Records

02. June 1890 The Hollerith machine is used for the US census and becomes the first major success in IT history. Nintendo was founded a year earlier.

1833 Charles Babbage begins work on the "Analytical Engine". Unfortunately I couldn't find out the exact start date.

24. June 1784 The architect Johann Helfrich von Müller invented the Müller machine in 1784, which anticipated the principles of later calculators.

01. January 1673 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invents a functioning calculating machine for all four basic arithmetic operations.

23. Mai 1618 The Thirty Years' War shook all of Europe between 1618 and 1648.

Actually it was already 1100 B.C. when wooden slide rules and aids such as the abacus were invented in various cultures and improved over the centuries.

The Second World War claimed more than 60 million lives between 1939 and 1945.

German engineer Konrad Zuse completes the "Z3". The mainframe is considered to be the first functional computer.

In Great Britain "Colossus" cracked German radio messages, in the USA the mainframe computers Mark I (1944) and ENIAC (1946) were built.

The transistor was invented in Bell Labs, but later developments such as the field effect transistor are at least as important for the technical breakthrough.

The UNIVAC 1 is the first commercial computer. It is available for a price of one million US dollars. By the end of the year, there will be 31 computers worldwide.

The first modern mainframe computers are completed: Siemens 2002 (1957), NEAC 1101 (1958) and IBM 7000 (1959) are based on better transistors.

The integrated circuit, developed three years earlier at Fairchild, is patented.

The Cray 6600 is the first supercomputer to achieve respectable results with standard hardware.

The company Intel ("Integrated Electronics") is founded.

AMD was founded on May 1, 1969 under the name “Sanders Association” by Jerry Sanders III and Ed Turney. The seed capital was provided by investors, including Intel founder Robert Noyce.

The Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 21, 1969.

The Intel 4004 is a 4-bit microprocessor from microchip manufacturer Intel that was released on November 15, 1971. It is considered the first single-chip microprocessor to be mass-produced and sold on the open market. It is usually referred to as the…

In 1972 the companies Atari, SAP and Traf-O-Data were founded. The latter would be meaningless had it not been renamed to Microsoft by Bill Gates and Paul Allen three years later.

Published by Atari in 1972, Pong became the first globally popular video game and first became popular on machines in arcades in the 1970s. It is considered the forefather of video games, although video games had already been developed before.

The Motorola 6800 (MC6800), not to be confused with the much better known Motorola 68000, is an 8-bit processor from 1974 with 78 instructions and a 1 or 2 MHz clock rate. It has a 16-bit wide address bus and can therefore address up to 64 KB of memory.…

The Altair 8800 was an early home computer, then called a "microcomputer" to differentiate it from the refrigerator-sized "minicomputers". With its toggle switches for input and LEDs for output (machine console), this device did not yet have the ease of…

The Apple I went on sale, followed a year later by the Apple II, which was produced until 1993. The Apple I was a personal computer (PC) developed by Steve Wozniak from the American company Apple. It was the first device in the world to be affordable for…

The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor developed by Zilog Inc. company. The Z80 is still available today in CMOS technology. It was created shortly after Federico Faggin left Intel and founded his own company Zilog. At Intel he had worked on the 8080…

The 8086, introduced in 1978, is still the compatibility basis for all Macs and PCs today. A little later, Motorola's 680x0 appeared, also one of the most successful chips of all time. The Intel 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor from Intel. Developed in…

In record time, IBM engineers used cheap components to build a desktop computer that would coin the term PC. There is an Intel 8088 processor and DOS 1.0 on board. The open character (only the BIOS is really protected) and the fairly low price ensure…

E.T. by Steven Spielberg is showing in cinemas and breaking all audience records.

The Commodore 64 (C64 for short, colloquially 64 or “bread box”) is an 8-bit home computer with 64 KB of RAM . Since its introduction in January 1982 at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, the Commodore-built C64 was extremely popular in the mid to…

The first modem for data transmission over a telephone line is presented. ATTENTION - Modems were already available before, but not generally and worldwide for the Internet: A modem (short for modulator-demodulator) is a device that enables the exchange…

IBM launches the "8088 Portable" (the first PC laptop), which looks more like a toolbox than a computer.

Acorn introduces the ARM1, a 32-bit RISC processor, but it is rarely used. Only the ARM2 from 1986 was used in a computer. The prototype was presented on April 26, 1985 and delivered shortly later that year.

With the 386, Intel is switching to 32-bit technology for x86 processors.

Nintendo's NES games console comes onto the market in the USA - it becomes one of the most successful gaming platforms of all time and ensures a fantastic comeback of "console gaming". Release was for the USA on October 18, 1985 but for the EU only on…

AMD begins production of the A80286, a 286 clone.

The first Windows version comes onto the market.

The first Cebit opened its doors on March 12, 1986.

The Amiga 500 appears and repeats the miracle of the C64 - albeit with more modest sales figures. Nevertheless, the “girlfriend” becomes the undisputed number one among home computers.

Intel terminates its licensing agreement with AMD. The result was a legal dispute lasting years and the beginning of an unequal duel that continues to this day. Unfortunately, no exact date is known, only the year.

ASTRA1A, the first commercial television satellite, is launched into orbit; More than a dozen satellites follow and help private television, which has been broadcasting since 1984, achieve a breakthrough.

Sim City founded the genre of strategy games on the Amiga and the C64.

Intel presents the 486 processor, the first x86 chip with integrated memory (L1 cache).

Germany becomes football world champion in the summer of 1990. The national team won the final in Rome 1-0 against Argentina.

After the fall of the Wall in 1989, the two German states were reunified on October 3, 1990

Windows 3.1 appears and becomes the first truly successful Microsoft operating system...

The commercial internet (WWW) starts in Germany and that especially thanks to the browser Mosaic who was introduced in 1993. He is the ancestor of the later coming Netscape Navigator.

Intel introduces the first x86 processor with a name. The Pentium gives the x86 competitor a lot of trouble, even though it initially contains a serious calculation error (FDIV bug).

1993 id-Software presents "Doom" which leaded over night to a high popularity of firt person shooters. In Germany new zip codes where introduced.

Commodore is unfortunately dead. Also in Germany, Commodore, a success story of the 80s, has to declare itself bancrupt.

In 1995 the game Descent brings for the first time a full freedom of movement to the computer.

Windows 95 was released and breaks all the sales records.