Computing

Bell Labs' December 1947 point-contact demonstration led to Shockley's junction transistor theory and patent 2,524,035 in 1950. AT...

Kilby built germanium circuits at TI in 1958; Noyce's Fairchild planar process made silicon manufacturable and interconnected. The...

Penn's ENIAC computed artillery tables with 18,000 vacuum tubes from 1945. Eckert and Mauchly left to build UNIVAC, winning their ...

Dennard's one-transistor, one-capacitor cell, patented 1968, shrank memory a thousandfold per dollar per decade. DRAM scaling rode...

Engelbart's SRI team built the wooden-wheel mouse for the 1968 Mother of All Demos, patenting an X-Y position indicator for a disp...

Intel's 4004, built for a Japanese calculator in 1971, crammed 2,300 transistors of CPU onto one die, patented 1974 as a memory sy...

Xerox PARC's Metcalfe designed the collision-sense multiple-access network in 1973, patenting with Boggs and Thacker in 1977. DEC,...

Woodland, a graduate student, sketched the idea by drawing Morse code dots and dashes in the sand of Miami Beach and stretching th...

Amazon patented a method for placing an online order with a single click, using stored payment and shipping details. It quickly wo...

Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext information system at CERN in 1989 and by the end of 1990 had built the first web server, bro...

As Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin ranked web pages by counting links from other pages, weighting each by t...

Apple patented unlocking a touchscreen device by dragging an image along a path, the gesture introduced with the first iPhone in 2...