ENIAC switches on
The first general-purpose electronic computer filled a room, weighed 27 tons, and recalculated artillery tables in seconds instead of days.
Humanity
115 events across three thousand years — chosen to be multi-regional and honest about uncertainty. Follow a thread to trace one capability through time, or filter by region and kind.
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Spatial timeline — scroll horizontally
The transistor, three weeks after Christmas
Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated a point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, with Shockley's team driving the solid-state program.
The integrated circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently put multiple transistors onto single pieces of semiconductor.
A computer on a chip
Intel's 4004 packed a complete CPU — 2,300 transistors — onto one chip, built for a Japanese calculator and priced accordingly.
AWS rents out the datacenter
Amazon opened its S3 storage and EC2 compute services to anyone with a credit card — infrastructure as a self-service API.
AlexNet wakes up deep learning
A neural network trained on two gaming GPUs halved the error rate of the best computer-vision systems at ImageNet, stunning the field.
Chronology
ENIAC switches on
The first general-purpose electronic computer filled a room, weighed 27 tons, and recalculated artillery tables in seconds instead of days.
The transistor, three weeks after Christmas
Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated a point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, with Shockley's team driving the solid-state program.
The integrated circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently put multiple transistors onto single pieces of semiconductor.
A computer on a chip
Intel's 4004 packed a complete CPU — 2,300 transistors — onto one chip, built for a Japanese calculator and priced accordingly.
AWS rents out the datacenter
Amazon opened its S3 storage and EC2 compute services to anyone with a credit card — infrastructure as a self-service API.
AlexNet wakes up deep learning
A neural network trained on two gaming GPUs halved the error rate of the best computer-vision systems at ImageNet, stunning the field.