The 1800s

1801: In France, Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented an automatic loom using punched cards for the control of the patterns in the fabrics. The introduction of these looms caused the riots against the replacement of people by machines.

1822:Charles Babbage recognized that among the most common of calculating devices -- the mathematical, celestial, and navigation tables -- are full of errors and leading to the loss of ships. While studying at Cambridge University he suggests that it ought to be possible to compute the table entries using a steam engine. This desire becomes the theme of his life and he begins to design the  Difference Engine for the purposes of computing the entries in navigation and other tables. Later he applies to the British Government for assistance, and receives what may have been the first government grant for computer research.

1833: Ten years later Charles Babbage had second thoughts about the Difference Engine, realizing that it was a special-purpose machine capable of only a single operation. Abandoning this line of work temporarily, he designed the Analytical Engine that had the basic components of a modern computer, and has led to Babbage being described as the "Father of the Computer".

1842Ada Augusta King, Countess of Lovelace, translates Menabrea's pamphlet on the Analytical Engine, adding her own notes, and becomes the world's first programmer.

1847-49 Charles Babbage returned to his plans for the Difference Engine and completed 21 drawings for the construction of the second version, but still did not complete the manufacture himself. In 1991, on the occasion of the bicentenary of Babbage's birth, the Science Museum in Kensington, England,  built a copy from those drawings, only finding a small number of very obvious errors. After Babbage's death his son, Henry Prevost, built several copies of the simple arithmetic unit of the Difference Engine and sent them to various places around the world, including Harvard University, to ensure their preservation. In October 1995  one of those copies was sold by Christies, auctioneers, in London, on behalf of descendants of Charles Babbage in New Zealand to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia for approximately $200,000.

1854: George Boole describes his system for symbolic and logical reasoning that becomes later the basis for computer design.

1884: The American Institute for Electrical Engineering (AIEE) was founded; the first of the organizations that would eventually merge to form the IEEE in 1963.

1890 Herman Hollerith won the competition for the delivery of data processing equipment to assist in the processing of the data from the 1890 US Census, and went on to assist in the census processing for many countries around the world. The company he founded, Hollerith Tabulating Company, eventually became one of the three that composed the Calculating-Tabulating-Recording (C-T-R) company in 1914, and eventually was renamed IBM in 1924. The Hollerith machines were the first to appear on a magazine cover.