Civilisation/Technology

Computing

History of Computing

1801

Joseph Jacquard created a punch-card programmable loom which greatly simplified the weaving process.

1837

The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's Difference Engine.

1843

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, worked closely with Charles Babbage. She wrote a plan for how the Bernoulli numbers might be calculated, which is widely regarded as the first computer program.

1936

Alan Turing invented the Turing Machine, a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Computers to this day emulate this functionality of reading simple binary input and computing a logical output. This relatively simple machine enables the computation of any algorithm.

1944

The Colossus machines were electronic computing devices used by British codebreakers to read encrypted German messages during World War II. These were the world's first programmable, digital, electronic, computing devices. They used vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) to perform the calculations. Colossus was designed by engineer Tommy Flowers

1946

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was designed for the US Army.

1947

William Shockley of Bell Labs invented the first transistor.

1949

EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory. Later the project was supported by J. Lyons & Co. Ltd., who were rewarded with the first commercially applied computer, LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I), based on the EDSAC design.

1951

Ferranti Mark I was the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer. The first machine was delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951, just ahead of the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) which was delivered to the United States Census Bureau a month later.

1958

Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce created the first integrated circuit, commonly known as a microchip. An integrated circuit consists of electronic circuits mounted onto a semiconductor.

1964

The CDC 6600 was manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it was designed by Seymour Cray.

1964

Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse. It was built of a wooden case with two wheels and a button on top.

1969

ARPANET was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control. It was the precursor to the Internet.

1971

Intel released the first microprocessor, the 4-bit Intel 4004.

1971

Email was invented by Ray Tomlinson.

1974

The term “Internet” was first used.

1975

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.

1976

Apple-1 was released. It was an 8-bit computer designed by Steve Wozniak. To finance its creation, Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen Bus, and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator. Production was discontinued in September 1977 after the introduction of its successor, the Apple II.

1981

IBM launched its first personal computer, the IBM Model-5150.

1982

Sinclair ZX spectrum was released.

1984

Apple Mac was released.

1985

Microsoft released its first version of the Windows operating system.

1989

The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee.

1990

Microsoft Office was released.

1995

Java programing language was developed by James Gosling of Sun Microsystems.

1998

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University.

1998

The first quantum computer was created.

2012

Raspberry Pi single-board computer was released at a cost of £35. By December 2019, a total of 30 million devices had been sold. It was designed for the teaching of basic computer science in schools but has also been used in commercial applications.

Personal Computers

Altair 8800 was the first commercially successful personal computer. It was advertised on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975 and was sold by mail order. It was designed by MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) and was based on the Intel 8080 processor.

Commodore PET was released in 1977 by Commodore International. It contained an 8-bit microprocessor and included a version of BASIC in read-only memory. PET was a backronym of Personal Electronic Transactor. 219,000 units were sold.

IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) was the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line. Based on the Intel 8088 microprocessor. The operating system was IBM PC DOS, developed by Microsoft. The starting price was US$1,565 (equivalent to $5,040 in 2022).

Osborne 1 was the first commercially successful portable computer. It was released in 1981 and weighed 11 kg. The microprocessor was a Zilog Z80 and the operating system was CP/M.

BBC Micro was a series of microcomputers designed and built in the 1980s by Acorn Computers, headed by Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry, for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. The CPU was an 8-bit MOS Technology 6502 and the programming language was BBC BASIC. An accompanying 1982 television series, The Computer Programme, featuring Chris Serle learning to use the machine, was broadcast on BBC2.

ZX Spectrum was developed by Sinclair Research and was Britain's best-selling microcomputer, selling 5 million units. The initial cost of the 16 KB machine was £125. It was the successor to the ZX80 and ZX81 machines. The original ZX Spectrum had a rubber keyboard. The microprocessor was an 8-bit Z80. Sinclair licensed the Spectrum design to Timex Corporation in the United States.

Commodore 64 was an 8-bit computer released in 1982. It was the highest-selling single computer model of all time, with estimates placing the number sold between 12.5 and 17 million units. The machine took its name from its 64 kilobytes of RAM.

Operating Systems

CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) was created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. It was widely used in business through the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s but was eventually displaced by DOS following the 1981 introduction of the IBM PC.

MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. IBM PC DOS is a rebranded version of MS-DOS. In 1980 IBM approached Digital Research, at Bill Gates' suggestion, to license a forthcoming version of CP/M for its new product, the IBM Personal Computer. Upon the failure to obtain a signed non-disclosure agreement, the talks failed, and IBM instead contracted with Microsoft to provide an operating system. The resulting product, MS-DOS, soon began outselling CP/M.

Microsoft Windows is the most popular desktop operating system in the world, with a 70% market share.

List of Microsoft Windows versions

Version	Release date[Ek1]
Windows 1.0	1985
Windows 2.0	1987
Windows 2.1x	1988
Windows 3.0	1990
Windows 3.1	1992
Windows NT 3.1	1993
Windows 3.2	1993
Windows NT 3.5	1994
Windows NT 3.51	1995
Windows 95	1995
Windows NT 4.0	1995
Windows 98	1998
Windows 2000	2000
Windows ME	2000
Windows XP	2001
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition	2005
Windows Vista	2007
Windows 7	2009
Windows 8	2012
Windows 8.1	2013
Windows 10	2015
Windows 11	2021

Windows 1.0 replaced MS-DOS.

Windows NT is a multiprocessing and multi-user operating system.

Windows 95 introduced the Start menu. The Windows 95 release included a commercial featuring The Rolling Stones' 1981 single "Start Me Up" (a reference to the Start button). Microsoft paid the Rolling Stones $3 million for the rights to “Start Me Up”. Windows 95 was bundled as a standalone operating system that did not require a separate DOS license.

Windows ME (Millennium Edition) became infamously known by many as one of the worst versions of Windows ever released, mainly due to stability problems.

Windows Vista received poor reviews, mainly for its much higher hardware requirements and perceived slowness compared to Windows XP.

Windows 8 received a mostly negative reception. The new user interface of the operating system was widely criticized for being confusing and unintuitive.

Windows 10 reintroduced the Start menu, and incorporated Microsoft's intelligent personal assistant, Cortana. Internet Explorer was replaced with Microsoft Edge.

Mac OS was developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The Macintosh operating system is credited with having popularized the graphical user interface concept.

macOS succeeded the classic Mac OS. In 1985 Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had left Apple and started another company, NeXT, developing the NeXTSTEP platform that would later be acquired by Apple to form the basis of macOS.

List of macOS versions

Version	Release name	Release date
Mac OS X 10.0	Cheetah	2001
Mac OS X 10.1	Puma	2001
Mac OS X 10.2	Jaguar	2002
Mac OS X 10.3	Panther	2003
Mac OS X 10.4	Tiger	2005
Mac OS X 10.5	Leopard	2007
Mac OS X 10.6	Snow Leopard	2009
Mac OS X 10.7	Lion	2011
Mac OS X 10.8	Mountain Lion	2012
Mac OS X 10.9	Mavericks	2013
Mac OS X 10.10	Yosemite	2014
Mac OS X 10.11	El Capitan	2015
macOS 10.12	Sierra	2016
macOS 10.13	High Sierra	2017
macOS 10.14	Mojave	2018
macOS 10.15	Catalina	2019
macOS 11	Big Sur	2020
macOS 12	Monterey	2021
macOS 13	Ventura	2022
macOS 14	Sonoma	Announced on 5 June 2023

Unix is a family of multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development was started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

Almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language.

Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released in 1991 by Finnish-American software engineer Linus Torvalds.

Popular Linux distributions include Debian, Fedora Linux, and Ubuntu. Commercial distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Tux is the penguin mascot of the Linux kernel, and is based on an image created by Larry Ewing in 1996.

ChromeOS is a Linux-based operating system developed and designed by Google. Laptops or tablets running ChromeOS are known as Chromebooks.

Programming languages

FORTRAN (Formula Translation) was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, and subsequently came to dominate scientific computing.

COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC designed by Grace Hopper. It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. It is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems.

BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. It became the de facto programming language for home computer systems that usually had a BASIC interpreter installed by default.

Pascal is a procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth and intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is based on the ALGOL 60 language.

Ada is an object-oriented high-level programming language designed for the United States Department of Defense (DoD). Ada was named after Ada Lovelace.

C was developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs to construct utilities running on Unix. C is widely used for systems programming in implementing operating systems and embedded system applications.

C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell Labs. It is as an extension of the C programming language and has object-oriented features.

C# is based on the C family of languages, and has similarities to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript. It was designed by Anders Hejlsberg from Microsoft in 2000.

Java is a high-level, object-oriented programming language used to create complete applications. The language is platform independent, allowing it to run on any device that supports its environment. Java was originally developed by James Gosling as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The Java logo is a cup of coffee, and the mascot is a cartoon character named Duke.

Python is a general-purpose programming language created by Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991. Python's name is derived from the British comedy troupe Monty Python.

Ruby was developed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan and released in 1995. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity.

Go is an object-oriented programming language that Google created in 2009 for networking and infrastructure. It has evolved into a general-purpose language used in a wide range of applications.

Kotlin was designed by JetBrains, a company based in Prague. Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java, and is used by Android app developers. The name comes from Kotlin Island, near Saint Petersburg.

R is an open-source programming language for statistical computing and data analysis.

JavaScript is a dynamic scripting language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web. It was designed by Brendan Eich of Netscape and released in 1995.

PHP is a widely-used open source and general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development. PHP’s popularity is owed to the fact that it was one of the first server-side languages that developers could embed into HTML. It was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. PHP was originally an abbreviation of Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

Computer security

Types of attack –

Malware ('malicious software') is any program or file that is harmful to a computer user. Malware can be divided into a number of types –

Virus - replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own code into those programs. Once downloaded, opened or executed, the virus can piggyback onto programs to corrupt data.

Worm - a standalone program that replicates itself in order to spread to other computers. Creeper was the first computer worm, while Reaper was the first antivirus software, designed to eliminate Creeper. Reaper was created by Ray Tomlinson in 1972.

Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in 2010. It initially spread via Microsoft Windows, and targeted Siemens industrial software and equipment. Different variants of Stuxnet targeted five Iranian organizations, with the probable target widely suspected to be uranium enrichment infrastructure in Iran.

Trojan horse - any malware that misleads users of its true intent by disguising itself as a standard program. It is unable to replicate itself.

Ransomware - comprises a class of malware which restricts access to the computer system that it infects, and demands a ransom paid to the creator of the malware in order for the restriction to be removed. Ransomware attacks are typically carried out using a Trojan disguised as a legitimate file that the user is tricked into downloading or opening when it arrives as an email attachment.

Rogue software - a form of malware and internet fraud that misleads users into believing there is a virus on their computer and aims to convince them to pay for a fake malware removal tool that actually installs malware on their computer.

Spyware - malware used to gain access to a user’s systems and monitor their data, files, and behavior. Spyware is frequently associated with advertising.

Terms used in connection with attacks –

Phishing – the fraudulent practice of sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies in order to induce individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.

Smishing – similar to phishing, but the messages are sent via text messages rather than emails.

Vishing – similar to phishing, but the messages are sent via phone calls or voice mails rather than emails. Also known as voice phishing.

Whaling – a type of phishing attack where a particularly important person in an organisation is targeted.

Spoofing – a sort of fraud in which someone forges the sender’s identity and poses as a reputable source in order to obtain personal information, acquire money, spread malware, or steal data.

Doxing – short for "dropping dox," is an online attack in which hackers dig up personal information and documents – hence, the “dox” part of “dropping dox” – to expose the real identities of people hoping to remain anonymous.

Clickjacking – a malicious technique of tricking a user into clicking on something different from what the user perceives, thus potentially revealing confidential information.

Denial of service attack (DoS attack) – a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources, and is usually performed by a group of Internet-connected devices known as a botnet (a portmanteau of the words "robot" and "network").

Hackers

A hacker is able to subvert computer security. If doing so for malicious purposes, the person can also be called a cracker. There are three types of hackers –

Black hat – someone who maliciously searches for and exploits vulnerabilities in computer systems or networks, often using malware and other hacking techniques to do harm.

White hat – a security specialist hired to find vulnerabilities in software, hardware and networks that black hats may find and target. Unlike black hats, white hats only hack networks when legally permitted to do so. Also known as ethical hackers.

Grey hat – someone who exploits security vulnerabilities without malicious intent, like a white hat, but may use illegal methods to find flaws.

Anti-virus software

Norton AntiVirus

Founded by Peter Norton, Norton AntiVirus has been developed and distributed by Symantec since 1990. The product runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS.

The current Norton product, Norton 360, was developed by Gen Digital (formerly Symantec Corporation).

McAfee

John McAfee created VirusScan, the first commercial anti-virus software, in 1987.

In 2000, McAfee/Network Associates was the leading authority in educating and protecting people against the Love Bug or ILOVEYOU virus, one of the most destructive computer viruses in history.

Intel acquired McAfee in 2010.

Bitdefender

Bitdefender is a Romanian cybersecurity technology company headquartered in Bucharest. The company was founded in 2001 by the current CEO and main shareholder, Florin Talpes.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus

Kaspersky Lab is a Russian computer security company, co-founded by Natalia Kaspersky and Eugene Kaspersky in 1997, offering anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, and anti-intrusion products.

In 2016 the software has about 400 million users and had the largest market-share of cybersecurity software vendors in Europe.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security banned Kaspersky products from all government departments in 2017.

Avast Antivirus

Avast was founded in Prague in 1988. The software is software are sold on a freemium model, where basic security features are free, but more advanced features require purchasing a premium version. The free version is also supported by ads.

In 2017 it had the largest share of the market for antivirus applications.

AVG was a cybersecurity software company founded in 1991 and it merged into Avast following an acquisition in 2017.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing resources, such as storage and infrastructure, as services over the internet. The market is currently dominated by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

iCloud allows users to store data such as music files for download to multiple devices such as iPhones, iPods, iPads, and personal computers running Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows on computer servers owned by Apple

File hosting

A file-hosting service is a hosting service on the internet that stores user data, like images, videos, and other types of data files. These services are secure and allow a user to store their files safely on the internet. Since the files are stored on the internet, they can be accessed from anywhere if the user has internet access.

Microsoft OneDrive is a file hosting service operated by Microsoft. First launched in 2007, it enables registered users to share and synchronize their files. OneDrive also works as the storage backend of the web version of Microsoft Office. OneDrive offers 5 GB of storage space free of charge.

Quantum computing

A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. Quantum computers are different from traditional computers based on transistors.

In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is a unit of quantum information.

The field of quantum computing was initiated by the work of Paul Benioff and Yuri Manin in 1980, Richard Feynman in 1982, and David Deutsch in 1985.

IBM Quantum System One was the first commercial quantum computer.

It was hoped that a quantum computer could perform some calculations exponentially faster than any modern "classical" computer, but in 2023 classical computers outperform quantum computers for all real-world applications.

Office productivity software

Word processing

WordPerfect was the dominant player in the word processor market in the 1980s. Following a failed release for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word took over the market.

Microsoft Word was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Commercial versions of Word are licensed as a standalone product or as a component of Microsoft Office. In the top menu, the icon for the save button is a floppy disk.

Spreadsheet

VisiCalc (visible calculator) was the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for the Apple II in 1979. When Lotus 1-2-3 was launched in 1983, taking full advantage of the expanded memory and screen of the PC, VisiCalc sales practically ended overnight.

Lotus 1-2-3 was a state-of-the-art spreadsheet and the standard throughout the 1980s. Due to the lack of a graphical user interface Lotus was surpassed by Microsoft in the early 1990s and never recovered.

Microsoft Excel was launched in 1987. Excel was one of the first spreadsheet programs to use a graphical interface with pull down menus. The first version was only released for the Macintosh. It consists of 1048576 rows and 16384 columns, a row and column together make a cell.

Presentation program

Microsoft PowerPoint was created by Forethought, Inc. in 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoint three months after it appeared. PowerPoint was originally designed to provide visuals for group presentations within business organisations. PowerPoint's worldwide market share of presentation software is around 95%.

Microsoft Office

Office was first announced by Bill Gates in 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. The first version of Office contained Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Later versions included an email client (Outlook), a database management system (Access), and a desktop publishing app (Publisher). In Microsoft Office 2007, Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word and replaced Arial as the default in PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. The branding Office 365 was first introduced in 2010 to refer to subscription-based software as a service platform for the corporate market. In October 2022, Microsoft announced that it would rebrand the product as "Microsoft 365".

Laptops

Acer

Acer is a Taiwanese company founded in 1976.

Current models – Aspire, Chromebook, Spin, Swift.

Apple

The MacBook Air is Apple's least expensive notebook computer and was released in 2008. The MacBook Pro is Apple's higher-end notebook available in 13-inch, 14-inch, and 16-inch configurations and was released in 2006.

Current models – MacBook Pro, MacBook Air.

Asus

Asus is a Taiwanese company founded in 1989.

Current models – Chromebook, Flip, Zenbook.

Lenovo

Lenovo is a Chinese company founded as Legend in 1984, and acquired IBM's personal computer business in 2005, including the ThinkPad laptop. The IdeaPad line of laptops was introduced in 2008. Lenovo has been the world's largest PC vendor by unit sales in every year since 2013, with the exception of 2017.

Current models – IdeaPad.

Dell

Dell was founded by Michael Dell in 1984 and is the world's 3rd-largest PC vendor by unit sales. The first Inspiron laptop model was introduced in 1997.

Current models – Inspiron, XPS.

HP

HP Inc. was formerly known as Hewlett-Packard. It is the world's 2nd-largest PC vendor by unit sales.

Current models – Envy, Pavilion, Chromebook, ProBook.

Microsoft

Microsoft Surface is a series of touchscreen-based personal computers, tablets, and interactive whiteboards designed and developed by Microsoft, most of them running the Windows operating system. They are designed to be premium devices.

Current models – Surface.

Tablet computers

A tablet is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery.

A 2-in-1 PC is a hybrid or combination of a tablet and laptop computer that has features of both. Distinct from tablets, 2-in-1 PCs all have physical keyboards.

A phablet is a mobile device combining or straddling the size formats of smartphones and tablets. The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is a 2013 Android phablet designed and manufactured by Sony Mobile

Market share (2022) – Apple 37%, Samsung 18%, Amazon 11%

Apple

The iPad was released in 2010. It features a multi-touch screen and a virtual onscreen keyboard. The iOS operating system was switched to iPadOS in 2019. Total sales exceed 670 million units.

iPad range consists of the original iPad lineup and three other products –

iPad Mini – a smaller tablet with screen sizes of 7.9 inches and 8.3 inches.

iPad Air – uses the Apple M1 chip.

iPad Pro – professional model with a screen size of 12.9 inches. Uses the Apple M2 chip.

Amazon

The Amazon Fire is built with Quanta Computer in Taiwan. The Kindle Fire was first released in 2011, featuring a colour 7-inch multi-touch and running on Fire OS. In 2014, when the fourth generation was introduced, the name "Kindle" was dropped. In later generations, the Fire tablet is also able to convert into a Smart speaker with interaction by voice command through Alexa.

Samsung

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is a line of Android OS tablet computers first released in 2010.