Computer Science Firsts

Abstract

A curated list of milestones in the history of computer science, each one precisely qualified, because “first” is the most contested word in the field. A bare claim like “the first computer” is almost always wrong: it depends entirely on which qualifier you attach (programmable? electronic? stored-program? general-purpose?). The entries below name the qualifier explicitly, and where a popular “first” is a myth or oversimplification, it is flagged and routed to Myths and Misconceptions. Every entry links to the article that examines it in full.

How to read this list

Dates mark the first working milestone unless noted otherwise (designs that were never built, or public announcements that lagged the working machine, are called out). Most “firsts” survive only with their qualifier attached, strip the qualifier and you usually get a myth.

🖥 Machines & Hardware

First design for a general-purpose programmable computer: Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, designed from 1837. It was never built in his lifetime, but its architecture (a “mill,” a “store,” and punched-card control) anticipated the general-purpose computer by a century. → Charles Babbage: The Visionary Architect
First working programmable, automatic, Turing-complete computer: Konrad Zuse’s Z3, completed in Berlin in 1941. Electromechanical (relay-based), not electronic; Turing-completeness was shown only in principle, decades later. → Konrad Zuse and the Z3
First programmable electronic digital computer: Colossus, operational at Bletchley Park in 1944 (Mark 1 in late 1943/early 1944). Special-purpose (codebreaking), not general-purpose, and kept secret for decades. → Tommy Flowers and Colossus
First general-purpose electronic digital computer: ENIAC, completed 1945, publicly unveiled February 1946. Programmed by rewiring; not a stored-program machine. → ENIAC and the First Electronic Computers
First practical full-scale stored-program electronic computer: EDSAC, which ran its first program in May 1949 at Cambridge. (The Manchester “Baby” ran the first stored program in June 1948 as a proof-of-concept prototype.) → Maurice Wilkes and EDSAC
First point-contact transistor, built at Bell Labs in December 1947 by Bardeen and Brattain (under Shockley). → The Transistor
First working integrated circuit: Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments, 1958; Robert Noyce independently produced the practical silicon planar IC in 1959. → Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit
First commercial single-chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004, released November 1971; Federico Faggin led the design. → Federico Faggin and the Microprocessor

Myth: “X was the first computer”

There is no single “first computer.” The Z3, Colossus, ENIAC, the Manchester Baby, and the ABC each hold a different qualified first (first programmable, first electronic, first general-purpose, first stored-program, etc.). The popular answer depends entirely on which qualifier is silently assumed. See Myths and Misconceptions.

👤 People & Foundational Ideas

First published algorithm intended for a machine: Ada Lovelace’s Note G (1843), a program to compute Bernoulli numbers for Babbage’s Analytical Engine. → Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine
First compiler: Grace Hopper’s A-0 system, 1952. → Grace Hopper: The Queen of Code

Myth: “Ada Lovelace was the first programmer”

Defensible as “author of the first published algorithm designed for a machine,” but the flat label “first programmer” overstates it and erases Babbage’s own earlier programs. See Myths and Misconceptions and the Fun Fact.

🔤 Programming Languages

First widely used high-level compiled language: FORTRAN, first delivered 1957 (John Backus’s team at IBM). → John Backus and FORTRAN
First functional programming language: LISP, designed by John McCarthy from 1958. → John McCarthy and LISP
First object-oriented programming language: Simula 67, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, which introduced classes and objects. → Simula and the Birth of OOP

🌐 Networking & the Internet

First message sent over the ARPANET: 29 October 1969, from UCLA to SRI; the system crashed after two letters, so the first “message” was “lo”. → ARPANET: Building the Network
First networked email using the @ sign: Ray Tomlinson, 1971, who chose @ to separate user from host. → Email: The Killer App
First Ethernet: Bob Metcalfe (with David Boggs) at Xerox PARC, 1973. → Bob Metcalfe and Ethernet
First web page, browser, and server: Tim Berners-Lee, who had the first page and browser running by late 1990 and put the Web into the public domain in 1991/1993. → Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web

💾 Software & Applications

First relational data model: Edgar F. Codd’s 1970 paper A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. → Edgar Codd and the Relational Model
First spreadsheet program: VisiCalc, released 1979 (Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston), the original “killer app”. → Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc
First wiki: WikiWikiWeb, launched by Ward Cunningham in 1995. → Ward Cunningham and the Wiki
First public demonstration of the mouse, hypertext, and video conferencing together: Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos,” 9 December 1968. → Douglas Engelbart and the Mother of All Demos
First self-replicating program to spread across the early internet, the Morris Worm, November 1988, the first to draw a felony conviction under the US CFAA. → Robert Tappan Morris

🔐 Cryptography

First published public-key key exchange: Diffie–Hellman, 1976 (New Directions in Cryptography). → Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman

Myth: “Public-key cryptography was invented at Stanford in 1976”

The first public-key methods were actually invented at GCHQ (Ellis, Cocks, Williamson) in the early 1970s, but classified and unpublished until 1997. Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle hold the first public invention. See Public Key Cryptography.