The Z3 computer

The Z3 computer is presented by German engineer Konrad Zuse in May 1941 to an audience of scientists in Berlin. The Z3 is credited as the world's first electronic programmable calculator and is used by the German aircraft industry to solve complex systems of simultaneous equations. The original Z3 computer was destroyed during bombing raids of World War II.
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The iPod

Apple Computer hires Tony Fadell in early 2001 and assigns him a team of designers, programmers and hardware engineers to develop a new music player called the iPod. Fadell's idea is to take an MP3 player, build a music sale service to complement it, and build a company around it. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is highly involved with the project since its inception and molds the device's shape, feel and design.
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Ada

The modern programming language Ada is named in 1979 to honor the first known computer programmer Augusta Ada Byron. Born in 1815, Augusta Ada Byron developed a computer program to run on Charles Babbage's Analytical Machine computer. The program was designed to compute the mathematical sequence known as Bernoulli numbers.
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Charles Babbage

British mathematician Charles Babbage conceives the ideas for the Difference Machine and the Analytical Machine in the 1820s. The Difference Machine would automatically calculate mathematical tables. The Analytical Machine is intended to use loops to make decisions based on previous computations. These machines are the first to be considered as computers in the modern sense of the word.
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Charles Geschke is kidnapped

On the morning of May 26, 1992, Adobe Systems co-founder and President Charles Geschke is kidnapped at gunpoint in broad day light from the Adobe parking lot in Mountain View, California. He is held for $650,000 ransom for four days while the FBI searches for him. He is located in Hollister, California, freed, and returned to his family. The two kidnappers are sentenced to life terms in prison.
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Turing Machine

British mathematician Alan Turing conceptualizes the idea of computer software in the 1930s. His revolutionary concept, dubbed the "Turing Machine," describes how a computer can perform a particular task by breaking the job down into a series of simple instructions. This concept earns Turing the title of "Father" of modern computer science.
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MULTICS

Bell Labs and General Electric scientists work together in 1965 in an attempt to develop a convenient, interactive computer system that can support many users. Their effort, called the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service timesharing system (MULTICS), ends in relative failure. However, the legacy of this effort will lead directly to the development of the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs.
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Ethernet LAN

The first Ethernet LAN data packet is transmitted at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center on May 23, 1973. Bob Metcalf and David Boggs are the inventors of the networking technology that will eventually be used on the vast majority of local area networks in the world. For three years they work to refine and improve their invention. By 1976, their experimental network is connecting 100 devices.
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Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows 3.0 is released on May 22, 1990. Independent software vendors begin developing Windows applications with vigor in response to its increased memory addressing and a more powerful user interface. The powerful new applications help Microsoft sell more than 10 million copies of Windows, making it the best-selling graphical user interface in the history of computing.
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GNU

"GNU's Not Unix" (GNU) is announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The goal of GNU is to create a free, UNIX-compatible operating system, called the GNU system. The GNU component libraries, compilers, text editors, and shell are integrated with LINUX in the early 1990s making the GNU operating system complete.
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Software Engineering

The discipline of Software Engineering enters its first stages during the late 1950s. Software workers rewrite all their programs to run on new machines every couple of years. Programs are run by putting punched cards into machine readers and waiting for results to come back on a printer. For the most part, academia does not yet teach the principles of computer science.
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The first working ATM

Docutel Vice President Don Wetzel conceptualizes the idea for the automated teller machine (ATM) while waiting in line at a Dallas bank in the late 1960s. After a five million dollar investment, a working prototype of the ATM is delivered in 1969. The first working ATM is installed in New York at Chemical Bank. Docutel is issued a patent for the ATM in 1973.
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"Silicon Alley"

New York City's "Silicon Alley" nickname originates during the late 1990s from a cluster of Internet and multimedia companies extending from Manhattan's Flatiron district to TriBeCa. The growth of Internet, new media, advertising, and dot com companies during this period gives New York City its first new growth industry in nearly two decades.
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RPG

The Report Program Generator (RPG) language is developed by IBM for its popular 1401 computer in 1964. The reporting tool is created to run matching records and sub-total reports from data. Since then, RPG has been ported to many IBM platforms such as System/390, System 32/34/36, the AS400 series, and the Websphere platform. RPG's remarkable longevity as a business tool ranks with BASIC and COBOL.
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Rapid Application Development

James Martin develops the Rapid Application Development software method during the 1980s at IBM. RAD involves iterative development, the construction of prototypes, and the use of computer-aided engineering tools. The method comes in response to methodologies where applications development takes so long that requirements change before the system is complete, often resulting in unusable systems.
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Computer worm

The term "worm" is derived from a 1970s science fiction novel by John Brunner entitled "The Shockwave Rider." The book describes programs known as "tapeworms" which spread through a network for the purpose of deleting data. The term is first used in computer science by researchers in the study of distributed computing.
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"Let's Talk Computers"

"Let's Talk Computers" goes on the air in 1989. The radio show is hosted by Alan and Sandra Ashendorf, and features insider conversations covering the latest hardware, software, and computer innovations. The weekly show is based in Nashville, Tennessee and ranks as one of the longest running radio computer talk shows.
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Desk Set

The comedy movie "Desk Set" is released in 1957. Richard Sumner has been tasked with the computerization of the research department of a big television network. Research department head Bunny Watson's fear of losing her job is pitted against her attraction to Sumner.
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SAGE project

The first demonstrations of computer time-sharing systems are performed in the summer of 1962 by the U.S. Air Force's SAGE project at MIT. A time sharing operating system permits each user of a computer to behave as though he were in sole control of the computer. The primary developers of timesharing are MIT Professor Fernando Corbato and researchers John McCarthy and Ed Fredkin.
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Thomas Watson

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943.
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Bluetooth

Swedish company Ericsson initiates the Bluetooth Technology movement in 1994. Bluetooth is a wireless radio standard designed for low power, short-wave device communication. In February 1998, five major companies found the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). Today, many devices such as cell phones, PDAs, computers, and hands-free devices include integrated BlueTooth technology.
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Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

Thomas J. Watson, Jr. becomes CEO of IBM in May 1956. Over the next 15 years, Watson will transition IBM from the age of mechanical office equipment into the computer era during its most explosive period of growth. When Watson becomes CEO, IBM employs 72,500 people and has revenue of $892 million. When he steps down in 1971, there are more than 270,000 employees and revenue is $8.3 billion.
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The Network Computer

Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellison announces in 1997 his intention to replace the PC with a low-cost device called the Network Computer (NC). The NC is billed as being as simple as turning on a TV or answering a telephone. Due to incompatibility perceptions, the interest in the NC unit never comes to fruition. Sales come up about 99 million units short of Ellison's 100 million unit projection.
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Sony

Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita establish Sony on May 7, 1946. The company begins modestly as a maker of a rice boiler. The Sony name is derived as a mix of the Latin word sonus, the English word "sunny," and from the word "Sonny-boys" which is Japanese slang for "whiz kids."
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GIF

Online bulletin board company CompuServe introduces the Graphics Interchange Format in 1987. Developed by Terry Welch of Sperry Corporation in 1984, GIF format allows large images to be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time, even with very slow modems. With the advent of the Internet, GIF format becomes the most widely used image format on the web.
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"I Love You"

The "I Love You" computer virus is released in spring of 2000 and affects millions of computers. Users are infected via e-mail, Internet chat systems, and through shared file systems. The virus is a program attached to an e-mail with the subject line, "I LOVE YOU." The destructive virus overwrites several types of files, including .gif and .jpg files, modifies the Internet Explorer start page, and changes registry keys.
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BASIC

The BASIC programming language runs for the first time on a General Electric 225 mainframe computer at Dartmouth College in spring of 1964. BASIC is an acronym for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz develop the language. It is intended to be a stepping-stone for students to learn one of the more powerful languages such as FORTRAN and ALGOL.
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EDSAC

Maurice Wilkes and his team at Cambridge University complete the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer (EDSAC) in May 1949. EDSAC is the first full-scale operational stored-program computer. The clock speed is 500 kHz and most instructions take about 1,500 milliseconds to execute.
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Steve Jobs

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is demoted by Apple's board of directors and resigns in May 1985. This event climaxes an internal power struggle between Jobs and CEO John Sculley. Ironically, Sculley joined the company in 1983 at Jobs' urging. Sculley remains the CEO until 1993. In 1997, Steve Jobs is back as Apple CEO, after the board of directors lose confidence in CEO Gil Amelio.
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Crazy Frog Axel F

The mobile phone ring tone "Crazy Frog Axel F" tops Britain's singles music charts in May 2005. Jamster's ring tone song, inspired by the 1980s movie theme from "Beverly Hills Cop," is the first song created specifically for mobile phones to crossover onto the mainstream pop music charts. The ring tone single registers 150,000 downloads in just one week.
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