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From Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline An Annotated Chronology of the History of Information from about 30,000 B.C.E. to the present, by Jeremy M. Norman. |
| 1920194019501960 |
|
1930 |
Vannevar Bush of MIT develops the differential analyzer, a large analog computer more accurate than previous devices of this type. |
| The Library of Congress begins to print Dewey Classification System numbers on library catalogue cards. | |
May 16 |
Texas Instruments is founded as Geophysical Service. Initially it is the first independent contractor specializing in the reflection seismograph method of exploration of oil fields in Texas. |
1931 |
Gödel proves the incompleteness and inconsistency of arithmetic, and invents the theory of recursive functions. |
| December 29 | Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon receives U.S. Patent No. 1,838,389 for a "Statistical Machine." The patent, applied for in 1928, and similar patents obtained in other countries, describes an electronic machine for searching through data encoded on reels of film, using "radiating energy to actuate a recorder when the explored indications upon the search plate and record element are identical, the indications on one of said elements being penetrable by the rays and the indication on the other element being impenetrable by the rays." Vannevar Bush will incorporate technology similar to this in the Rapid Selector machine on which he will begin development in 1938. The existence of Goldberg's patent will prevent Bush from patenting his Rapid Selector. Bush's machine will become famous after publication in 1945 of his article, As We May Think, describing the Memex. |
|
IBM manufactures the 601 multiplying punch. |
1932 |
The BBC begins public television broadcasting in England. By 1935 the transmissions reach only the 2000 homes with television sets within a 35-mile range of Alexandria Palace. Each set costs £100--roughly the cost of a small car. |
1933 |
Edwin Howard Armstrong develops wide-band frequency modulation, later called FM radio. |
January 30 |
Adolf Hitler seizes power in Germany. |
1933 |
IBM markets the first commercially successful electric typewriter, the Electromatic. IBM will produce electric typewriters until 1990. |
1934 |
Konrad Zuse, a German mechanical engineer, realizes that an automatic calculator would need only a control, a memory, and an arithmetic unit. |
| January 26 | In a paper entitled "Sources of Information on Specific Subjects," (Engineering 137 [1934], 85-6), Samuel C. Bradford publishes Bradford's Law of the "exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search." |
| June 19 | President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the National Archives Act creating the National Archives as an independent agency (48 Stat. 1122) and creating the National Historical Publications Commission (NHPC) |
1935 |
The Social Security Act of 1935 requires the U. S. government to keep continuous records on the employment of 26 million individuals. |
September |
IBM’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen, introduces the Dehomag D11 tabulator, the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator. It has internal instructions programmed with a plug board. |
1936 |
Bush begins the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project at MIT. In a paper called Instrumental Analysis, he suggests how an electromechanical machine might be built to accomplish Babbage’s goals for the Analytical Engine. This is almost exactly one hundred years after Babbage began designing his Analytical Engine. In the same paper Bush writes that four billion punched cards are being used annually in electric tabulating machines. This amounts to ten thousand tons of cards. |
|
Church publishes his logical proof of the undecidability of arithmetic, using his
lambda calculus.
Turing publishes On Computable Numbers, a mathematical description of what he calls a universal machine that can, in principle, solve any mathematical problem that can be presented to it in symbolic form. Turing models the machine processes after the functional processes of a human carrying out mathematical computation. (See Reading 7.1.) Emil Post independently arrives at a similar idea. Church calls Turing’s universal machine a Turing Machine . (See Reading 7.2.) |
|
Homer Dudley and a team of engineers at Bell Labs produce the first electronic speech synthesizer, called the Voder. This machine will be demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair by experts that use a keyboard and foot pedals to play the machine and emit speech. |
April 11 |
Zuse applies for a patent on his electromagnetic, program-controlled calculator, which he built in the living room of his parents’ apartment in Berlin. It is the first freely programmable, binary-based calculating machine ever built, but it does not function reliably. The patent application is the only surviving documentation of Zuse's prewar work on computers. Between 1986 and 1989 Zuse will create a replica of the Z1. It is preserved in the Deutsche Technikmuseum. |
| December | The Society of American Archivists is founded. |
1936-38 |
Turing spends more than a year at Princeton to study mathematical logic with Church, who is pursuing research in recursion theory. |
|
| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
January 24, 2006. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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