Below is a very brief outline of some major advances in computers and technology.
1450 Printing Press 1500 1600 1698 Steam Engine 1700 1800 1804 Steam Locomotive 1867 Typewriter 1843 Fax Machine 1876 Telephone 1889 Automobile 1900 1900 Photocopier 1901 Radio 1910 1911 IBM incorporated 1920 1927 Television 1930 1940 1946 Eniac Computer 1947 Cell Phone 1947 Transistor 1948 Cable Television 1950 1951 Univac Computer 1951 Wang Laboratories founded 1952 Video Cassette Recorder 1953 Color Television 1954 Fortran ? Formula Translation 1957 Digital Equipment Corporation founded 1958 Integrated Circuit 1959 Cobol ? Common Business Oriented Language 1960 1964 Basic - Beginners All Purpose Instructional Code 1968 Pascal 1968 Intel Founded 1969 Microprocessor 1969 Darpanet 1970 1970 Compact Disc 1971 Email 1972 Atari Founded 1972 C 1973 1974 TCP ? Transmission Control Protocol 1975 Microsoft founded 1976 Apple Computers founded 1977 VisiCalc Spread Sheet 1978 1979 1980 1981 IBM PC 1982 Lotus Software founded 1982 Adobe founded 1982 Compaq founded 1982 Sun Microsystems founded 1983 C++ 1983 Lotus 1-2-3 1983 DNS ? Domain Name Service 1984 Apple Macintosh 1984 Excel Spreadsheet 1984 Dell Computers founded 1985 Nintendo founded 1985 Gateway Computers founded 1986 1987 Perl ? Practical Extraction and Reporting Language 1988 1989 World Wide Web 1990 1991 Gopher 1991 Visual Basic 1992 1993 Mosaic Web Browser 1994 HTML ? Hypertext Markup Language 1994 PHP ? Hypertext Pre Processor 1994 Mozilla Web Browser 1994 Opera Web Browser 1994 Yahoo founded 1995 DVD - Digital Versatile Disc 1995 Javascript 1995 Java Programming Language 1995 Internet Explorer Web Browser 1995 Apache Server 1995 Ebay founded 1995 Lycos founded 1996 Cascading Style Sheets 1996 Internet Information Server 1997 1998 Google founded 1999 2000 2000 The Dot Com Bubble Bursts 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
A few notes on the above list. First the dates are not completely accurate. There is debate about some inventions with respect to who invented it and when precisely it was invented. Also an invention might be patented but not widely available for several years or decades. Often the invention needs to wait for advances in another field before it can be used in an economical fashion.
Also this is not a complete list. There are quite a few sites with similar listings. Some of them focus on inventions in general while others focus specifically on the history of computers or computer languages. I also included when certain companies were founded. I only included the technologies and companies that came to my mind so I certainly left of significant contributions and contributors to technology.
Before collecting the above information I assumed I would see a clearly accelerated list of activities. In other words the last 5 years would have as much activity as the prior 10 years. And those 10 years would have more activity than the preceding 20 years. However the limited data seems to detract from that assumption.
It seems that most of the significant advances that created our current internet actually occurred between 1993 and 1996. Very little has happened since then except possibly the refinement of those technologies.
Any significant technological advance goes through several stages including invention, commercialization, speculation, and then collapse.