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| 1906 | Electronic Tube (or Electronic Valve) developed by Lee De Forest in America. Before this it would have been impossible to make digital electronic computers. |
| 1919 | W. H. Eccles and F. W. Jordan publish the first flip-flop circuit design. |
| 1931-1932 | E. Wynn-Williams, at Cambridge, England, uses thyratron tubes to construct a binary digital counter for use in connection with physics experiments. |
| 1947 - end | Invention of Transistor at The Bell Laboratories, USA, by William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain. |
| 1950 | Floppy Disk invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo by Doctor Yoshiro Nakamats, the sales license for the disk was granted to IBM. |
| 1953 | Magnetic Core Memory developed. |
| 1958 - September 12 | The integrated circuit invented by Jack St Clair Kilby at Texas Instruments. Robert Noyce, who later set up Intel, also worked separately on the invention. Intel later went on to invent perfect the microprocessor. The patent was applied for in 1959 and granted in 1964. This patent wasn't accepted by Japan so Japanese businesses could avoid paying any fees, but in 1989 - after a 30 year legal battle - Japan granted the patent; so all Japanese companies paid fees up until the year 2001 - long after the patent became obsolete in the rest of the World! |
| 1965 | Mouse conceived by Douglas Englebart, not to become popular until 1983 with the Apple computers and not adopted by IBM until 1987 - although compatible computers such as the Amstrad PC 1512 were fitted with mice before this date. |
| 1979 | compact disk was invented. |
| 1985 | CD-ROM, invented by Phillips, produced in collaboration with Sony. |
| 1988 | First optical chip developed, it uses light instead of electricity to increase processing speed. |