* Abacus: c. 3000 BC
* Transistors: 1947
* Apple II: 1977
* IBM PC: 1981
* World Wide Web: 1991
(H-Ref 1)
Told you it was brief. Okay, so maybe a little bit more information is needed about the "big" events in history, yeah?
Alan Turing, born in England in 1912, did most of the serious work for the development of the computer. After the War, Turing investigated "programming, neural nets, and the prospects for artificial intelligence." (H-Ref 2)
In the 1950's, IBM produced the first commercially available computers. Impressive, huh? Not as impressive as the gigantic, monstrous machines that they were though. Ugly, but impressive.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got together to create that well-loved company we all know as Apple. They made this "thing" (I'd hardly call it a computer) called the Apple I - a primitive machine with a single circuit board, no case and no keyboard. It cost $USA666.60. Oh, the devil's number, could it be a sign? They came back with the Apple II after the flop of the Apple I, which basically made them a fortune by 1978. (H-Ref 2)
As for the internet... well...
*1969: something known as the ARPANET was brought online. Basically, it allowed computers to share information with each other across military and scientific fields.
*1972: Ray Tomlinson adapted e-mail for ARPANET
*1981: BITNET connected IBM mainframes around the educational community and the world to provide mail services
*1986: the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet
*1991: the first really friendly interface to the Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota.
*1998: Bill Gates releases Windows '98 with the internet browser well intergrated into the system
*Today: Wireless has been in for a while; internet speed is phenomenal when looking back.
(H-Ref 3)
Bibliography
H-Ref 1 - Triumph of the Nerds
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/timeline/
H-Ref 2- NCT 09 GC Blog
http://nct09-gc.blogspot.com/
H-Ref 3 - A Brief History of the Internet
http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html
H-Ref 4 - Big Computers
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/Shustek/37-Xerox-Alto.gif
H-Ref 5 - First Apple Computer
http://www.vintage-computer.com/images/apple2e.jpg
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