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Telex messaging network comes on line
Like the Volkswagen Beetle and modern freeway systems, the Telex messaging network comes out of the early period of Germany’s Third Reich. Telex starts as a way to distribute military messages, but soon becomes a world-wide network of both official and commercial text messaging that will persist in some countries into the 2000s. -
“World Brains”
Belgian Paul Otlet has a modest goal: collect, organize, and share all the world’s knowledge. Otlet had co-created a massive “search engine” starting in the early 1900s. His Mundaneum now combines enhanced card catalogs with sixteen million entries, photos, documents, microfilm, and more. He is working on integrating telegraphy and multiple media, from sound recordings to television. -
Bell Laboratories scientist George Stibitz uses relays for a demonstration adder
Called the “Model K” Adder because he built it on his “Kitchen” table, this simple demonstration circuit provides proof of concept for applying Boolean logic to the design of computers, resulting in construction of the relay-based Model I Complex Calculator in 1939. That same year in Germany, engineer Konrad Zuse built his Z2 computer, also using telephone company relays. -
Elektro at the World's Fair
Built by Westinghouse, the relay-based Elektro robot responds to the rhythm of voice commands and delivers wisecracks pre-recorded on 78 rpm records. It appeared at the World's Fair, and it could move its head and arms… and even "smoked" cigarettes. -
The Complex Number Calculator (CNC) is completed
In 1939, Bell Telephone Laboratories completes this calculator, designed by scientist George Stibitz. In 1940, Stibitz demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College. Stibitz stunned the group by performing calculations remotely on the CNC (located in New York City) using a Teletype terminal connected via to New York over special telephone lines. This is likely the first example of remote access computing. -
Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 Computer
The Z3, an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere, uses 2,300 relays, performs floating point binary arithmetic, and has a 22-bit word length. The Z3 was used for aerodynamic calculations but was destroyed in a bombing raid on Berlin in late 1943. Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in the 1960s, which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. -
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed
After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in 1939, Professor John Vincent Atanasoff receives funds to build a full-scale machine at Iowa State College (now University). The machine was designed and built by Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry between 1939 and 1942. -
First Colossus operational at Bletchley Park
Designed by British engineer Tommy Flowers, the Colossus is designed to break the complex Lorenz ciphers used by the Nazis during World War II. A total of ten Colossi were delivered, each using as many as 2,500 vacuum tubes. A series of pulleys transported continuous rolls of punched paper tape containing possible solutions to a particular code. Colossus reduced the time to break Lorenz messages from weeks to hours. -
ERA 1101 introduced
One of the first commercially produced computers, the company´s first customer was the US Navy. The 1101, designed by ERA but built by Remington-Rand, was intended for high-speed computing and stored 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, one of the earliest magnetic storage devices and a technology which ERA had done much to perfect in its own laboratories. Many of the 1101’s basic architectural details were used again in later Remington-Rand computers until the 1960s. -
CSIRAC plays the Colonel Bogey march
Australia's first computer, the CSIRAC, begins operating in 1949. Chief programmer Geoff Hill came from a musical family and as part of preparations for a demonstration of CSIRAC during the first Australian Conference on Automatic Computing Machines, he programmed it to play several songs, including Colonel Bogey, a popular regimental march written at the beginning World War I. -
Alexander Douglas writes OXO for EDSAC
Alexander Douglas was a Cambridge University PhD candidate when he designed one of the earliest computer games, a version of Tic-Tac-Toe (known in Britain as 'Naughts and Crosses’), called OXO. Played on Cambridge's EDSAC computer, OXO allowed a player to choose to start or to allow the machine to make the first move. Using a rotary telephone dial to enter their moves, the EDSAC would display the game board on a 35 x 15 dot cathode ray tube. Few outside of Cambridge ever played OXO. -
Grimsdale and Webb build early transistorized computer
Working under Tom Kilburn at England’s Manchester University, Richard Grimsdale and Douglas Webb demonstrate a prototype transistorized computer, the "Manchester TC", on November 16, 1953. The 48-bit machine used 92 point-contact transistors and 550 diodes. -
English Electric DEUCE introduced
A commercial version of Alan Turing's Pilot ACE, called DEUCE—the Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine -- is used mostly for science and engineering problems and a few commercial applications. Over 30 were completed, including one delivered to Australia. -
Direct keyboard input to computers
At MIT, researchers begin experimenting with direct keyboard input to computers, a precursor to today´s normal mode of operation. Typically, computer users of the time fed their programs into a computer using punched cards or paper tape. Doug Ross wrote a memo advocating direct access in February. -
First computer scanned image on SEAC
One of the earliest applications of computers to image creation and processing starts with the work of Robert Kirsch on the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) in 1957. Working with the SEAC team, Kirsch designed a rotating drum scanner, allowing him to digitize an image of his young son, Walden. The image, a five-by-five centimeter black-and-white shot, was the first image to be scanned into a computer. In 2003. -
Higinbotham develops Tennis-For-Two at Brookhaven National Labs
Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York holds an annual “Visitor's Day” for families and area residents. William Higinbotham, looking for a way to entertain visitors, conceived of a simple electronic game that could be played using the lab's Donner Model 30 analog computer connected to an oscilloscope display. -
Atlas computer
The concept of virtual memory emerges from a team under the direction of Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester on its Atlas computer. Virtual memory permitted a computer to use its storage capacity to switch rapidly among multiple programs or users and was a key requirement for timesharing. -
Digital Equipment Corporation introduces the PDP-8
The Canadian Chalk River Nuclear Lab needed a special device to monitor a reactor. Instead of designing a custom controller, two young engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) -- Gordon Bell and Edson de Castro -- do something unusual: they develop a small, general purpose computer and program it to do the job. A later version of that machine became the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. -
Ed Feigenbaum DENDRAL artificial intelligence program
A Stanford team led by professors Ed Feigenbaum, Joshua Lederberg and Carl Djerassi creates DENDRAL, the first “expert system.” DENDRAL was an artificial intelligence program designed to apply the accumulated expertise of specialists to problem solving. Its area of specialization was chemistry and physics. It applied a battery of "if-then" rules to identify the molecular structure of organic compounds, in some cases more accurately than experts. -
HP introduces the HP 2116A
The 2116A is HP’s first computer. It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP's growing family of programmable test and measurement products. It interfaced with a wide number of standard laboratory instruments, allowing customers to computerize their instrument systems. The 2116A also marked HP's first use of integrated circuits in a commercial product. -
Seymour Papert designs LOGO
Papert emphasized creative exploration over memorization of facts: "People give lip service to learning to learn, but if you look at curriculum in schools, most of it is about dates, fractions, and science facts; very little of it is about learning. I like to think of learning as an expertise that every one of us can acquire." -
Computer Space is released
The cult success of Steve Russell's SpaceWar! and other early space battle games led Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney to design Computer Space, one of the earliest electronic arcade games. Using no microprocessor, RAM, or ROM, Computer Space was a simple technical design that still allowed for complex gameplay, so complex that many noted there was a steep learning curve involved in playing. While Computer Space did not sell well, it was featured in films like Jaws and Soylent Green. -
Pong is released
California entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell hires young engineer Al Alcorn to design a car-driving game, but when it becomes apparent that this is too ambitious for the time, he has Alcorn design a version of Ping Pong instead. The game was tested in bars in Grass Valley and Sunnyvale, California, where it proved very popular. Pong would revolutionize the arcade industry and launch the modern video game era. -
IBM SCAMP is developed
Under the direction of engineer Dr. Paul Friedl, the Special Computer APL Machine Portable (SCAMP) personal computer prototype is developed at IBM's Los Gatos and Palo Alto, California laboratories. IBM’s first personal computer, the system was designed to run the APL programming language in a compact, briefcase-like enclosure which comprised a keyboard, CRT display, and cassette tape storage. -
Microsoft ships Windows 3.0
Microsoft ships Windows 3.0. Compatible with DOS programs, the first successful version of Windows finally offered good enough performance to satisfy PC users. For the new version, Microsoft updated the interface and created a design that allowed PCs to support large graphical applications for the first time. It also allowed multiple programs to run simultaneously on its Intel 80386 microprocessor. -
Web momentum moves to US
When main Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee forms the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994, the European headquarters are slated for the Web’s birthplace, CERN in Switzerland, with U.S. headquarters at MIT in Boston. But then CERN changes its plans and the core team of Web developers gets split among several French research sites. Also in 1994, Vice-President Al Gore supports a prominent White House Web site, as well as encouraging funding of W3C in the U.S. -
The iMac, a range of all-in-one Macintosh desktop computers, is launched
Apple makes a splash with its Bondi Blue iMac, which sells for about $1,300. Customers got a machine with a 233-MHz G3 processor, 4GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, a CD-ROM drive, and a 15" monitor. The machine was noted for its ease-of-use and included a 'manual' that contained only a few pictures and less than 20 words. As Apple’s first new product under the leadership of a returning Steve Jobs, many consider this the most significant step in Apple's return from near-bankruptcy in the middle 1990s. -
Mac OS X is released
Mac OS X is released. It was a significant departure from the classic Mac OS as it was based on the Unix-like operating systems FreeBSD, NetBSD and NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. OS X introduced a more stable and reliable platform and multiple applications could more efficiently be run at the same time. Mac OS X 10.7 (“Lion”) was the first version to support 64-bit Intel processors. It came pre-installed on all Macs beginning in 2011. -
PowerMac G5 is released
With a distinctive anodized aluminum case, and hailed as the first true 64-bit personal computer, the Apple G5 is the most powerful Macintosh ever released to that point. While larger than the previous G4 towers, the G5 had comparatively limited space for expansion. Virginia Tech used more than a thousand PowerMac G5s to create the System X cluster supercomputer, rated #3 in November of that year on the world’s TOP500 fastest computers. -
NASA Ames Research Center supercomputer Columbia
Named in honor of the space shuttle which broke-up on re-entry, the Columbia supercomputer is an important part of NASA's return to manned spaceflight after the 2003 disaster. Columbia was used in space vehicle analysis, including studying the Columbia disaster, but also in astrophysics, weather and ocean modeling. At its introduction, it was listed as the second fastest supercomputer in the world and this single system increased NASA's supercomputing capacity 10-fold. -
China's Tianhe supercomputers are operational
With a peak speed of over a petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second), the Tianhe 1 (translation: Milky Way 1) is developed by the Chinese National University of Defense Technology using Intel Xeon processors combined with AMD graphic processing units (GPUs). The upgraded and faster Tianhe-1A used Intel Xeon CPUs as well, but switched to nVidia's Tesla GPUs and added more than 2,000 Fei-Tang (SPARC-based) processors.
