The history of CT originates from humble beginnings, which include the abacus.  The abacus is thought to have been originally invented 3000 years before the birth of Christ.  Revisions to its use/design continued for many years e.g. 500 BC a bead and wire version is developed in Egypt.  Early versions of the calculator were gradually replacing this primitive method of mathematics.  In 1624 Wilhelm Schickard built the first four-function calculator-clock at the University of Heidelberg, thus heralding a new era. 

Development Timeline

        1939 - Hewlett Packard founded

        Hewlett-Packard is founded. David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage.

        Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers.

        1943 - Project Whirlwind

        Project Whirlwind begins. During World War II, the U.S. Navy approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) about building a flight simulator to train bomber crews.

1948 - IBM SSEC

        IBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed scientific data in public display near the company´s Manhattan headquarters.

        Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon.

        1950 - First commercial computer

        Engineering Research Associates of built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer; the company´s first customer was the U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices.

        Drums registered information as magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder. Read/write heads both recorded and recovered the data.

        Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second.

        1962 - First interactive computer game

        MIT students wrote SpaceWar!, considered the first interactive computer game.

        First played at MIT on DEC´s PDP-1, the large-scope display featured interactive, shoot´em-up graphics that inspired future video games.

        Duelling players fired at each other´s spaceships and used early versions of joysticks to manipulate away from the central gravitational force of a sun as well as from the enemy ship.

        1971 - First email sent

        The first e-mail is sent. Ray Tomlinson of the research firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman sent the first e-mail when he was supposed to be working on a different project.

        Tomlinson, who is credited with being the one to decide on the "@" sign for use in e-mail, sent his message over a military network called ARPANET.

        When asked to describe the contents of the first email, Tomlinson said it was “something like "QWERTYUIOP"”

        1988 - First computer virus

        Robert Morris´ worm flooded the ARPANET.

        23-year-old Morris, the son of a computer security expert for the National Security Agency, sent a non-destructive worm through the Internet, causing problems for about 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts linked to the network.

        Morris was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community
service, and a fine of $10,050

        1990 - World Wide Web is born

        The World Wide Web (www) was born when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, developed Hypertext Mark-up Language.

        HTML, as it is commonly known, allowed the Internet to expand into the World Wide Web, using specifications he developed such as URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol).

        A browser, such as Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer, follows links and sends a query to a server, allowing a user to view a site

        2004 - Facebook

        Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc.

        Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

        As of July 2011 Facebook has more than 800 million active users and a value of around 41 billion US dollars