computer history

1939-David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which was used by many engineers.
....Walt Disney Pictures also ordered eight of the 200B model to use as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie “Fantasia.”
1941-Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 computer which was an early computer which used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length.
1943- The original Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid of Berlin.
1945-On September 9th, Grace Hopper recorded the first actual computer "bug" — a moth stuck between the relays and logged at 15:45 hours on the Harvard Mark II. She helped program the Harvard Mark I and II and developed the first compiler, A-0.
1948-Claude Shannon showed engineers how to code data so they could check for accuracy after transmission between computers.
1950- Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer that held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices it stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second.
this computer was first used by the U.S. Navy
1952- grace hopper completes the A-0 Compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use english-like words instead of numbers.

1958- the first integrated circuit is created to prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material.

1962- the first widely accepted epitaxial gold-doped NPN transistor was created by fairchild camera and instrument corp.

1963- the first artificial robotic arm is created, the rancho arm, as a tool for the handicapped. its fjoints flexibilty deminstrate the motion of a human arm.

http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1939
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1941
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1943
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1945
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1948
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1950
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1952
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1957
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1962
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1963