And the rest is history...

February 8, 1945

C.D Lake, H.H. Aiken, F.E. Hamilton, and B.M. Durfee file a calculator patent for the Automatic Sequence Control Calculator, commonly known as the Harvard Mark I. The Mark I was a large automatic digital computer that could perform the four basic arithmetic functions and handle 23 decimal places. A multiplication took about five seconds.

February 10, 1948

Enjoying a change of climate in Florida, IBM's Thomas Watson, Sr. sends a directive to IBM headquarters to begin planning "a machine of the same type as the Harvard Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) to meet the requirements of the ordinary businesses we serve." The resulting machine, the Selective Sequence Controlled Calculator (SSEC) was completed on January 27, 1948, and contained 21,400 relays and 12,500 vacuum tubes.

IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator

February (4) the same year, Kenneth Thompson, is born.

Mr. Thompson, with Dennis Ritchie developed UNIX at AT&T Bell Laboratories. The UNIX operating system combined many of the timesharing and file management features offered by Multics, from which it took its name. (Multics, a projects of the mid - 1960s, represented the first effort at creating a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system.) The UNIX operating system quickly secured a wide following, particularly among engineers and scientists.

Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie (standing) in front of a PDP-11 in 1972.