In 1971, Baer and Sanders Associates filed the first-ever video game patent, eventually granted in 1973. The patent held the legal monopoly on any product that included a regular TV with circuits capable of producing and controlling dots on the screen.

The Turing Machine was ground-breaking because of its simplicity. Because it was clear about what it could and could not compute, it is still considered the most powerful machine in the world. Any modern computing system as powerful as Turing Complete is called Turing Complete.

Online shopping, or e-commerce, is precisely what it sounds like—buying and selling services via the Internet. You might have looked at the title of this post and thought, wait - we didn’t have the internet in 1982. That's true, but it doesn’t mean e-commerce wasn’t possible.

Joseph Marie Charles, known as Jacquard, might not be a name that springs to mind when you think of early computers, particularly when you consider that he was born in Lyon, France, in 1752. Jacquard’s innovative loom engineering led to the technological revolution of the entire textile industry.

Before PayPal's creation, early retail sites had no choice but to accept payments in cheque form or through money orders. The genius of Levchin and Thiel’s idea is partly due to its innovativeness and partly to the fact that no other company has noticed the gap in the market for an online payment system.