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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 |
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1937 |
Alan Turing and John von Neumann have their first discussions about computing and what will later be called “artificial intelligence” (AI) at Princeton. |
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Believing that war with Germany is inevitable, Turing builds in a Princeton machine shop an experimental electromechanical cryptanalysis machine capable of binary multiplication. |
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Comrie founds Scientific Computing Service, the first independent scientific computing service bureau in the world. (See Reading 4.5.) |
August 10 |
Claude Shannon, in his master’s thesis entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, submitted on August 10, 1937, and published in a revised and abridged version in 1938, shows that the two-valued algebra developed by Boole can be used as a basis for the design of electrical circuits. This will become the theoretical basis for the electronics and computer industries that will develop after World War II. Shannon wrote the thesis while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City. As examples of circuits that could be built using relays, Shannon appends to the thesis theoretical descriptions of "An Electric Adder to the Base Two," and "A Factor Table Machine." The "Factor Table Machine" will not be included in the published version. Shannon's thesis will later be characterized as the most significant master's thesis of the 20th century, (See Reading 12.1.) |
| November | George Stibitz, a research mathematician at Bell Telephone Labs in New York City, builds a binary adder out of a few light bulbs, batteries, relays and metal strips cut from tin cans on his kitchen table. This device is similar to a theoretical design described by Shannon in his master's thesis. Stibitz's "Model K" (for “Kitchen”) is the first electromechanical computer built in America. |
| Winter | John Atanasoff at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, conceives of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), a special-purpose electronic computer. |
| November | Howard Aiken drafts a proposal for an automatic calculating machine and joins with IBM to produce the Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical calculating machine that will eventually weigh five tons. |
1938 |
Konrad Zuse completes his Z-1 mechanical computer in his parents’ Berlin apartment. Independently of Shannon, he develops a form of symbolic logic to assist in the design of the binary circuits. With Helmut Schreyer, he begins work on the Z-2. |
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H. G. Wells publishes a book of essays and speeches entitled World Brain which includes an essay entitled "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia."This essay first appeared in the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937. Another essay entitled "The Brain Organization of the Modern World" describes Wells' vision for ". . .a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared." (p. 49) Wells believes that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized towards this end so that "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica." (p. 54) |
| Vannevar Bush begins development of the Rapid Selector machine for information retrieval from rolls of microfilm. He will publish a general description of the aims of this machine in his 1945 article, As We May Think. | |
| October 30 | Orson Wells and the Mercury Theatre broadcast over CBS radio H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. The broadcast is heard by 6,000,000 people, some of whom believe that the story of the invading Martians is real. To the extent that a large number of people are deceived, this may be one of the earliest examples of mass hysteria induced by electronic media. |
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Chester F. Carlson invents xerography. It will not become a commercial success until the invention of the xerographic copier in 1959. |
1939 |
John Atanasoff begins work on his special-purpose ABC machine, the earliest electronic digital computer. It will never be properly operational. |
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IBM starts construction on Aiken ’s Harvard Mark I. |
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Konrad Zuse completes his Z2 machine. It uses the same kind of mechanical memory as the Z1 but uses 800 relays in the arithmetic and control units. . |
April |
George Stibitz and Samuel Williams of Bell Telephone Labs begin construction of the Complex Number Calculator (later known as the Bell Labs Model I). This machine will be called “the first electromechanical computer for routine use.” It uses telephone relays and coded decimal numbers as groups of four binary digits (bits) each. |
September 1 |
Germany invades Poland. World War II begins. |
September 3 |
Britain and France declare war on Germany. |
September 4 |
Alan Turing reports to the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, in the town of Bletchley. |
| October 15 | Zuse’s associate, Helmut Schreyer, writes a memorandum concerning the Z-2, Rechnische Rechenmachine (unpublished at the time), in which he also says it would be possible to build a computer with vacuum tubes that would process “10,000 operations per second.” |
December 31 |
In Germany the Reichsministerium fur Volksaufklaerung und Progaganda publishes the Liste des schädlichen und unerwünschten Schrifttums. This list of "damaging and undesirable writing" includes authors, living and dead, whose works are banned from the Reich because of their Jewish descent, pacifist or communist views, or suspicion thereof. |
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| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
April 18, 2008
. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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