thousands of images of different abacus models using Google image search for abacus or try out a simulation of one design of an abacus.
introduced the first electromechanical, punched-card data-processing machine which was used to compile information for the 1890 U.S. census. Hollerith's tabulator became so successful that he started his own business to market it. His company would eventually become International Business Machines (IBM). (picture ; Google images) (this paper based machine represents the origin of computer database software)
of Texas Instruments manufactured the first integrated circuit, or chip, which is made up of six components, a feat for which they eventually win a Nobel Prize for physics in the year 2000. This led to hundreds of tiny transistors that fit on a chip of silicon, then thousands, then millions over the next decade. (pictures ; picture2 ; Google images)
created the Cal-Tech, the first handheld calculator design completed which is marketed three years later by Canon. TI begins to sell its own 4 function Datamath calculator in 1972 for $150.00. (pictures ; Google images)
first microprocessor, the 4004 (invented by Ted Hoff) a specialized integrated circuit chip which was able to process four bits of data at a time at 108 khz using some 2000 transistors (see 1958). What formerly required many computer chips with connecting wires for the arithmetic, logic and control components, was now on one chip, significantly reducing the complexity and cost of manufacturing the heart of a computer. Storage for data and programs remains on other chips and devices. Eventually, almost every device using electricity will be controlled by a microprocessor. (picture ; Google images)
1973: Classrooms begin using teletype terminals (e.g., keyboard types on paper) for instructional purposes to interact with remote computers using acoustic couplers (standard telephone handsets placed in an early type of modem to send and receive data), image courtesy of Grace Museum, University of Missouri-St. Louis.
and built the Apple I; then the following year introduced the Apple II microcomputer during a year in which many other personal computer brands are marketed including the Commodore Pet, Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, Atari and Coleco and then more brands appear in the years to follow (Apple pictures ; other PC pictures).
Palm Pilot.The above timeline was developed by building from the more detailed histories below and other sources.