“Man of the Year”

Time magazine names the Computer “Man of the Year” in 1982. "Computers were once regarded as distant, ominous abstractions, like Big Brother. In 1982, they truly became personalized, brought down to scale, so that people could hold, prod and play with them."
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Cyberspace

Novelist William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in his award winning 1984 science fiction novel "Neuromancer." Gibson describes cyberspace as "a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where, since about the time of the Second World War, we've increasingly done so many of the things that we think of as civilization."
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IBM

International Business Machines, the largest computer company in the world, starts in New York in 1911 when the Computing Tabulating Recording Company is created by a merger of the Tabulating Machine Company, International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Company, and Bundy Manufacturing. Computing Tabulating Recording is renamed International Business Machines in 1924.
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Manchester Mark I

The Manchester Mark I computer is built at the University of Manchester England in 1949. It is historically significant due to its pioneering inclusion of index registers in its architecture, as well as being the platform on which Autocode is developed, one of the first high-level computer languages. The Manchester Mark 1 is used for a variety of purposes, such as investigation of the Riemann hypothesis and calculations in optics.
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Comptometer

Dorr Eugene Felt develops the Comptometer in 1886. The Comptometer is the first practical key-driven calculator with sufficient speed and reliability to bring significant economic benefits to the processing of business data. A largely unheralded pioneer of today's data processing business, many of Felt's machines were still in use some fifty years after his death.
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UNIVAC I

The Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC I) is delivered to its first customer, the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1951. Developed by Remington-Rand, the first American computer designed for commercial business use weighs 8 tons and uses 5,000 vacuum tubes. The machine can perform about 1,000 calculations per second. Remington-Rand sells forty-six UNIVAC machines by 1957.
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Nerd

The term "nerd" comes from an original spelling "knurd." The term is originated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the late 1940s. Students who party and rarely study are called "drunks," while students who are always studying are known as "knurds" (drunks spelled backwards). The TV show Happy Days gives the phrase its national popularity.
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