Matchup: Vintage years in computing history

• Sep 12, 2003

How well do you know computer history?

Match each item in this brief list of significant events with the appropriate year, then find out how you did.

1. Honeywell releases the H316 Kitchen Computer, the first home computer, priced at $10,600. And the Advanced Research Projects Agency goes online with Arpanet.

2. Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web.

3. Douglas Englebart designs a mouse pointing device for computers.

4. Gordon Moore of Fairchild Semiconductor prophesies that the transistor density of integrated circuits will double every 12 months for the next 10 years.

5.Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf come up with the basic idea for the Internet.

6. UseNet goes online with a Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol link between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University.

7. The Apple II, with 16K of RAM, makes its debut for $1,195 sans monitor.

8. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments Inc. builds the first integrated circuit.

9. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, known as ENIAC, begins crunching at the Ballistics Research Laboratory in Maryland. About the same time, Colossus, a British code-breaking computer, goes operational.

10. Telnet, the first public-switched packet network, debuts.

11. The Universal Automatic Computer goes by the acronym UNIVAC.

12. Ed Roberts coins the term 'personal computer' for an Altair advertising campaign. The same year, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, formerly principals in Traf-O-Data, form a company called Micro-Soft.

13. Bell Labs develops Unix.

14. TCP/IP becomes the standard for Arpanet.


1944

1951

1958

1963

1965

1969

1970

1973

1974

1975

1977

1979

1982

1991

Answers

1. 1969

2. 1991

3. 1963

4. 1965

5. 1973

6. 1979

7. 1977

8. 1958

9. 1944

10. 1974

11. 1951

12. 1975

13. 1970

14. 1982