Computer Timeline

1. PROJECT IN COMPUTER

2. EVOLUTION/TIMELINE OF
COMPUTERS
1980 – 2020
• Jersey Rain O. Chua
• Grade 6 – Ylang-ylang

3. 1980
Commodore introduces the VIC-20
Commodore releases the VIC-20 home computer as the successor to
the Commodore PET personal computer. Intended to be a less
expensive alternative to the PET, the VIC-20 was highly successful,
becoming Commodore releases the VIC-20 home computer as the
successor to the Commodore PET personal computer. Intended to be
a less expensive alternative to the PET, the VIC-20 was highly
successful, becoming the first computer to sell more than a million
units. Commodore even used Star Trek television star William
Shatner in advertisements.

4. ZX80 introduced
This very small home computer is available in the UK as a
kit for £79 or pre-assembled for £99. Inside was a Z80
microprocessor and a built-in BASIC language interpreter.
Output was displayed on the user’s home TV screen
through use of an adapter. About 50,000 were sold in
Britain, primarily to hobbyists, and initially there was a long
waiting list for the system.

5. 1981
The Computer Programme debuts on the BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Computer Literacy
Project hoped “to introduce interested adults to the world of
computers.” Acorn produces a popular computer, the BBC
Microcomputer System, so viewers at home could follow
along on their own home computers as they watched the
program. The machine was expandable, with ports for
cassette storage, serial interface and rudimentary networking.
A large amount of software was created for the “BBC Micro,”
including educational, productivity, and game programs.

6. Apollo Computer unveils its first workstation, its
DN100
The DN100 is based on the Motorola 68000
microprocessor, high-resolution display and built-in
networking - the three basic features of all
workstations. Apollo and its main competitor, Sun
Microsystems, optimized their machines to run the
computer-intensive graphics programs common in
engineering and scientific applications. Apollo was a
leading innovator in the workstation field for more than
a decade, and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in
1989.

7. IBM introduces its Personal Computer (PC)
IBM's brand recognition, along with a massive marketing
campaign, ignites the fast growth of the personal computer
market with the announcement of its own personal computer
(PC). The first IBM PC, formally known as the IBM Model
5150, was based on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor
and used Microsoft´s MS-DOS operating system. The IBM PC
revolutionized business computing by becoming the first PC to
gain widespread adoption by industry. The IBM PC was widely
copied (“cloned”) and led to the creation of a vast “ecosystem”
of software, peripherals, and other commodities for use with
the platform.

8. Osborne 1 introduced
Weighing 24 pounds and costing $1,795, the Osborne 1 is
the first mass-produced portable computer. Its price was
especially attractive as the computer included very useful
productivity software worth about $1,500 alone. It featured a
5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, a modem, and two 5.25-
inch floppy disk drives.

9. 1982
Commodore introduces the Commodore 64
The C64, as it is better known, sells for $595, comes with
64 KB of RAM and features impressive graphics.
Thousands of software titles were released over the
lifespan of the C64 and by the time it was discontinued in
1993, it had sold more than 22 million units. It is recognized
by the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records as the
greatest selling single computer of all time.

10. Franklin releases Apple II “clones”
Created almost five years after the original Apple II, Franklin's
Ace 1000 main logic board is nearly identical to that in the
Apple II+ computer, and other models were later cloned as
well. Franklin was able to undercut Apple's pricing even while
offering some features not available on the original. Initially,
Franklin won a court victory allowing them to continue cloning
the machines, but in 1988, Apple won a copyright lawsuit
against Franklin, forcing them to stop making Apple II
“clones.”

11. Sun Microsystems is founded
When Xerox PARC loaned the Stanford Engineering Department
an entire Alto Ethernet network with laser printer, graduate student
Andy Bechtolsheim re-designed it into a prototype that he then
attached to Stanford’s computer network. Sun Microsystems
grows out of this prototype. The roots of the company’s name
came from the acronym for Stanford University Network (SUN).
The company was incorporated by three 26-year-old Stanford
alumni: Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy. The trio
soon attracted UC Berkeley UNIX guru Bill Joy, who led software
development. Sun helped cement the model of a workstation
having an Ethernet interface as well as high-resolution graphics
and the UNIX operating system.

12. 1983
Apple introduces the Lisa computer
Lisa is the first commercial personal computer with a
graphical user interface (GUI). It was thus an important
milestone in computing as soon Microsoft Windows and
the Apple Macintosh would soon adopt the GUI as their
user interface, making it the new paradigm for personal
computing. The Lisa ran on a Motorola 68000
microprocessor and came equipped with 1 MB of RAM, a
12-inch black-and-white monitor, dual 5.25-inch floppy
disk drives and a 5 MB “Profile” hard drive. Lisa itself, and
especially its GUI, were inspired by earlier work at the
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

13. Compaq Computer Corporation introduces the Compaq Portable
Advertised as the first 100% IBM PC-compatible computer, the
Compaq Portable can run the same software as the IBM PC. With
the success of the clone, Compaq recorded first-year sales of $111
million, the most ever by an American business in a single year.
The success of the Portable inspired many other early IBM-
compatible computers. Compaq licensed the MS-DOS operating
system from Microsoft and legally reverse-engineered IBM’s BIOS
software. Compaq's success launched a market for IBM-
compatible computers that by 1996 had achieved an 83-percent
share of the personal computer market.

14. 1984
Apple Computer launches the Macintosh
Apple introduces the Macintosh with a television commercial
during the 1984 Super Bowl, which plays on the theme of
totalitarianism in George Orwell´s book 1984. The ad featured
the destruction of “Big Brother” – a veiled reference to IBM --
through the power of personal computing found in a
Macintosh. The Macintosh was the first successful mouse-
driven computer with a graphical user interface and was based
on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor. Its price was $2,500.
Applications that came as part of the package included
MacPaint, which made use of the mouse, and MacWrite, which
demonstrated WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
word processing.

15. IBM releases its PC Jr. and PC/AT
The PC Jr. is marketed as a home computer but is too expensive
and limited in performance to compete with many of the other
machines in that market. It’s “chiclet” keyboard was also criticized
for poor ergonomics. While the PC Jr. sold poorly, the PC/AT sold
in the millions. It offered increased performance and storage
capacity over the original IBM PC and sold for about $4,000. It
also included more memory and accommodated high-density 1.2-
megabyte 5 1/4-inch floppy disks.

16. 1985
PC's Limited is founded
In 1984, Michael Dell creates PC's Limited while still a student
of the University of Texas at Austin. The dorm-room
headquartered company sold IBM PC-compatible computers
built from stock components. Dell dropped out of school to
focus on his business and in 1985, the company produced the
first computer of its own design, the Turbo PC, which sold for
$795. By the early 1990s, Dell became one of the leading
computer retailers.

17. The Amiga 1000 is released
Commodore’s Amiga 1000 is announced with a major event at
New York's Lincoln Center featuring celebrities like Andy
Warhol and Debbie Harry of the musical group Blondie. The
Amiga sold for $1,295 (without monitor) and had audio and
video capabilities beyond those found in most other personal
computers. It developed a very loyal following while add-on
components allowed it to be upgraded easily. The inside of the
Amiga case is engraved with the signatures of the Amiga
designers, including Jay Miner as well as the paw print of his
dog Mitchy.

18. 1986
Compaq introduces the Deskpro 386 system
Compaq beats IBM to the market when it announces the Deskpro 386,
the first computer on the market to use Intel´s new 80386 chip, a 32-bit
microprocessor with 275,000 transistors on each chip. At 4 million
operations per second and 4 kilobytes of memory, the 80386 gave
PCs as much speed and power as older mainframes and
minicomputers.
The 386 chip brought with it the introduction of a 32-bit architecture, a
significant improvement over the 16-bit architecture of previous
microprocessors. It had two operating modes, one that mirrored the
segmented memory of older x86 chips, allowing full backward
compatibility, and one that took full advantage of its more advanced
technology. The new chip made graphical operating environments for
IBM PC and PC-compatible computers practical. The architecture that
allowed Windows and IBM OS/2 has remained in subsequent chips.

19. IBM releases the first commercial RISC-based workstation
Reduced instruction set computers (RISC) grow out of the
observation that the simplest 20 percent of a computer´s
instruction set does 80 percent of the work. The IBM PC-RT
had 1 MB of RAM, a 1.2-megabyte floppy disk drive, and a
40 MB hard drive. It performed 2 million instructions per
second, but other RISC-based computers worked
significantly faster.

20. The Connection Machine is unveiled
Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corporation moves artificial
intelligence a step forward when he develops the controversial
concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine CM-1.
The machine used up to 65,536 one-bit processors and could
complete several billion operations per second. Each processor
had its own small memory linked with others through a flexible
network that users altered by reprogramming rather than rewiring.
The machine´s system of connections and switches let processors
broadcast information and requests for help to other processors in
a simulation of brain-like associative recall. Using this system, the
machine could work faster than any other at the time on a problem
that could be parceled out among the many processors.

21. 1987
Acorn Archimedes is released
Acorn's ARM RISC microprocessor is first used in the
company's Archimedes computer system. One of Britain's
leading computer companies, Acorn continued the
Archimedes line, which grew to nearly twenty different
models, into the 1990s. Acorn spun off ARM as its own
company to license microprocessor designs, which in turn
has transformed mobile computing with ARM’s low power,
high-performance processors and systems-on-chip (SoC).

22. IBM introduces its Personal System/2 (PS/2) machines
The first IBM system to include Intel´s 80386 chip, the company
ships more than 1 million units by the end of the first year. IBM
released a new operating system, OS/2, at the same time,
allowing the use of a mouse with IBM PCs for the first time.
Many credit the PS/2 for making the 3.5-inch floppy disk drive
and video graphics array (VGA) standard for IBM computers.
The system was IBM's response to losing control of the PC
market with the rise of widespread copying of the original IBM
PC design by “clone” makers.

23. 1988
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs unveils the NeXT Cube
Steve Jobs, forced out of Apple in 1985, founds a new company
– NeXT. The computer he created, an all-black cube was an
important innovation. The NeXT had three Motorola
microprocessors and 8 MB of RAM. Its base price was $6,500.
Some of its other innovations were the inclusion of a magneto-
optical (MO) disk drive, a digital signal processor and the
NeXTSTEP programming environment (later released as
OPENSTEP). This object-oriented multitasking operating
system was groundbreaking in its ability to foster rapid
development of software applications. OPENSTEP was used as
one of the foundations for the new Mac OS operating system
soon after NeXT was acquired by Apple in 1996.

24. Laser 128 is released
VTech, founded in Hong Kong, had been a manufacturer of
Pong-like games and educational toys when they introduce the
Laser 128 computer. Instead of simply copying the basic input
output system (BIOS) of the Apple II as Franklin Computer had
done, they reversed engineered the system and sold it for US
$479, a much lower price than the comparable Apple II. While
Apple sued to remove the Laser 128 from the market, they were
unsuccessful and the Laser remained one of the very few Apple
“clones” for sale.

25. 1989
Intel introduces the 80486 microprocessor
Intel released the 80486 microprocessor and the i860
RISC/coprocessor chip, each of which contained more than 1
million transistors. The RISC microprocessor had a 32-bit
integer arithmetic and logic unit (the part of the CPU that
performs operations such as addition and subtraction), a 64-bit
floating-point unit, and a clock rate of 33 MHz.
The 486 chips remained similar in structure to their
predecessors, the 386 chips. What set the 486 apart was its
optimized instruction set, with an on-chip unified instruction
and data cache and an optional on-chip floating-point unit.
Combined with an enhanced bus interface unit, the
microprocessor doubled the performance of the 386 without
increasing the clock rate.

26. Macintosh Portable is introduced
Apple had initially included a handle in their Macintosh
computers to encourage users to take their Macs on the go,
though not until five years after the initial introduction does
Apple introduce a true portable computer. The Macintosh
Portable was heavy, weighing sixteen pounds, and expensive
(US$6,500). Sales were weaker than projected, despite being
widely praised by the press for its active matrix display,
removable trackball, and high performance. The line was
discontinued less than two years later.

27. 1990
Intel's Touchstone Delta supercomputer system comes
online
Reaching 32 gigaflops (32 billion floating point operations
per second), Intel’s Touchstone Delta has 512 processors
operating independently, arranged in a two-dimensional
communications “mesh.” Caltech researchers used this
supercomputer prototype for projects such as real-time
processing of satellite images, and for simulating molecular
models in AIDS research. It would serve as the model for
several other significant multi-processor systems that would
be among the fastest in the world.

28. 1991
Babbage's Difference Engine #2 is completed
Based on Charles Babbage's second design for a
mechanical calculating engine, a team at the Science
Museum in London sets out to prove that the design would
have worked as planned. Led by curator Doron Swade the
team built Babbage’s machine in six years, using
techniques that would have been available to Babbage at
the time, proving that Babbage’s design was accurate and
that it could have been built in his day.

29. PowerBook series of laptops is introduced
Apple's Macintosh Portable meets with little success in the
marketplace and leads to a complete redesign of Apple's line of
portable computers. All three PowerBooks introduced featured a
built-in trackball, internal floppy drive, and palm rests, which
would eventually become typical of 1990s laptop design. The
PowerBook 100 was the entry-level machine, while the
PowerBook 140 was more powerful and had a larger memory.
The PowerBook 170 was the high-end model, featuring an
active matrix display, faster processor, as well as a floating point
unit. The PowerBook line of computers was discontinued in
2006.

30. 1992
DEC announces Alpha chip architecture
Designed to replace the 32-bit VAX architecture, the Alpha is a 64-
bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessor. It was
widely used in DEC's workstations and servers, as well as several
supercomputers like the Chinese Sunway Blue Light system, and
the Swiss Gigabooster. The Alpha processor designs were
eventually acquired by Compaq, which, along with Intel, phased out
the Alpha architecture in favor of the HP/Itanium microprocessor.

31. Intel Paragon is operational
Based on the Touchstone Delta computer Intel had built at
Caltech, the Paragon is a parallel supercomputer that uses
2,048 (later increased to more than four thousand) Intel i860
processors. More than one hundred Paragons were installed
over the lifetime of the system, each costing as much as five
million dollars. The Paragon at Caltech was named the
fastest supercomputer in the world in 1992. Paragon
systems were used in many scientific areas, including
atmospheric and oceanic flow studies, and energy research.

32. 1993
Apple ships the first Newton
Apple enters the handheld computer market with the Newton.
Dubbed a “Personal Data Assistant” by Apple President John
Scully in 1992, the Newton featured many of the features that
would define handheld computers in the following decades.
The handwriting recognition software was much maligned for
inaccuracy. The Newton line never performed as well as hoped
and was discontinued in 1998.

33. Intel's Pentium microprocessor is released
The Pentium is the fifth generation of the ‘x86’ line of
microprocessors from Intel, the basis for the IBM PC and its
clones. The Pentium introduced several advances that made
programs run faster such as the ability to execute several
instructions at the same time and support for graphics and
music.

34. 1994
RISC PC is released
Replacing their Archimedes computer, the RISC PC from
UK's Acorn Computers uses the ARMv3 RISC
microprocessor. Though it used a proprietary operating
system, RISC OS, the RISC PC could run PC-
compatible software using the Acorn PC Card. The RISC
PC was used widely in UK broadcast television and in
music production.

35. 1995
BeBox is released
Be, founded by former Apple executive Jean Louis Gassée and a
number of former Apple, NeXT and SUN employees, releases their
only product – the BeBox. Using dual PowerPC 603 CPUs, and
featuring a large variety of peripheral ports, the first devices were
used for software development. While it did not sell well, the operating
system, Be OS, retained a loyal following even after Be stopped
producing hardware in 1997 after less than 2,000 machines were
produced.

36. IBM releases the ThinkPad 701C
Officially known as the Track Write, the automatically
expanding full-sized keyboard used by the ThinkPad 701
is designed by inventor John Karidis. The keyboard was
comprised of three roughly triangular interlocking pieces,
which formed a full-sized keyboard when the laptop was
opened -- resulting in a keyboard significantly wider than
the case. This keyboard design was dubbed “the
Butterfly.” The need for such a design was lessened as
laptop screens grew wider.

37. 1996
Palm Pilot is introduced
Palm Inc., founded by Ed Colligan, Donna Dubinsky, and Jeff
Hawkins, originally created software for the Casio Zoomer
personal data assistant. The first generation of Palm-
produced devices, the Palm 1000 and 5000, are based
around a Motorola microprocessor running at 16MHz, and
uses a special gestural input language called “Graffiti,” which
is quick to learn and fast. Palm could be connected to a PC or
Mac using a serial port to synchronize – “sync” – both
computer and Palm. The company called it a ‘connected
organizer’ rather than a PDA to emphasize this ability.

38. Sony Vaio series is begun
Sony had manufactured and sold computers in Japan, but the
VAIO signals their entry into the global computer market. The
first VAIO, a desktop computer, featured an additional 3D
interface on top of the Windows 95 operating system as a way
of attracting new users. The VAIO line of computers would be
best known for laptops were designed with communications and
audio-video capabilities at the forefront, including innovative
designs that incorporated TV and radio tuners, web cameras,
and handwriting recognition. The line was discontinued in 2014.

39. 1997
ASCI Red is operational
The Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI)
needed a supercomputer to help with the maintenance of
the US nuclear arsenal following the ban on underground
nuclear testing. The ASCI Red, based on the design of the
Intel Paragon, was built by IBM and delivered to Sandia
National Laboratories. Until the year 2000, it was the
world’s fastest supercomputer, able to achieve peak
performance of 1.3 teraflops, (about 1.3 trillion calculations
per second).

40. 1998
The iMac, a range of all-in-one Macintosh desktop computers,
is launched
Apple makes a splash with its Bondi Blue iMac, which sells for
about $1,300. Customers got a machine with a 233-MHz G3
processor, 4GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, a CD-ROM drive,
and a 15" monitor. The machine was noted for its ease-of-use
and included a 'manual' that contained only a few pictures
and less than 20 words. As Apple’s first new product under
the leadership of a returning Steve Jobs, many consider this
the most significant step in Apple's return from near-
bankruptcy in the middle 1990s.

41. 2000
First camera phone introduce
Japan's SoftBank introduces the first camera phone, the J-
Phone J-SH04; a Sharp-manufactured digital phone with
integrated camera. The camera had a maximum resolution
of 0.11 megapixels a 256-color display, and photos could
be shared wirelessly. The J-Phone line would quickly
expand, releasing a flip-phone version just a month later.
Cameras would become a significant part of most phones
within a year, and several countries have even passed laws
regulating their use.

42. 2002
Earth Simulator is world's fastest supercomputer
Developed by the Japanese government to create global
climate models, the Earth Simulator is a massively parallel,
vector-based system that costs nearly 60 billion yen (roughly
$600 million at the time). A consortium of aerospace, energy,
and marine science agencies undertook the project, and the
system was built by NEC around their SX-6 architecture. To
protect it from earthquakes, the building housing it was built
using a seismic isolation system that used rubber supports. The
Earth Simulator was listed as the fastest supercomputer in the
world from 2002 to 2004.

43. Handspring Treo is released
Leaving Palm Inc., Ed Colligan, Donna Dubinsky, and Jeff
Hawkins found Handspring. After retiring their initial Visor
series of PDAs, Handspring introduced the Treo line of
smartphones, designed with built-in keyboards, cameras,
and the Palm operating system. The Treo sold well, and
the line continued until Handspring was purchased by
Palm in 2003.

44. 2003
PowerMac G5 is released
With a distinctive anodized aluminum case, and hailed as
the first true 64-bit personal computer, the Apple G5 is the
most powerful Macintosh ever released to that point. While
larger than the previous G4 towers, the G5 had
comparatively limited space for expansion. Virginia Tech
used more than a thousand PowerMac G5s to create the
System X cluster supercomputer, rated #3 in November of
that year on the world’s TOP500 fastest computers.

45. 2005
Arduino
Harkening back to the hobbyist era of personal computing
in the 1970s, Arduino begins as a project of the Interaction
Design Institute, Ivrea, Italy. Each credit card-sized Arduino
board consisted of an inexpensive microcontroller and
signal connectors which made Arduinos ideal for use in any
application connecting to or monitoring the outside world.
The Arduino used a Java-based integrated development
environment and users could access a library of programs,
called “Wiring,” that allowed for simplified programming.
Arduino soon became the main computer platform of the
worldwide “Maker” movement.

46. Lenovo acquires IBM’s PC business
Nearly a quarter century after IBM launched their PC in 1981, they
had become merely another player in a crowded marketplace.
Lenovo, China’s largest manufacturer of PCs, purchased IBM’s
personal computer business in 2005, largely to gain access to
IBM’s ThinkPad line of computers and sales force. Lenovo became
the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world with the acquisition,
later also acquiring IBM’s server line of computers.

47. NASA Ames Research Center supercomputer Columbia
Named in honor of the space shuttle which broke-up on
re-entry, the Columbia supercomputer is an important
part of NASA's return to manned spaceflight after the
2003 disaster. Columbia was used in space vehicle
analysis, including studying the Columbia disaster, but
also in astrophysics, weather and ocean modeling. At its
introduction, it was listed as the second fastest
supercomputer in the world and this single system
increased NASA's supercomputing capacity 10-fold. The
system was kept at NASA Ames Research Center until
2013, when it was removed to make way for two new
supercomputers.

48. 2006
One Laptop Per Child initiative begins
At the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
announces it will create a program to deliver technology and
resources to targeted schools in the least developed
countries. The project became the One Laptop per Child
Consortium (OLPC) founded by Nicholas Negroponte, the
founder of MIT's Media Lab. The first offering to the public
required the buyer to purchase one to be given to a child in
the developing world as a condition of acquiring a machine
for themselves. By 2011, over 2.4 million laptops had been
shipped.

49. 2007
The Amazon Kindle is released
Many companies have attempted to release electronic
reading systems dating back to the early 1990s. Online
retailer Amazon released the Kindle, one of the first to gain
a large following among consumers. The first Kindle
featured wireless access to content via Amazon.com, along
with an SD card slot allowing increased storage. The first
release proved so popular there was a long delay in
delivering systems on release. Follow-on versions of the
Kindle added further audio-video capabilities.

50. The Apple iPhone is released
Apple launches the iPhone – a combination of web
browser, music player and cell phone – which could
download new functionality in the form of “apps”
(applications) from the online Apple store. The
touchscreen enabled smartphone also had built-in GPS
navigation, high-definition camera, texting, calendar,
voice dictation, and weather reports.

51. 2008
The MacBook Air is released
Apple introduces their first ultra notebook – a light, thin
laptop with high-capacity battery. The Air incorporated
many of the technologies that had been associated with
Apple's MacBook line of laptops, including integrated
camera, and Wi-Fi capabilities. To reduce its size, the
traditional hard drive was replaced with a solid-state
disk, the first mass-market computer to do so.

52. 2009
IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer is completed
The Roadrunner is the first computer to reach a
sustained performance of 1 petaflop (one thousand
trillion floating point operations per second). It used two
different microprocessors: an IBM POWER XCell L8i
and AMD Opteron. It was used to model the decay of
the US nuclear arsenal, analyze financial data, and
render 3D medical images in real-time. An offshoot of
the POWER XCell8i chip was used as the main
processor in the Sony PlayStation 3 game console.

53. Jaguar Supercomputer at Oak Ridge upgraded
Originally a Cray XT3 system, the Jaguar is a massively
parallel supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
a US science and energy research facility. The system
cost more than $100 million to create and ran a variation of
the Linux operating system with up to 10 petabytes of
storage. The Jaguar was used to study climate science,
seismology, and astrophysics applications. It was the
fastest computer in the world from November 2009 to June
2010.

54. 2010
Apple Retina Display
Since the release of the Macintosh in 1984, Apple has placed
emphasis on high-resolution graphics and display
technologies. In 2012, Apple introduced the Retina display for
the MacBook Pro laptop and iPad tablet. With a screen
resolution of up to 400 pixels-per-inch (PPI), Retina displays
approached the limit of pixel visibility to the human eye. The
display also used In Plane Switching (IPS) technology, which
allowed for a wider viewing angle and improved color
accuracy. The Retina display became standard on most of the
iPad, iPhone, MacBook, and Apple Watch product lines.

55. China's Tianhe supercomputers are operational
With a peak speed of over a petaflop (one thousand trillion
calculations per second), the Tianhe 1 (translation: Milky Way 1) is
developed by the Chinese National University of Defense
Technology using Intel Xeon processors combined with AMD
graphic processing units (GPUs). The upgraded and faster
Tianhe-1A used Intel Xeon CPUs as well, but switched to nVidia's
Tesla GPUs and added more than 2,000 Fei-Tang (SPARC-
based) processors. The machines were used by the Chinese
Academy of Sciences to run massive solar energy simulations, as
well as some of the most complex molecular studies ever
undertaken.

56. The Apple iPad is released
The iPad combines many of the popular
capabilities of the iPhone, such as built-in high-
definition camera, access to the iTunes Store,
and audio-video capabilities, but with a nine-
inch screen and without the phone. Apps,
games, and accessories helped spur the
popularity of the iPad and led to its adoption in
thousands of different applications from movie
making, creating art, making music, inventory
control and point-of-sale systems, to name but
a few.

57. 2011
IBM Sequoia is delivered to Lawrence Livermore Labs
Built by IBM using their Blue Gene/Q supercomputer
architecture, the Sequoia system is the world's fastest
supercomputer in 2012. Despite using 98,304 PowerPC
chips, Sequoia's relatively low power usage made it
unusually efficient. Scientific and defense applications
included studies of human electrophysiology, nuclear
weapon simulation, human genome mapping, and global
climate change.

58. Nest Learning Thermostat is Introduced
The Nest Learning Thermostat is an early product
made for the emerging “Internet of Things,” which
envisages a world in which common everyday
devices have network connectivity and can
exchange information or be controlled. The Nest
allowed for remote access to a user’s home’s
thermostat by using a smartphone or tablet and
could also send monthly power consumption
reports to help save on energy bills. The Nest
would remember what temperature users preferred
by ‘training’ itself to monitor daily use patterns for a
few days then adopting that pattern as its new way
of controlling home temperature.

59. 2012
Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-size single board computer, is
released as a tool to promote science education
Conceived in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, this
credit card-sized computer features ease of use and
simplicity making it highly popular with students and
hobbyists. In October 2013, the one millionth Raspberry Pi
was shipped. Only one month later, another one million
Raspberry Pis were delivered. The Pi weighed only 45 grams
and initially sold for only $25-$35 U.S. Dollars.

60. 2014
University of Michigan Micro Mote is Completed
The University of Michigan Micro Mote (M3) is the smallest computer in
the world at the time of its completion. Three types of the M3 were
available – two types that measured either temperature or pressure and
one that could take images. The motes were powered by a tiny battery
and could gain light energy through a photocell, which was enough to
feed the infinitesimally small amount of energy a mote consumes (1
picowatt). Motes are also known as “smart dust,” since the intention is
that their tiny size and low cost make them inexpensive enough to
“sprinkle” in the real world to as sensors. An ecologist, for example,
could sprinkle thousands of motes from the air onto a field and
measure soil and air temperature, moisture, and sunlight, giving them
accurate real-time data about the environment.

61. 2015
Apple Watch
Building a computer into the watch form factor has been attempted
many times but the release of the Apple Watch leads to a new level
of excitement. Incorporating a version of Apple’s iOS operating
system, as well as sensors for environmental and health
monitoring, the Apple Watch was designed to be incorporated into
the Apple environment with compatibility with iPhones and Mac
Books. Almost a million units were ordered on the day of release.
The Watch was received with great enthusiasm, but critics took
issue with the somewhat limited battery life and high price.

62. 2016
The first reprogrammable quantum computer is created
Scientists at MIT created the first five-atom quantum computer with
the potential to crack the security of traditional encryption schemes.

63. iphone 7 and iphone 7 plus announced
Apple announced the new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus and how
they have discontinued the 3.5mm headphone jack and
introduced AirPods.

64. 2019
Quantum Supremacy
Quantum supremacy refers to quantum computers being
able to solve a problem that a classical computer cannot. ...
Google's quantum computer, named Sycamore, claimed
'supremacy' because it reportedly did the task in 200 seconds
that would have apparently taken a supercomputer 10,000
years to complete.

65. 2020
Lenovo announces Yoga 5G
Lenovo Yoga 5G is a Windows 10 laptop with a 14.00-inch display
that has a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. It is powered by a
Snapdragon processor and it comes with 8GB of RAM.
Connectivity options include Bluetooth and it comes with 2 USB
ports (2 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 (Type C)), Headphone and Mic Combo
Jack ports.