Timeline

Early computing and videogame prehistory

1834	Charles Babbage proposes his Analytical Engine—the first, electro-mechanical concept of a modern computer. It remains unrealised.
1873	E. Remington and Sons start producing the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, the first commercially successful typewriter. It introduces the “QWERTY” keyboard layout.
1887	Fusajiro Yamauchi starts the Nintendo Koppai company in Kyoto, Japan. It produces hand-made playing cards.
1896	Herman Hollerith founds the Tabulating Machine Company, the core of what is later to become IBM.
1897	Karl Ferdinand Braun invents the cathode-ray tube (CRT).
1898	Valdemar Poulsen’s Telegraphone wire recorder is the first successful means of magnetic data storage.
1906	Lee De Forest’s invention of the triode tube paves the way for the first generation of computers in the 1940s, based on vacuum tubes, to last until transistors take over in the early 1960s.
1908	By describing a beam raster scan, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton proposes the use of CRTs as electronic picture transmitters and receivers 25 years before the first successful experiments.
1918	William H. Eccles and F.W. Jordan create the first flip-flop, an essential building block for digital computers.
1919	Norton Hinckley and Dave Tandy found the Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company, which eventually diversifies into electronics and becomes a major force in the home computer revolution in the late 1970s (see 1963, 1977).
1924	The Calculating-Tabulating-Recording Company is renamed to International Business Machines, or IBM.
1928	Fritz Pfleumer patents magnetic recording tape.
1931	At EMI, Alan Blumlein develops stereo (binaural) sound for records and film, as well as surround sound. EMI cuts the first stereo record, but the concept would not reach the public for another 20 years.
1932	Maurice Greenberg founds the Connecticut Leather Company for the manufacture of shoe leather. Under the shortened name Coleco, the company became a successful producer of toys and video game consoles in the 1970s.
	Austrian Gustav Tauschek invents magnetic drum memory. The drum, 20 cm in length and 10 cm in diameter, has a capacity of a little over 60 kB.
1936	Alan Turing publishes his seminal paper on computability and the Entscheidungsproblem, laying the theoretical framework for digital general-purpose computers.
	Austrian engineer Paul Eisler produces the first printed electrical circuit. It took about 20 years for the process to catch on commercially.
1937	Claude A. Shannon publishes a paper relating electric relay switches to symbolic logic and Boolean algebra, an important step towards binary computers as information processors. The paper is published in 1938.
	At Bell Telephone Labs, George Stibitz constructs a relay-based 1-bit binary adder, the Model K (named after the kitchen table he assembled it on). It is a proof-of-concept for binary computers.
	IBM releases the first automatic test scoring machine, which senses conductive pencil markings.
1938	In Germany, the first programmable binary computer, Z1, is completed by Konrad Zuse. It is a mechanical prototype of modern computers.
1939	John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Edward Berry build the first vacuum tube-based computer, a 16-bit adder.
	In a garage in Palo Alto, William Hewlett and David Packard establish Hewlett-Packard, which would rise to become the world’s biggest manufacturer of computer equipment. It later symbolises the birth of Silicon Valley.
1940	George Stibitz extends his relay-based Model K (see 1937) to the Complex Number Calculator. It is the first computer to be used remotely, using teletypes.
1941	German engineer Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3, the first fully programmable (Turing-complete), fully automatic computer. The electro-mechanical machine uses around 2400 relays and is considered by many to be the first modern computer. Operating clock frequency was slightly above 5 Hz.
	International Mutoscope Corp. releases DriveMobile, possibly the first (electro-mechanical) sit-down arcade driving game.
	At M.I.T., Dr. Raymond Redheffer designs a “machine for playing the game Nim“, quite possibly the first electronic game ever designed and built.
	IBM’s Electromatic Model 04 typewriter introduces proportional letter spacing, such as obtained through professional typesetting.
1942	Atanasoff and Berry (see 1939) complete the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry-Computer), the first electronic digital (but not general-purpose) computer.
1945	Konrad Zuse finishes the Z4, the world’s first computer built as a commercial product. It is bought by ETH Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
	Vannevar Bush describes the Memex, a desk-sized library of annotated, linked microfilm documents and media. The concept is an electromechanical progenitor of later hypertext and hypermedia systems (such as the World Wide Web) as well as the idea of a personal computer. Most directly, it inspired Douglas Engelbart to invent the first computer mouse and graphical user interface in the late 60s.
	Harold “Matt” Matson and Elliot Handler with wife Ruth found Mattel in order to produce and sell picture frames. Elliot starts using the left-over scraps to create dollhouse furniture as a side business, laying the foundation for a giant toymaking corporation, which also had a brief stint in the videogame console business.
1946	The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) goes live. It is the first computer that is both general-purpose and fully electronic.
	American statistician John Tukey coins the term bit, as a contraction of binary digit, to denote the basic unit of information.
	Masaru Ibuka, having set up a radio repair shop in a bomb-damaged building in post-WWII Tokyo in late 1945, is joined by Akio Morita to found the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., or Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Co. In 1958, they change their company’s name to a brand they have already been using for international markets: Sony.
1947	William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invent the transistor at Bell Labs.
	Frederic Williams and Tom Kilburn use CRTs to construct the Williams tube, the first RAM (random-access memory; a storage device that allows directly accessing any location).
	To be continued