John McCarthy, an American computer scientist, is widely credited as one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence. He coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" in 1955 and organized the famous Dartmouth Conference in 1956, which is considered the birth of AI as a field.

While Joseph Jacquard used punch cards for looms, Herman Hollerith developed a punch card tabulating machine system to process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. His invention was a major step in the development of automated data processing and the history of computing, and his company eventually became part of IBM.

Early computers processed jobs in batches without user interaction.

In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to provide an operating system for its upcoming Personal Computer. Bill Gates and Paul Allen's company acquired and adapted an existing OS, which became MS-DOS, a key factor in Microsoft's early success.

First-generation computers were massive, often taking up entire rooms. Their reliance on bulky vacuum tubes and extensive cooling systems made them anything but small and portable.

In 1995, the NSFNET, which had served as the backbone of the Internet, was decommissioned, and restrictions on carrying commercial traffic were lifted. This opened the floodgates for the commercialization and rapid growth of the Internet.

Niklaus Wirth created Pascal in the late 1960s to be a small, efficient language that encouraged good programming habits using structured programming and data structuring.

The Altair 8800, featured on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine, inspired thousands of hobbyists, including Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to start programming for personal machines. It was the first commercially successful personal computer.

The IBM 650, also known as the Magnetic Drum Data-Processing Machine, was a highly successful first-generation computer introduced in 1954. Its defining characteristic was the use of a magnetic drum as its primary memory medium. This choice of technology made the IBM 650 significantly more affordable and operationally robust compared to contemporaries that relied on more complex and fragile memory systems like mercury delay lines or vacuum tube arrays. While ENIAC (1946) used vacuum tubes for computation but had limited storage, EDVAC (1949) pioneered mercury delay lines for main memory, and Colossus (1943) was specialized for code-breaking and primarily used vacuum tubes and relays for its operations, with very limited short-term memory rather than a dedicated main storage system like a magnetic drum.

Claude Shannon is universally recognized as the 'father of Information Theory.' His seminal 1948 paper, 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication,' introduced key concepts such as the bit as a fundamental unit of information, entropy as a measure of uncertainty, and channel capacity, which defines the maximum rate at which information can be reliably transmitted over a communication channel. This elegant mathematical framework provided the theoretical underpinnings for efficient data transmission, storage, and compression, laying the groundwork for virtually all modern digital technologies, including the internet, mobile phones, and digital media.