Timeline

Turing's famous 1936-7 paper On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, described the theory of Turing machines and the definition of computability.

The first prototype or MK1 Colossus computer began operation at Bletchley Park in January 1944. The MK2 version was operational on 1st June 1944.

The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), nicknamed Baby, was the world's first stored-program computer and it ran its first program on 21 June 1948.

Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was the first 'proper' computer system that provided a service to its users. The machine was the first practical stored-program electronic computer and ran its first programs on 6 May 1949 when it calculated a table of squares and a list of prime numbers.

The Pilot ACE was one of the first computers built in the United Kingdom, at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the early 1950s. It ran its first program on 10 May 1950 and was demonstrated to the press in December 1950.

The British LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I) computer ran its first business application in 1951. The computer, modelled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC, was the first computer used for commercial business applications.

The Ferranti Pegasus was an early thermionic valve (vacuum tube) computer built by Ferranti Ltd of Great Britain. The Pegasus 1 was first delivered in 1956 and the Pegasus 2 was delivered in 1959.

The Elliott 803 was a small computer manufactured by the British company Elliott Brothers in the 1960s. About 250 were built and most British universities and colleges bought one. The first model, the 803A was built in 1959.

The Ferranti Atlas Computer of the University of Manchester, England, became operational in 1962 as a joint development between the University, Ferranti and Plessey. It was arguably one of the world's first supercomputers.

ICT 1900 is the name given to a series of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) in the 1960s.

Designed in Cambridge, BCPL was the first of the curly bracket programming languages.

The ICL 2900 Series was a range of mainframe computer systems announced by the UK manufacturer ICL on 9 October 1974.

The BBC Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, was a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Designed with an emphasis on education it was notable for its ruggedness, expandability and the quality of its operating system.

The World Wide Web (commonly abbreviated as "the Web") is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed using a web browser via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposed building a "web of nodes" storing "hypertext pages" viewed by "browsers" on a network, and released that web in 1992.