Events

Key Events

World War II

"World War II (1939-1945) was the largest armed conflict in human history. Ranging over six continents and all the world's oceans, the war caused an estimated 50 million military and civilian deaths, including those of 6 million Jews. Global in scale and in its repercussions, World War II created a new world at home and abroad." -Eleanor Roosevelt Project

"World War II provided much of the motivation and funding to produce programmable calculating machines, for everything from calculating artillery firing tables to cracking the enemy's secret codes."
- ArsTechnica

The race to quickly and accurately create firing tables funded one of the key machines in the evolution of the Personal Computer, the ENIAC.

Space Race

John Glenn's spaceship

"The Space Race grew out of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the most powerful nations after World War II. For a half-century, the two superpowers competed for primacy in a global struggle pitting a democratic society against totalitarian communism." - National Air and Space Museum

The Lunar Lander required a computer that at that time needed a room to house. Fortunately, a new kind of processing device was invented, the microprocessor, and the space race was there to sponsor it.

The development of the integrated circuit and the microprocessor sponsored by the Space Race, would affect computer industry forever.