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Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 Computer
This is one of the first computers ever built by Konrad Zuse, who was a german engineer. https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1941/ -
First Bombe is Completed
Hundreds of allied bombes were built in order to determine the daily rotor start positions of Enigma cipher machines, which in turn allowed the Allies to decrypt German messages. https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1941/ -
John Von Nuemann writes first draft of a report of the EDVAC
n a widely circulated paper, mathematician John von Neumann outlines the architecture of a stored-program computer, including electronic storage of programming information and data.
https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1945/ -
Cybernetics
Norbert Wiener publishes the book Cybernetics, which has a major influence on research into artificial intelligence and control systems.
https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1948/ -
Alan Turing quoted by The London Times on Artificial Intelligence
On June 11, The London Times quotes the mathematician Alan Turing. “I do not see why it (the machine) should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms. I do not think you even draw the line about sonnets, though the comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.” https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1949/ -
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. https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1950/ -
CSRICAC plays 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.
https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1951/ -
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. -
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. -
Alan Turing found dead at age 42
English mathematician Alan Turing is found dead in his bed with a cyanide-laced apple on his night stand. Turing had published a seminal paper, On Computable Numbers, in 1936 in which he theorized about the nature of human and machine intelligence. During World War II, Turing applied his mathematical genius to codebreaking efforts, including solving the riddle of the German ENIGMA encryption machine. -
Logic Theorist
Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and J.C. Shaw begin work on Logic Theorist, a program that would eventually prove 38 theorems from Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. Logic Theorist introduced several critical concepts to artificial intelligence including heuristics, list processing and ‘reasoning as search.’ -
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. -
Digital Equipment Corporation founded
DEC is founded initially to make electronic modules for test, measurement, prototyping and control markets. Its founders were Ken and Stan Olsen, and Harlan Anderson. Headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts, Digital Equipment Corporation, took over 8,680 square foot leased space in a nineteenth century mill that once produced blankets and uniforms for soldiers who fought in the Civil War. -
Digital Phones Lines
Phone companies develop digital transmission for internal uses – specifically to put more calls on each of the main lines connecting their own switching centers. By 1958, this produces the T1 standard still used in North America. By the 1980s, phone companies will be leasing digital lines to commercial customers. -
Automatically Programmed Tools
MIT´s Servomechanisms Laboratory demonstrates computer assisted manufacturing (CAM). The school´s Automatically Programmed Tools project created a language, APT, used to control milling machine operations. At the demonstration, an air force general claimed that the new technology would enable the United States to “build a war machine that nobody would want to tackle.” The machine produced a commemorative ashtray for each attendee. -
COBOL Common Business-Oriented Language
A team drawn from several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon develop COBOL—an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language. Many of its specifications borrow heavily from the earlier FLOW-MATIC language. Designed for business use, early COBOL efforts aimed for easy readability of computer programs and as much machine independence as possible. Designers hoped a COBOL program would run on any computer for which a compiler existed with only minimal modifications. -
Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) is demonstrating
The increasing number of users needing access to computers in the early 1960s leads to experiments in timesharing computer systems. Timesharing systems can support many users – sometimes hundreds – by sharing the computer with each user. CTSS was developed by the MIT Computation Center under the direction of Fernando Corbató and was based on a modified IBM 7090, then later 7094, mainframe computer. -
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. -
ASCII
ASCII — American Standard Code for Information Interchange — permits machines from different manufacturers to exchange data. The ASCII code consisted of 128 unique strings of ones and zeros. Each sequence represented a letter of the English alphabet, an Arabic numeral, an assortment of punctuation marks and symbols, or a function such as a carriage return. -
CDC 6600 supercomputer introduced
The Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6600 performs up to 3 million instructions per second —three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM 7030 supercomputer. The 6600 retained the distinction of being the fastest computer in the world until surpassed by its successor, the CDC 7600, in 1968. Part of the speed came from the computer´s design, which used 10 small computers, known as peripheral processing units, to offload the workload from the central processor. -
3C DDP-116 introduced
Designed by engineer Gardner Hendrie for Computer Control Corporation (CCC), the DDP-116 is announced at the 1965 Spring Joint Computer Conference. It was the world's first commercial 16-bit minicomputer and 172 systems were sold. The basic computer cost $28,500. -
Carterfone
Used by Texas oilmen, the Carterfone acoustically connects mobile radios to the telephone network. Telephone companies sue in 1966. The FCC supports Carter, freeing U.S. telephone lines for many uses—including later answering machines, faxes and modems. Users in some countries will wait until the 1990s for similar freedoms. Modems create a kind of de facto net neutrality; telephone companies have no control over what is sent over their lines with a modem. -
Star Trek debuts with multiple computation devices
One of the most popular television series of all-time, Star Trek tells of the journeys of the starship Enterprise and its 5-year mission of exploration. Star Trek speculated on technologies such as voice-recognition, handheld computing and communications, human computer interaction, and machine-supported medical diagnosis. -
GO TO considered harmful letter is published
Edsger Dijkstra´s "GO TO considered harmful" letter is published in Communications of the ACM, fires the first salvo in the structured programming wars. He called for abolishing the unrestricted GOTO statements used in higher-level languages, and argued that they complicated programming. The ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it established a policy of no longer printing articles taking such an assertive position against a coding practice. -
Apollo Guidance Computer read-only rope memory
Apollo Guidance Computer read-only rope memory is launched into space aboard the Apollo 11 mission, which carried American astronauts to the Moon and back. This rope memory was made by hand, and was equivalent to 72 KB of storage. Manufacturing rope memory was laborious and slow, and it could take months to weave a program into the rope memory. If a wire went through one of the circular cores it represented a binary one, and those that went around a core represented a binary zero.
