1822 – Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables”.
1941 – John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff in Iowa City to see his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.
In 1951 – The U.S. Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer.