Tag: 20th Century

20th Century – 1900s

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Data Science - Big Data History

Fair Credit Reporting Act – 1970 AD

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1970

Fair Credit Reporting Act

Alan Westin (1929–2013)

“In March 1970, a (“limited hangout“) professor from Columbia University testified before the US Congress about shadowy American businesses that were maintaining secret databases on American citizens. These files, said Alan Westin, “may include ‘facts, statistics, inaccuracies and rumors’ . . . about virtually every phase of a person’s life: his marital troubles, jobs, school history, childhood, sex life, and political activities.”

The files were used by American banks, department stores, and other firms to determine who should be given credit to buy a house, a car, or even a furniture set. The databanks, Westin explained, were also used by companies evaluating job applicants and underwriting insurance. And they couldn’t be outlawed: without credit and the ability to pay for major purchases with installments, many people couldn’t otherwise afford such things.

Westin was well known to the US Congress: he had testified on multiple occasions before congressional committees investigating the credit-reporting industry, and he had published a book, Privacy and Freedom (1967), in which he argued that freedom in the information age required that individuals have control over how their data are used by governments and businesses. Westin defined privacy as “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.” And he coined the phrase data shadow to describe the trail of information that people leave behind in the modern world.

On October 26, 1970, Congress enacted the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which gave Americans, for the first time, the right to see the consumer files that businesses used to decide who should get credit and insurance. The FCRA also gave consumers the right to force the credit bureaus to investigate a claim that the consumer felt was inaccurate, and the ability to insert a statement in the file, telling his or her side of the story.

The FCRA was one of the first laws in the world regulating what private businesses could do with data that they collect—the beginning of what is now called data protection, an idea that eventually spread worldwide.

Today there are privacy commissioners in almost every developed country. The passage of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) marked the most far-reaching privacy law on the planet.”

SEE ALSO Relational Database (1970)

Columbia professor Alan Westin was concerned about American businesses keeping secret databases on American citizens.

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Cloud History Software Engineering

The Byte – 1956 AD

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1956

The Byte

Werner Buchholz (b. 1922), Louis G. Dooley (dates unavailable)

“Designers of the early binary computers faced a fundamental question: how should the computers’ storage be organized? The computers stored information in bits, but computer users didn’t want to write programs that manipulated bits; they wanted to solve math problems, crack codes, and generally work with larger units of information. The memory of decimal computers such as ENIAC and the UNIVAC I was organized in groups of 10 alphanumeric digits, called words. The binary computers also organized their memory into words, but these groups of bits were called bytes.”

byte
Unit systemunits derived from bit
Unit ofdigital information, data size
SymbolB or (when referring to exactly 8 bits) o 

“It appears that the word byte was coined simultaneously in 1956 by Werner Buchholz at IBM, working on the IBM STRETCH (the world’s first supercomputer), and by Louis G. Dooley and others at MIT Lincoln Lab working on the SAGE air-defense system. In both cases, they used the word byte to describe the inputs and outputs of machine instructions that could operate on less than a full word. The STRETCH had 60-bit words and used 8-bit bytes to represent characters for its input/output system; the SAGE had instructions that could operate on 4-bit bytes.”

“The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer[1][2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as The Internet Protocol (RFC 791)(1981) refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet.[3]“

“Over the next 20 years, the definition of a byte was somewhat fluid. IBM used 8-bit bytes with its System/360 architecture, and 8-bit groups were the standard for AT&T’s long-distance digital telephone lines. DEC, on the other hand, successfully marketed a series of computers with 18-bit and 36-bit words, including the PDP-7 and the PDP-10, which both utilized 9-bit bytes.”

“This lack of consistency resulted in the early Internet standards avoiding the word byte entirely. Instead, the word octet is used to describe a group of 8 bits sent over a computer network, a usage that survives to this day in Internet standards.”

“Nevertheless, by the 1980s, the acceptance of 8-bit bytes was almost universal—largely a result of the microcomputer revolution, because micros used 8-bit bytes almost exclusively. In part, that’s because 8 bits is an even power of 2, which makes it somewhat easier to design computer hardware with 8-bit bytes than with 9-bit bytes.”

“Today the era of 9-bit bytes is all but forgotten. And what about collections of 4 bits? Today these are called a nibble (sometimes spelled nybble).”

Multiples of bytes:

1000kBkilobyte
10002MBmegabyte
10003GBgigabyte
10004TBterabyte
10005PBpetabyte
10006EBexabyte
10007ZBzettabyte
10008YByottabyte
Multiples of bytes

1000103kkilo
10002106Mmega
10003109Ggiga
100041012Ttera
100051015Ppeta
100061018Eexa
100071021Zzetta
100081024Yyotta
Prefixes for multiples of bits (bit) or bytes (B)

SEE ALSO:

“Today’s computers most frequently use bytes consisting of 8 bits, represented by 1s and 0s.”

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History

1920s

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1930 AD

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1931 AD

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1932 AD

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1933 AD

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1934 AD

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History

1935 AD

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1936 AD

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History

1938 AD

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1939 AD

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Cloud History

1930s

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1931–1940

DatePlaceEvent
1931AustriaKurt Gödel of Vienna University, Austria, published a paper on a universal formal language based on arithmetic operations. He used it to encode arbitrary formal statements and proofs, and showed that formal systems such as traditional mathematics are either inconsistent in a certain sense, or contain unprovable but true statements. This result is often called the fundamental result of theoretical computer science.
1931United StatesIBM introduced the IBM 601 Multiplying Punch, an electromechanical machine that could read two numbers, up to 8 digits long, from a card and punch their product onto the same card.[60]
1934JapanFrom 1934 to 1936, NEC engineer Akira Nakashima published a series of papers introducing switching circuit theory.[61][62][63][64] This laid the foundations for digital circuit design, in digital computers and other areas of modern technology.[64]
1934United StatesWallace Eckert of Columbia University connects an IBM 285 Tabulator, an 016 Duplicating Punch and an IBM 601 Multiplying Punch with a cam-controlled sequencer switch that he designed. The combined system was used to automate the integration of differential equations.[65]
1936United KingdomAlan Turing of Cambridge University, England, published a paper on ‘computable numbers’[66] which reformulated Kurt Gödel‘s results (see related work by Alonzo Church). His paper addressed the famous ‘Entscheidungsproblem‘ whose solution was sought in the paper by reasoning (as a mathematical device) about a simple and theoretical computer, known today as a Turing machine. In many ways, this device was more convenient than Gödel’s arithmetics-based universal formal system.
1937United StatesGeorge Stibitz of the Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs), New York City, constructed a demonstration 1-bit binary adder using relays. This was one of the first binary computers, although at this stage it was only a demonstration machine; improvements continued leading to the Complex Number Calculator of January 1940.
1937United StatesClaude E. Shannon published a paper on the implementation of symbolic logic using relays as his MIT Master’s thesis. He cited and elaborated on Akira Nakashima’s earlier work in switching circuit theory.[63]
1938GermanyKonrad Zuse of Berlin, completed the ‘Z1‘, the first mechanical binary programmable computer. It was based on Boolean Algebra and had some of the basic ingredients of modern machines, using the binary system and floating-point arithmetic. Zuse’s 1936 patent application (Z23139/GMD Nr. 005/021) also suggested a ‘von Neumann’ architecture (re-invented about 1945) with program and data modifiable in storage. Originally the machine was called the ‘V1’ but retroactively renamed after the war, to avoid confusion with the V-1 flying bomb. It worked with floating point numbers (7-bit exponent, 16-bit mantissa, and sign bit). The memory used sliding metal parts to store 16 such numbers, and worked well; but the arithmetic unit was less successful, occasionally suffering from certain mechanical engineering problems. The program was read from holes punched in discarded 35 mm movie film. Data values could have been entered from a numeric keyboard, and outputs were displayed on electric lamps. The machine was not a general purpose computer (i.e., Turing complete) because it lacked loop capabilities.
1939United StatesWilliam Hewlett and David Packard established the Hewlett-Packard Company in Packard’s garage in Palo Alto, California with an initial investment of $538 (equivalent to $9,772 in 2019); this was considered to be the symbolic founding of Silicon Valley. HP would grow to become one of the largest technology companies in the world today.
1939
Nov		United StatesJohn Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry of Iowa State College (now the Iowa State University), Ames, Iowa, completed a prototype 16-bit adder. This was the first machine to calculate using vacuum tubes.
1939 – 1940GermanyHelmut Schreyer completed a prototype 10-bit adder[citation needed] using vacuum tubes, and a prototype memory using neon lamps.[citation needed]
1940United StatesAt Bell Labs, Samuel Williams and George Stibitz completed a calculator which could operate on complex numbers, and named it the ‘Complex Number Calculator‘; it was later known as the ‘Model I Relay Calculator’. It used telephone switching parts for logic: 450 relays and 10 crossbar switches. Numbers were represented in ‘plus 3 BCD’; that is, for each decimal digit, 0 is represented by binary 0011, 1 by 0100, and so on up to 1100 for 9; this scheme requires fewer relays than straight BCD. Rather than requiring users to come to the machine to use it, the calculator was provided with three remote keyboards, at various places in the building, in the form of teletypes. Only one could be used at a time, and the output was automatically displayed on the same one. On 9 September 1940, a teletype was set up at a Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a connection to New York, and those attending the conference could use the machine remotely.
1940GermanyKonrad Zuse completed the ‘Z2‘ (originally ‘V2’), which combined the Z1’s existing mechanical memory unit with a new arithmetic unit using relay logic. Like the Z1, the Z2 lacked loop capabilities. The project was interrupted for a year when Zuse was drafted in 1939, but continued after he was released.In 1940 Zuse presented the Z2 to an audience of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (“German Laboratory for Aviation”) in Berlin-Adlershof.

References

  • Marguin, Jean (1994). Histoire des instruments et machines à calculer, trois siècles de mécanique pensante 1642-1942 (in French). Hermann. ISBN 978-2-7056-6166-3.
  • Ginsburg, Jekuthiel (2003). Scripta Mathematica (Septembre 1932-Juin 1933). Kessinger Publishing, LLC. ISBN 978-0-7661-3835-3.
  • Gladstone-Millar, Lynne (2003). John Napier: Logarithm John. National Museums Of Scotland. ISBN 978-1-901663-70-9.
  • Taton, René (1969). Histoire du calcul. Que sais-je ? n° 198. Presses universitaires de France.
  • Swedin, Eric G.; Ferro, David L. (2005). Computers: The Life Story of a Technology. Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-33149-7.
  • Taton, René (1963). Le calcul mécanique (in French). Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
  • Smith, David Eugene (1929). A Source Book in Mathematics. New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.

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1940s

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1941–1949

DatePlaceEvent
1941
May 11		GermanyNow working with limited backing from the DVL (German Aeronautical Research Institute), Konrad Zuse completed the ‘Z3‘ (originally ‘V3’): the first operational programmable computer. One major improvement over Charles Babbage‘s non-functional device is the use of Leibniz‘s binary system (Babbage and others unsuccessfully tried to build decimal programmable computers). Zuse’s machine also featured floating point numbers with a 7-bit exponent, 14-bit mantissa (with a ‘1’ bit automatically prefixed unless the number is 0), and a sign bit. The memory held 64 of these words and therefore required over 1400 relays; there were 1200 more in the arithmetic and control units. It also featured parallel adders. The program, input, and output were implemented as described above for the Z1. Although conditional jumps were not available, it has been shown that Zuse’s Z3 is, in principle, capable of functioning as a universal computer.[67][68] The machine could do 3-4 additions per second, and took 3–5 seconds for a multiplication. The Z3 was destroyed in 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin, and had no impact on computer technology in America and England.
1942
Summer		United StatesAtanasoff and Berry completed a special-purpose calculator for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, later called the ‘ABC’ (‘Atanasoff–Berry Computer‘). This had 60 50-bit words of memory in the form of capacitors (with refresh circuits—the first regenerative memory) mounted on two revolving drums. The clock speed was 60 Hz, and an addition took 1 second. For secondary memory it used punched cards, moved around by the user. The holes were not actually punched in the cards, but burned. The punched card system’s error rate was never reduced beyond 0.001%, and this was inadequate. Atanasoff left Iowa State after the U.S. entered the war, ending his work on digital computing machines.
1942GermanyHelmut Hölzer built an analog computer to calculate and simulate[69] V-2 rocket trajectories.[70][71][72]
1942GermanyKonrad Zuse developed the S1, the world’s first process computer, used by Henschel to measure the surface of wings.
1943
Apr		United KingdomMax Newman, C. E. Wynn-Williams and their team at the secret Government Code and Cypher School (‘Station X’), Bletchley Park, Bletchley, England, completed the ‘Heath Robinson‘. This was a specialized counting machine used for cipher-breaking, not a general-purpose calculator or computer, but a logic device using a combination of electronics and relay logic. It read data optically at 2000 characters per second from two closed loops of paper tape. It was significant as it was the forerunner of Colossus. Newman knew Turing from Cambridge University (Turing was a student of Newman’s), and had been the first person to see a draft of Turing’s 1936 paper.[66] Heath Robinson is the name of a British cartoonist known for drawings of comical machines, like the American Rube Goldberg. Two later machines in the series were named after London stores with ‘Robinson’ in their names.
1943
Sep		United StatesWilliams and Stibitz completed the ‘Relay Interpolator’, later called the ‘Model II Relay Calculator‘. This was a programmable calculator; again, the program and data were read from paper tapes. An innovative feature was that, for greater reliability (error-detecting/self-checking), numbers were represented in a biquinary format using seven relays for each digit, of which exactly two should be “on”: 01 00001 for 0, 01 00010 for 1, and so on up to 10 10000 for 9. Some of the later machines in this series would use the biquinary notation for the digits of floating-point numbers.
1943
Dec		United KingdomThe Mark 1 Colossus was completed, by Tommy Flowers at The Post Office Research Laboratories in London, to assist in the cracking of the German Lorenz SZ42 cipher at Bletchley Park. It was a binary digital machine that contained 1500 vacuum tubes (valves), and applied a programmable logical function to a stream of characters, read and re-read from a loop of punched paper tape at a rate of 5000 characters a second. It had 501 bits of memory, the program being set on switches and plug panels. Colossus was used at Bletchley Park during World War II—as a follow on from the less productive Heath Robinson machines.
1944
June		United KingdomThe first Mark 2 Colossus was commissioned. It was a development of the Mark 1 machine and contained 2400 vacuum tubes. It had five identical parallel processors fed from a shift register that enabled processing of 25,000 characters a second. Colossus could evaluate a wide range of Boolean algebraic functions for helping to establish the rotor settings of the Lorenz SZ42 machine. Ten Mark 2 Colossi were in use at Bletchley Park by the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. All but two of the machines were then dismantled into such small parts that it was not possible to infer their use, so as to maintain the secrecy of the work. The remaining two were dismantled at GCHQ Cheltenham in the 1960s.
1944
August 7		United StatesThe IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was turned over to Harvard University, which called it the Harvard Mark I. It was designed by Howard Aiken and his team, financed and built by IBM—it became the second program-controlled machine (after Konrad Zuse‘s). The whole machine was 51 feet (16 m) long, weighed 5 (short) tons (4.5 tonnes), and incorporated 750,000 parts. It used 3304 electromechanical relays as on-off switches, had 72 accumulators (each with its own arithmetic unit), as well as a mechanical register with a capacity of 23 digits plus sign. The arithmetic was fixed-point and decimal, with a control panel setting determining the number of decimal places. Input–output facilities include card readers, a card punch, paper tape readers, and typewriters. There were 60 sets of rotary switches, each of which could be used as a constant register—sort of mechanical read-only memory. The program was read from one paper tape; data could be read from the other tapes, or the card readers, or from the constant registers. Conditional jumps were not available. However, in later years, the machine was modified to support multiple paper tape readers for the program, with the transfer from one to another being conditional, rather like a conditional subroutine call. Another addition allowed the provision of plug-board wired subroutines callable from the tape. Used to create ballistics tables for the US Navy.
1945GermanyKonrad Zuse developed Plankalkül, the first higher-level programming language. He also presented the Z4 in March.
1945United StatesVannevar Bush developed the theory of the memex, a hypertext device linked to a library of books and films.
1945United StatesJohn von Neumann drafted a report describing the future computer eventually built as the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC includes the first published description of the design of a stored-program computer, giving rise to the term von Neumann architecture. It directly or indirectly influenced nearly all subsequent projects, especially EDSAC. The design team included John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
1946
February 14		United StatesENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer): One of the first totally electronic, vacuum tube, digital, program-controlled computers was unveiled although it was shut down on 9 November 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. Development had started in 1943 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, USA, by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. It weighed 30 tonnes and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, consuming around 160 kW of electrical power. It could do 5,000 basic calculations a second. It was used for calculating ballistic trajectories and testing theories behind the hydrogen bomb.
1946
February 19		United KingdomACE (Automatic Computing Engine): Alan Turing presented a detailed paper to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Executive Committee, giving the first reasonably complete design of a stored-program computer. However, because of the strict and long-lasting secrecy around his wartime work at Bletchley Park, he was prohibited (having signed the Official Secrets Act) from explaining that he knew that his ideas could be implemented in an electronic device.
1946United KingdomThe trackball was invented as part of a radar plotting system named Comprehensive Display System (CDS) by Ralph Benjamin when working for the British Royal Navy Scientific Service.[73][74] Benjamin’s project used analog computers to calculate the future position of target aircraft based on several initial input points provided by a user with a joystick. Benjamin felt that a more elegant input device was needed and invented a ball tracker[73][74] system called the roller ball[73] for this purpose in 1946.[73][74] The device was patented in 1947,[73] but only a prototype was ever built[74] and the device was kept as a secret outside military.[74]
1947
September		United KingdomDevelopment of the first assembly language by Kathleen Booth at Birkbeck, University of London following work with John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine at the Institute for Advanced Study.[75][76]
1947
December 16		United StatesInvention of the transistor at Bell Laboratories, USA, by William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.
1947United StatesHoward Aiken completed the Harvard Mark II.
1947United StatesThe Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), was founded as the world’s first scientific and educational computing society. It remains to this day with a membership currently around 78,000. Its headquarters are in New York City.
1948
January 27		United StatesIBM finished the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator). It was the first computer to modify a stored program. “About 1300 vacuum tubes were used to construct the arithmetic unit and eight very high-speed registers, while 23000 relays were used in the control structure and 150 registers of slower memory.”
1948
May 12		United KingdomThe Birkbeck ARC, the first of three machines developed at Birkbeck, University of London by Andrew Booth and Kathleen Booth, officially came online on this date. The control was entirely electromechanical and the memory was based on a rotating magnetic drum.[76] This was the first rotating drum storage device in existence.[77]
1948
June 21		United Kingdomthe Manchester Baby was built at the University of Manchester. It ran its first program on this date. It was the first computer to store both its programs and data in RAM, as modern computers do. By 1949 the ‘Baby’ had grown, and acquired a magnetic drum for more permanent storage, and it became the Manchester Mark 1.
1948United StatesANACOM from Westinghouse was an AC-energized electrical analog computer system used up until the early 1990s for problems in mechanical and structural design, fluidics, and various transient problems.
1948United StatesIBM introduced the ‘604‘, the first machine to feature Field Replaceable Units (FRUs), which cut downtime as entire pluggable units can simply be replaced instead of troubleshot.
1948The first Curta handheld mechanical calculator was sold. The Curta computed with 11 digits of decimal precision on input operands up to 8 decimal digits. The Curta was about the size of a handheld pepper grinder.
1949
Mar		United StatesJohn Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly construct the BINAC for Northrop.
1949
May 6		United KingdomThis is considered the birthday of modern computing.[citation needed] Maurice Wilkes and a team at Cambridge University executed the first stored program on the EDSAC computer, which used paper tape input–output. Based on ideas from John von Neumann about stored program computers, the EDSAC was the first complete, fully functional von Neumann architecture computer.
1949
Oct		United KingdomThe Manchester Mark 1 final specification is completed; this machine was notably in being the first computer to use the equivalent of base/index registers, a feature not entering common computer architecture until the second generation around 1955.
1949AustraliaCSIR Mk I (later known as CSIRAC), Australia’s first computer, ran its first test program. It was a vacuum-tube-based electronic general-purpose computer. Its main memory stored data as a series of acoustic pulses in 5 ft (1.5 m) long tubes filled with mercury.
1949United KingdomMONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer) also known as the Phillips Hydraulic Computer, was created in 1949 to model the national economic processes of the United Kingdom. The MONIAC consisted of a series of transparent plastic tanks and pipes. It is thought that twelve to fourteen machines were built.

References

  • Marguin, Jean (1994). Histoire des instruments et machines à calculer, trois siècles de mécanique pensante 1642-1942 (in French). Hermann. ISBN 978-2-7056-6166-3.
  • Ginsburg, Jekuthiel (2003). Scripta Mathematica (Septembre 1932-Juin 1933). Kessinger Publishing, LLC. ISBN 978-0-7661-3835-3.
  • Gladstone-Millar, Lynne (2003). John Napier: Logarithm John. National Museums Of Scotland. ISBN 978-1-901663-70-9.
  • Taton, René (1969). Histoire du calcul. Que sais-je ? n° 198. Presses universitaires de France.
  • Swedin, Eric G.; Ferro, David L. (2005). Computers: The Life Story of a Technology. Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-33149-7.
  • Taton, René (1963). Le calcul mécanique (in French). Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
  • Smith, David Eugene (1929). A Source Book in Mathematics. New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.

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Cloud History

1950s

See also: Timeline of the History of Computing, This Year in History and History

1950s

DatePlaceEvent
Apr 1950USASEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer) demonstrated at US NBS in Washington, DC – was the first fully functional stored-program computer in the U.S.
Aug 1950USASWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) demonstrated at UCLA in Los Angeles; fastest computer in the world until IAS machine
Sep 1950GERKonrad Zuse leased his Z4 machine to the ETH Zurich for five years. Z4 was a relay-based machine. The corresponding contract was signed in the fall of 1949, and the machine reassembled in Zurich after its arrival in July 1950.The Z4 was replaced by ERMETH, a computer developed at the ETH in Switzerland from 1953 to 1956, one of the first electronic computers on the European continent.
1950UKTuring Test – The British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing published a paper describing the potential development of human and computer intelligence and communication. The paper would come later to be called the Turing Test.
May 1950UKThe Pilot ACE computer, with 800 vacuum tubes, and mercury delay lines for its main memory, became operational on 10 May 1950 at the National Physical Laboratory near London. It was a preliminary version of the full ACE, which had been designed by Alan Turing.
1950USATIME magazine cover story on the Harvard “Mark III: Can man build a superman?” includes a quote from Howard Aiken, commenting on “calculators” (computers) then under construction: “We’ll have to think up bigger problems if we want to keep them busy.”
30 Mar 1951USAThe first commercially successful electronic computer, UNIVAC, was also the first general-purpose computer – designed to handle both numeric and textual information. Designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, whose corporation subsequently passed to Remington Rand. The implementation of this machine marked the real beginning of the computer era. Remington Rand delivered the first UNIVAC machine to the U.S. Bureau of Census. This machine used magnetic tape for input.
21 Apr 1951USAWhirlwind, the first real-time computer was built at MIT by the team of Jay Forrester for the US Air Defense System, became operational.This computer is the first to allow interactive computing, allowing users to interact with it using a keyboard and a cathode-ray tube. The Whirlwind design was later developed into SAGE, a comprehensive system of real-time computers used for early warning of air attacks.
17 Nov 1951UKJ Lyons, a United Kingdom food company, famous for its tea, made history by running the first business application on an electronic computer. A payroll system was run on Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) a computer system designed by Maurice Wilkes who had previously worked on EDSAC.
Sep 1951UKThe oldest known recordings of computer generated music were played by the Ferranti Mark 1 computer.The Mark 1 is a commercial version of the Manchester Mark 1 machine from the University of Manchester. The music program was written by Christopher Strachey.
1951USAEDVAC (electronic discrete variable computer). The first computer to use magnetic tape.EDVAC could have new programs loaded from the tape. Proposed by John von Neumann, it was installed at the Institute for Advance Study, Princeton, USA.
1951AustraliaCSIRAC used to play music – the first time a computer was used as a musical instrument.
1951USAThe A-0 high-level compiler is invented by Grace Murray Hopper.
April 1952USAIBM introduces the IBM 701, the first computer in its 700 and 7000 series of large scale machines with varied scientific and commercial architectures, but common electronics and peripherals. Some computers in this series remained in service until the 1980s.
June 1952USAIAS machine completed at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA (by Von Neumann and others).
1952USSRBESM-1 is completed. Only one BESM-1 machine was built. The machine used approximately 5,000 vacuum tubes.
1953UKThe University of Manchester team complete the first transistorised computer.
1953USAArthur Andersen was hired to program the payroll for General Electric (GE)’s Appliance Park manufacturing facility near Louisville, Kentucky. As a result, GE purchased UNIVAC I which became the first-ever commercial computer in the USA. Joe Glickauf was Arthur Andersen‘s project leader for the GE engagement.
1953WorldEstimate that there are 100 computers in the world.
1953USAMagnetic core memory developed.
1954USAFORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), the first high-level programming language development, was begun by John Backus and his team at IBMThe development continued until 1957. It is still in use for scientific programming. Before being run, a FORTRAN program needs to be converted into a machine program by a compiler, itself a program.
1954USAThe IBM 650 is introduced. A relatively inexpensive decimal machine with drum storage, it becomes the first mass-produced computer, with some 2000 installations.
December 1954USAThe NORC was delivered by IBM to the US Navy.
1956USAFirst conference on artificial intelligence held at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
1956USAThe Bendix G-15 computer was introduced by the Bendix Corporation
1956NEDEdsger Dijkstra invented an efficient algorithm for shortest paths in graphs as a demonstration of the abilities of the ARMAC computer. The example used was the Dutch railway system. The problem was chosen because it could be explained quickly and the result checked. Although this is the main thing many people will remember Dijkstra for, he also made important contributions to many areas of computing – in particular he should be remembered for his work on problems relating to concurrency, such as the invention of the semaphore.
1957USAFirst dot matrix printer marketed by IBM.
1957USAFORTRAN development finished. See 1954.
1957USAI have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.— Editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall.
1958USAProgramming language LISP (interpreted) developed, Finished in 1960. LISP stands for ‘LISt Processing’. Used in A.I. development. Developed by John McCarthy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1958USSRSetun, a balanced ternary computer developed in 1958 at Moscow State University.
12 Sep 1958USAThe integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments.Robert Noyce, who later set up Intel, also worked separately on the invention. Intel later went on to perfect the microprocessor. The patent was applied for in 1959 and granted in 1964. This patent wasn’t accepted by Japan so Japanese businesses could avoid paying any fees, but in 1989 – after a 30-year legal battle – Japan granted the patent; so all Japanese companies paid fees up until the year 2001 – long after the patent became obsolete in the rest of the World.
1959WorldComputers introduced between 1959 and 1964, often regarded as Second-generation computers, were based on discrete transistors and printed circuits – resulting in smaller, more powerful and more reliable computers.
1959USACOBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) developed by Grace Murray Hopper as the successor to FLOW-MATIC, finished in 1961.
1959USSRMinsk mainframe computer development and production begun in the USSR. Stopped in 1975.
1959USAThe MOSFET (MOS transistor) invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs.The MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor), also known as the MOS transistor, was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs. It enabled high-density integrated circuits, and is the most widely used semiconductor device in computers.[1][2]
1959USAThe silicon integrated circuit developed by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, using Jean Hoerni‘s planar process.In contrast to Kilby’s germanium integrated circuit, Noyce developed a silicon integrated circuit, using Jean Hoerni‘s planar process.[3]
1959USADouglas E. Eastwood and Douglas McIlroy of Bell Labs created Macro SAP, the first programming language with advanced macro capabilities. The following year McIlroy published a seminal paper in the fields of macro processors and programming language extensibility.

References

  1. ^ https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/metal-oxide-semiconductor-mos-transistor-demonstrated/
  2. ^ https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/who-invented-the-transistor/
  3. ^ https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/practical-monolithic-integrated-circuit-concept-patented/
  4. ^ “Molecular Electronic Computer brochure | 102646283 | Computer History Museum”. www.computerhistory.org. Retrieved 2018-03-13.
  5. ^ history-computer.com: LINC
  6. ^ a b c Matthew Kirschenbaum (July 2013), “10 Most Influential Software Programs Ever”, Slate, USA
  7. ^ Stefan Betschon: Der Zauber des Anfangs – Schweizer Computerpioniere. In: Ingenieure bauen die Schweiz. Franz Betschon et al. (editors), pp. 376–399, Verlag Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Zurich 2013, ISBN 978-3-03823-791-4
  8. ^ “Auf den Spuren der deutschen Computermaus” [In the footsteps of the German computer mouse] (in German). Heise Verlag. 2009-04-28. Retrieved 2013-01-07.
  9. ^ “Telefunken’s ‘Rollkugel'”. oldmouse.com.
  10. ^ “SIG-100 video terminal and mouse”.
  11. ^ a b Paul Ford (April 2014), The Great Works of Software – via Medium
  12. ^ “The man who made ‘the world’s first personal computer'”, BBC News, 6 November 2015
  13. ^ a b Cornell University Library (2003). “Digital Preservation and Technology Timeline”. Digital Preservation Management. USA. Retrieved 2017-12-07.
  14. ^ a b IBM Archives Archived 2003-02-10 at Archive.today
  15. ^ Friedl, Paul J. (November 1983). “SCAMP: The Missing Link In The PC’s Past?”. PC. pp. 190–197. Retrieved 8 January 2015.
  16. ^ see 6502 microprocessor history
  17. ^ Steven Weyhrich (28 December 2001). “Apple II History Chapter 5, The Disk II”. Archived from the original on 1 December 2006. Retrieved 27 November 2008.
  18. ^ Christopher Null (April 2007), “50 Best Tech Products of All Time”, PC World, USA

External links

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