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A to Z of Computing History.
Giga Girl's A to Z of Computing History.A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Apple
The first Apple computer was released on April Fool's Day in 1976. Its inventors, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, formed Apple Computer at the same time. Jobs is still head of Apple, which has since produced a number of iconic products - the Macintosh, Powerbook, iMac and iPod.
Blog
Blogs grew out of online diaries, which have been part of online life since the mid-1990s. The term 'weblog' was first used to describe them in 1997. In 1999 the term was first shortened to 'blog' by blogger Peter Merholz on his site peterme.com.
Cellphone
The first call on a mobile phone was made in 1973 by Martin Cooper of Motorola. It wasn't until cellular networks were introduced in the mid-1980s that mobile phones came into general use, and in those days they were in cars only, due to their sheer size.
Digital Camera
The first digital camera was made by Fuji in 1988 but it was never marketed. In 1994 Kodak and Apple came out with digital cameras for the consumer market. A year later, the first digital cameras capable of recording video clips were introduced.
The first email was sent in 1965. That was on a big, mainframe computer, letting multiple users who were working different shifts send each other messages. It wasn't until 1971 that email was used to send messages between computers. Ray Tomlinson, an engineer working for a company contracted to the US Defense Department, is generally credited with being the first to send internet-based email.
Flash
Flash memory transformed mobile devices, such as iPods, cellphones and digital cameras. Its inventor was Toshiba's Dr Fujio Masuoka, in 1984.
Google was just one of a number of search engines until the early 2000s, when 'google' became the default term for searching for something on the web. The company started as a research project at Stanford University in California, by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996.
Hopper
Grace Hopper was one of computing's pioneers. In the 1940s she worked for the US Navy, programming the Mark I computer, the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the US. It is considered by some to be the first universal calculator. In the 1950s she worked on the development of COBOL, one of the first programming languages. And she famously popularised the term 'computer bug' after a moth flew into the Mark I's successor and brought programming to a halt.
IBM
IBM, or International Business Machines, or Big Blue, as it's often known, was founded in 1888 and came up with the first commercially successful computer in 1953. Its first personal computer for the home sold in 1981.
Joystick
Joysticks found their way from aircraft to computer games in 1977, when the Atari 2600, the first video game console to use plug-in cartridges, also came out with a digital joystick. Control pads later took over for consoles like Nintendo and Sega but joysticks have lived on as popular optional extras.
Kazaa
Once one of the most common peer-to-peer file sharing applications, used to exchange mp3 tracks online. It came out in March 2000 and, like other file-sharing software such as Napster, has been the subject of a number of lawsuits, since such file sharing is, in fact, in breach of copyright. Kazaa no longer offers users the ability to exchange copyrighted music.
Laptop
The first laptop, as they were first called, was released in 1983, with the Gavilan SC, priced at US$4,000. Later, they were increasingly referred to as notebooks, because they are roughly the same size as an A4 sheet of paper.
Mouse
Douglas Engelbart came up with a prototype of the first computer mouse in 1964. His idea was that you would hold the mouse continuously in one hand and type with the other. The ball mouse that most of us use now, which uses light sensors, was invented in 1972 by Xerox and released as part of a computer package.
Net
The predecessor of the modern internet was called the ARPANET, or The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, developed by the US Department of Defence in 1969. It was the first operational packet-switching network, which meant that a computer could use one communication link to communicate with more than one machine at a time. The first international packet-switched network was operational by 1978.
Open Source
Open source refers to software code that is publicly available for users to modify, improve and distribute. It was first labelled open source in 1998 when the source code for web browser Navigator was released. It promotes a collaborative approach to software development because users are treated as co-developers.
Podcasting
Podcasting kicked off in 2004 when radio hosts started letting iPod users download their playlists. It soon branched out from music to radio broadcasts, catching on with big broadcasters like CNN and BBC World, and has now become an important tool in education, with teachers making lessons available as podcasts.
Qwerty
Where did the qwerty keyboard come from? It first appeared on a typewriter in 1874 and computer keyboards have generally followed the same model, with the addition of more keys - from the original 101 up to 130-plus.
RAM
Random Access Memory (RAM), the type of data storage used in computers, was created in 1966 by IBM researcher Dr Robert H Dennard. Intel released the first chip featuring RAM in 1970, called the 1103.
Spam
This electronic version of junk mail has been around since 1978. Named after a brand of canned meat, the use of spam really took off in the 1980s on bulletin boards and in early chatrooms, but in those cases, its purpose was more to annoy people than to try and sell them something. Commercial spamming began in 1994; interestingly, it was a pair of lawyers who started it all, trying to drum up business.
3G
Third-generation wireless technology means you can do all sorts of things with cellphones that were unheard of only a few years ago: make video calls, play music and email. Japan was the first country to launch a 3G network, in 2001. They were introduced in Europe in 2003 and in New Zealand in 2005.
URL
When you type in a website address, what you're typing is the website URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. The idea first came about in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, came up with a proposal for hypertext to link to websites.
Virus
Computer viruses - programs that can copy themselves, then go on to infect other computers - have been around since 1982 in some form or another. The first was created as a joke by a high school student to sabotage a game. Through the 1980s and 90s viruses became more and more widespread with the rise of personal computers and internet use.
World Wide Web
The side of the internet that supports links to other files, pictures, sound and video was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. Before that, the internet was mostly text-based and lacked the hyperlinks that make navigation so easy today. The first web browser was built the same year, also by Berners-Lee.
Xbox
Microsoft's game console, the Xbox, was released in November 2001 in the US and in New Zealand in March 2002. The X comes from the use of DirectX in its technology, which is a kind of interface that supports multimedia and gaming. The Xbox was replaced in November 2006 by the Xbox 360.
Yahoo
Like Google, Yahoo was created by two graduate students - Jerry Yang and David Filo, from Stanford University. Their website, which began as a directory of other websites in 1994, had received 1 million hits by the end of that year and is now one of the most visited sites on the internet.
Zuse
The first programmable computer, the Zuse Z3 was invented by a German aircraft engineer in 1941. Konrad Zuse had built his first computer, the Z1, in 1936; this third version was the first binary 64-bit floating point calculator. More than a century earlier, in 1822, Charles Babbage had come up with the idea of a computer when he described the principles of a calculating engine. The first general purpose electronic computer was used by the US Army in 1946.
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