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"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 incorporating telegraphy and multiple media, from sound recordings to television. These approaches to organizing information differ. -
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. -
Elektro and Sparko
It was built by Westinghouse, the relay-based Elektro robot answers 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. -
Complex Number Calculator (CNC)
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 using a Teletype terminal connected via to New York over special telephone lines. This is probably the first instance of remote access computing. -
The Zuse 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 mathematics, and has a 22-bit word length. The Z3 was used for aerodynamic calculations but was destroyed in a bombing in Berlin during the 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
Being completed by 1942, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was the first electronic computer. It was designed and built by John Vincent Atanasoff and his assistant, Clifford E. Berry. They worked on the computer from 1939 until 1942 when it was abandoned due to WWII. While it was smaller than other computers of the time period.unfortunately, after being abandoned, it was left and eventually torn to parts. In 1994, a team from Iowa State University began rebuilding the computer and finished it. -
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity
Scientists named , Warren S. McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts, publish the groundbreaking paper A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity. The paper quickly became a foundational work in the study of artificial neural networks and has many applications in artificial intelligence research. In it McCulloch and Pitts described a simplified neural network architecture for intelligence. The model they proposed was enhanced and improved upon by subsequent generations of researchers. -
Harvard Mark 1
Harvard Mark I, an early prototype, built during World War II in the United States. Electromagnetic relay circuits were already being used in business machines, and the vacuum tube—a switch with no moving parts, very high speed action, and greater reliability than electromechanical relays—was quickly put to use in the early experimental machines.The machine was huge, more than 50 feet long, weighing five tons, and consisting of about 750,000 separate parts, it was mostly mechanical. -
ERA 1101 introduced
The ERA 1101, later renamed UNIVAC 1101, was a computer system designed and built by Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in the early 1950s and continued to be sold by the Remington Rand corporation after that company later purchased ERA. -
COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language)
