The Evolution Of Computers and Information Technology

Overview of some of the historical developments in information technology from Clay Tablets, the first dawn of the Printing Press up to the presumed singularity future.

Just a tidbit before we begin, it took the telephone 40 years to reach 10 million customers, and fax machines 20 years. Personal Computers, on the other hand, made it to that numbers in as fast as 5 years in every American home. Email took a year to reach 10 million users when first introduced in 1981.

Facts and Figures on entries (following) doesn’t guarantee sharp accuracy to to numbers, events, persons – so bring with you your grain of salt while reading on.

YEAR: 1982

Portable Computers

A portable computer is a computer designed to be easily moved from one place to another and included a display and keyboard. The first commercially sold portable was the 50-pound (23 kg) IBM 5100, introduced 1975. The next major portables were Osborne's 24-pound (11 kg) CP/M-based Osborne 1 (1981) and Compaq's 28-pound (13 kg) 100% IBM PC compatible Compaq Portable (1983). These "luggable" computers... Discover More »

YEAR: 1982

YEAR: 1984

First Laser Printer

Fresh off the success of the 9700, Starkweather shifted his research onto personal laser printers,and again ran into opposition from Xerox. Xerox was a company that liked large, fast laser printers. They saw departmental units as the profit center for laser printer technology. Xerox failed to connect the dots and realize that the profit wasn't in the printer but in the toner and the paper. As a result, the company was beaten to market by... Discover More »

YEAR: 1984

Top_Gadget_Info_The-Evolution-of-Computers-Laptops

YEAR: 1990

Laptops widely in used

It is a little hard to determine which was the first portable or laptop computer since the earliest portable computers to arrive did not look anything like the book-sized folding laptops that we are familiar with today. However, they were both portable and can sit on a person's lap and did eventually lead to the development of notebook style laptops. With that in mind, there are several potential firsts below and how each might qualify for the honor... Discover More »

YEAR: 1990

YEAR: 1994

First Web Browser

In 1990, almost four years before Netscape, the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee developed the first-ever web browser. To avoid confusion with the World Wide Web, this internet browser was renamed Nexus. Nexus was developed for NeXTStep operating system; both a browser and an editor, Nexus used a graphical user interface (GUI)... Discover More »

YEAR: 1994

Top_Gadget_Info_The-Evolution-of-Computers-Paypal

YEAR: 1998

Paypal was Founded

There are a handful of big dates that stand out for PayPal — one of which hasn’t happened yet, but will soon be marked down in PayPal’s timeline of big events. That date, of course, is July 20, 2015: when PayPal officially splits from eBay and begins trading again as PYPL. For this week’s Throwback Thursday, PYMNTS wanted to take you through a brief history tour of big days for the payments network, and share what else was going on in the... Discover More »

YEAR: 1998

YEAR: 2000

The Millenium Bug

A computer flaw, the so-called "Millennium Bug," led to anxiety and the Y2K (Year 2000) scare. When complex computer programs were first written in the 1960s, engineers used a two-digit code for the year, leaving out the "19." As the year 2000 approached, many believed that the systems would not interpret the "00" correctly, therefore causing a major glitch in the system. The Y2K bug was a computer flaw, or bug, that may have caused problems... Discover More »

YEAR: 2000

YEAR: 2002

Friendster

Friendster was a U.S. social networking site based in Mountain View, CA, founded in 2002 and launched in March 2003 by Jonathan Abrams. The company was sold in 2015 and became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was originally a social networking service website. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with... Discover More »

YEAR: 2002

YEAR: 2003

Facebook

Facebook, Inc. is an American social media and technology company based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, originally as TheFacebook.com—today's Facebook, a popular global social networking website. Facebook is one of the world's most valuable companies. It is considered one of... Discover More »

YEAR: 2003

Top_Gadget_Info_The-Evolution-of-Computers-IBM-Sold-to-Lenovo

YEAR: 2004

IBM Sold to Lenovo Group

Lenovo Group Limited, the leading Personal Computer brand in China and across Asia, and IBM today announced a definitive agreement under which Lenovo will acquire IBM's Personal Computing Division to form the world's third-largest PC business, bringing IBM's leading enterprise-class PC technologies to the consumer market and giving Lenovo global market reach beyond China and Asia. Lenovo will have combined... Discover More »

YEAR: 2004

YEAR: 2005

YouTube

In February 2005 three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, launched the YouTube website for publishing and sharing video files. The first video called "Me at the zoo" was uploaded to YouTube on 23 April, 2005 by one of the co-founders, Jawed Karim. It was a short video from the San Diego zoo. In November 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for $ 1.65 billion... Discover More »

YEAR: 2005

YEAR: 2006

Twitter

On this day in 2006, the San Francisco-based podcasting company Odeo officially releases Twttr—later changed to Twitter—its short messaging service (SMS) for groups, to the public. Born as a side project apart from Odeo’s main podcasting platform, the free application allowed users to share short status updates with groups of friends by sending one text message to a single number (“40404”). Over the next few years, as Twttr became Twitter... Discover More »

YEAR: 2006

YEAR: 2007

First iPhone

MACWORLD SAN FRANCISCO—January 9, 2007—Apple® today introduced iPhone, combining three products—a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod® with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching and maps—into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and... Discover More »

YEAR: 2007

Top_Gadget_Info_The-Evolution-of-Computers-Netbook

YEAR: 2008

Netbooks widely in use

In many ways, netbook is simply another name for subnotebook PCs, which have been on the market for a long time or "ultra-mobile" PCs, a category championed by Microsoft, Intel and other manufacturers in 2006. Ultra-mobile PCs were typically tablet PCs, sometimes without keyboards, while most netbooks are basically just smaller versions of traditional laptop PCs. I'm writing this column on an Acer Aspire One... Discover More »

YEAR: 2008

Top_Gadget_Info_The-Evolution-of-Computers-iPad

YEAR: 2010

iPad was Released

SAN FRANCISCO—January 27, 2010—Apple® today introduced iPad, a revolutionary device for browsing the web, reading and sending email, enjoying photos, watching videos, listening to music, playing games, reading e-books and much more. iPad’s responsive high-resolution Multi-Touch™ display lets users physically interact with applications and content. iPad is just 0.5 inches thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds— thinner and lighter than any... Discover More »

YEAR: 2010

YEAR: 2013

Foldable PC

Folding phones are already being pitched as the next big wave of tech, and whether or not that turns out to be true, the industry has no plans to stop there. Lenovo has just announced what it says is the world’s first “foldable PC:” a prototype ThinkPad that iterates the foldable tech we’ve already seen from phones on a much bigger scale. It’s not just a cool tech demo, either: Lenovo has been developing this for over three years and has plans to launch... Discover More »

YEAR: 2013

Top_Gadget_Info_The-Evolution-of-Computers-Teleportation

YEAR: 2015

Probability of Teleportation

Sick of those frenzied morning school drop-offs? Longing for a morning commute free of highway road rage and public transit bum stink? Well, lucky for you, science is working on an answer, and it might just be as simple as scanning your body down to the subatomic level, annihilating all your favorite parts at point A and then sending all the scanned data to point B, where a computer builds you back up from nothing in a fraction of... Discover More »

YEAR: 2015

Top_Gadget_Info_The-Evolution-of-Computers-Technological-Singularity

YEAR: 2030-2045

The Technological Singularity

The technological singularity—also, simply, the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, called intelligence explosion, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles... Discover More »

YEAR: 2030-2045