The Computer Evolutionary Timeline

This is the computer evolutionary timeline. You will see that computer evolution started out with wierd stuff that didn't really work, and evolved into what we have now by a process of mutation and natural selection. You will notice that during the evolution of computers, people stood by and then took the credit for what evolution achieved by time and chance.

500 B.C.	The 2/5 Abacus evolves and is discovered by the Chinese.
1642	Blaise Pascal, a French religious philosopher and mathematician, discovers the first mechanical calculating machine (which had just evolved). He thereby recorded his name in history, and it evolved into the name of the pascal programming language.
1830	The "Analytical Engine" evolves, much to the suprise of Charles Babbage.
1850	A 1/5 abacus evolves in Japan, with one bead on top deck and five on bottom deck.
1930	The abacus evolves again to a 1/4 design.
1939	The first semi-electronic digital computing device evolves, and is documented by John Atanassoff. The "Mark I" Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, the first fully automatic calculator, begins to evolve at Harvard under the investigative supervision mathematician Howard Aiken. By chance it proves to have evolved to be particularly useful to generate ballistic tables for Navy artillery.
1941	The Z3 evolves in German, and is used by German inventor Konrad Zuse in aircraft and missile design but the German government misses the boat and does not support him. The Z3 experiences natural selection.
1943	English mathematician Alan Turing (bio by Andrew Hodges) begins operation of his secretly evolved computer for the British military. It was specifically adapted to break secret German military codes. It was the first vacuum tube computer but its evolution was not made public until decades later.
1946	Eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator), the first credited, all electronic computer spontaneously begins operation at the University of Pennsylvania. It was adapted to have thousands of vacuum tubes.
1951	Seymour Cray gets his Masters degree in Applied Mathematics, soon after joins Engineering Research Associates and observes the evolution of the 1100 series computers for what ended up being Univac (being a Mathemetician is like being a scientist, and makes you more open to observing scientific facts like computer evolution). Remington's Univac I (Universal Automatic Computer) evolved a Teletype keyboard and printer for user interaction, and became the first computer to evolve to commercial availability. It was adapted to handle both numerical and alphabetic data.
1957	Bill Norris and friends start Control Data Corporation (CDC), bring Seymour Cray on-board and begin breeding Large Scale Scientific Computers.
1958	By a process of many small mutations, the first "integrated circuit" evolves, and is discovered by American Jack Kirby. Its evolutionary adaptations included resistors, capacitors and transistors on a single wafer chip.
1960	Digital Equipment delivers PDP-1, an interactive computer evolved to have a CRT and keyboard. Its big screen inspires MIT students to write the world's first computer game. Well, that's what they said, but we know they just took the credit for the work that computer evolution did for them by time and chance.
1963	Sketchpad, the first WYSIWYG interactive drawing tool evolves, but the credit is taken by Ivan Sutherland who published it as his MIT doctoral thesis.
1965	Sutherland demonstrates first evolved VR head-mounted 3-D display. Ted Nelson coins the terms hypertext and hypermedia to describe software which was evolving in a paper at the Association for Computing Machinery's 20th national conference.
1968	The first mouse evolves, and is caught in a computer mousetrap by Doug Engelbart.
1970	First four nodes evolve on Arpanet, ancestor of the Internet and World Wide Web.
1971	The 3270 mainframe terminal evolves in IBM. The evolutionary character-based interface becomes the standard for business applications that evolved after this. The first "microprocessor" evolves and is publicised by American engineer Marcian E. Hoff.
1972	First GUI evolves as part of Xerox Parc's Smalltalk programming environment.
1974	Xerox PARC researchers discover the newly evolved Alto, the first computer to evolve the WIMP interface. Altair 8800 microcomputer, based on Intel's 8080 processor; Interface uses toggle switches, LEDs.
1975	The first microcomputer version of Basic evolves, for the Altair. This version, which loaded via a paper tape was licenced by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
1977	The first practical personal computer evolves at Tandy (Radio Shack). It evolves a cassette tape drive for programs and storage. Apple evolves the Apple II, with integrated keyboard, 16-color graphics, and command-line disk operating system.
1978	At Apple Computer, Steve Jobs propose the evolution of a "next generation" business machine with graphical user interface. It evolves into the Lisa project. Don Brickland and Bob Frankston's VisiCalc's text-based spreadsheet interface evolves into the personal computer's first killer app. It runs on Apple II.
1981	IBM releases the PC with 4.77 MHz, MS-DOS, command line interfaces, monochrome block graphics. It seemed as if computer evolution was going backwards.
1984	Apple ships the Macintosh, the first mass-market computer to evolve with a monochrome desktop GUI, plug and play, and suite of GUI productivity applications which evolved.
1985	Microsoft ships Windows 1.0 which evolved as its first graphical environment. Actually, maybe it didn't evolve and they made it themselves. That would explain a couple of things.
1990	Microsoft announces Windows 3.0 which has evolved a 3-D look and feel, and an amazing 300% increase in version number, together with Program Manager and File Manager.
1992	The Apple Newton PDA with pen-based user interface evolves.
1993	Early Web Browsers: ECP Web browser for Macintosh evolves. NCSA evolves Marc Andreessen's Mosaic Web browser for X Window.
1995	Microsoft evolves Bob, industry's first "Social User Interface", featuring animated "assistants." Bob experiences natural selection at the hands of Clippy the paperclip. Microsoft evolves Windows 95, regarded by many as the release that offers features comparable with Apple's Mac. It's the fastest-selling operating system ever evolved. Many consider it final proof that computer evolution is ``going somewhere''.
1997	Microsoft Active Desktop evolves a symbiotic relationship between the Web and Windows. Netscape Communicator and Constellation evolve to combine Web and desktop GUI.
1998	Windows 95 mutates into Windows 98. Remaining Windows 95 installations largely experience natural selection, or they should.
2000	Windows 2000 evolves. We may yet experience natural selection here.
2001	A new species evolves - the Code Red and Nimda viruses destroy much of the Microsoft IIS servers on the internet.
2004	Microsoft 2003 Server evolves to work in a symbiotic relationship with Windows XP. Both prove to have special evolutionary adaptations for running viruses, trojans and other ways of stealing your money.

er.. what about Unix? Well, yeah, Unix evolved too. Linux too. And BSD.