From Gutenberg to the Internet: Timeline 1940 to 1944

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.

1940	Claude Shannon writes Communication in the Presence of Noise. Because of the war it will not be published until 1948.
	Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil invent “frequency-hopping” transmission, now called spread-spectrum. In 1941 Lamarr patents this under her married name of H. K. Markey. She assigns the patent to the U.S. Government. This early version of frequency hopping uses a piano-roll to change between 88 frequencies, and is intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.
January 8	Bell Labs Complex Number Calculator is operational.
March 7	Vannevar Bush writes a memorandum entitled “Arithmetical Machine.” This shows that the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project begun in 1936 is already well-advanced conceptually. Bush continues to focus most of his computational energy on building the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer II. This 100 ton machine includes 2000 vacuum tubes and 150 electric motors.
June 22	France signs an armistice with Germany, followed by an armistice with Italy, which entered the war on June 10. The Vichy government is established.
August	Atansoff writes a thirty-five-page memorandum describing the design and principles of the ABC machine. It remains unpublished until 1973
September 11	George Stibitz's Complex Number Calculator, an electromechanical relay machine located in New York, is demonstrated via a remote teletype terminal at the American Mathematical Association Meeting in Dartmouth, New Hampshire. Norbert Wiener and John Mauchly spend a lot of time experimenting with the system. This is the first demonstration of remote computing.
September 23	Inspired by the September 11 demonstration, Norbert Wiener sends a letter to Vannevar Bush enclosing a “Memorandum on the Mechanical Solution of Partial Differential Equations.” This outlines a machine that has all the features of an electronic digital computer except for a stored program. The memorandum is not published until it appears in Wiener’s Collected Works. (See Reading 7.3.)
December	John Mauchly meets John Atanasoff at the Philadelphia meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. After corresponding with him about electronic calculating, Mauchly visits Atanasoff in Iowa and reads the thirty-five-page memorandum on the ABC machine that Atanasoff had written in August.
Winter	Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman at Bletchley Park design an improved Bombe cryptanalysis machine for deciphering Enigma messages.
1940-41	Max Newman and his team at Bletchley Park, including Turing, create the top-secret Heath Robinson cryptographic computer, named after the cartoonist-designer of fantastic machines.This special-purpose relay computer successfully decodes messages encrypted by Enigma, the Nazi’s first-generation enciphering machine.
1941	Helmut Schreyer, Konrad Zuse’s associate, receives his doctorate in telecommunications engineering with a dissertation on the use of vacuum-tube relays in switching circuits. He converts Zuse’s logical designs into electronic circuits, building a simple prototype of an electronic computer, which achieves a switching frequency of 10,000 Hz.
	IBM announces the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring proportional spacing. By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreates the appearance of a printed page, an effect that is enhanced by a typewriter ribbon innovation that produces clearer, sharper words on the page.
May 12	Zuse completes his Z3 machine--the world’s first fully functional electromechanical digital computer--with twenty-four hundred relays. It runs programs punched into rolls of discarded movie film. In 1944 it will be destroyed in bombing raids.
Summer	J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly meet at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, and begin discussions on electronic computing.
October 8	Edmund C. Berkeley, an actuary at the Prudential Insurance Company in Boston, writes a report on the possible application of Stibitz’s Complex Number Calculator for insurance-company calculations.
December 7	Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor causes the United States to declare war on Japan. Within days Germany and Italy declare war on the United States.
1942	Atanasoff’s special-purpose ABC machine is nearly operational when work on it is abandoned because of the war.
	Having collaborated with Julian Bigelow, an engineer, Norbert Wiener publishes, as a classified document, The Extrapolation, Interpretation and Smoothing of Stationery Time Series. This contains, according to Shannon , “the first clear-cut formulation of communication theory as a statistical problem, the study of operations on time series.”
	Zuse starts work on the Z4 electromechanical computer.
	Bush completes the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer II, with increased accuracy and higher speed relative to the first Differential Analyzer. It contains two thousand vacuum tubes and weighs about one hundred thousand pounds. For security reasons its existence is not publicized until October 1945.
August	Mauchly writes a privately circulated confidential memorandum on “The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating”
1943	Turing consults with Shannon and Harry Nyquist at Bell Labs in New York concerning the encipherment of speech signals between Roosevelt and Churchill.
	IBM develops the Vacuum Tube Multiplier. This experimental machine is the first complete machine to perform arithmetic electronically. By substituting vacuum tubes for electro-mechanical relays it can process information thousand of times faster.
	Project Whirlwind starts as an analog flight simulator project at MIT.
	Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish “A Logical Calculus of the ideas Imminent in Nervous Activity,” describing the McCulloch -Pitts neuron, the first mathematical model of neural networks. Building on ideas in Turing’s “On computable numbers,” the paper provides a way to describe brain functions in abstract terms, and shows that simple elements connected in a network can have immense computational power. It receives little attention until its ideas are applied by von Neumann, Wiener, and others. (See Reading 7.4.)
	Walter Pitts, an autodidact without a high school or college diploma, accepts a position at MIT to work with Norbert Wiener.
	Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation (MTAC), the world’s first computing journal, begins publication. At this time mathematical tables prepared by human computers are the primary calculating aid. The journal will report on the new electromechanical and electronic “aids to computation” as they are developed.
1943 January	Aiken’s electromechanical Harvard Mark I operates at IBM Endicott Labs in New York under wartime security. This is one of the first two programmed computers built by Americans.
April 8	With the goal of speeding up the calculation of artillery firing tables, Eckert and Mauchly of the Moore School submit a proposal to the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground. It is entitled Report on an Electronic Difference Analyzer. The name tries to make the distinction between the electromechanical analog differential analyzer that the United States Army is currently using and the new electronic digital machine that will be developed. The proposal is submitted to army ordnance in May. When the first contracts are signed between the United States Army and the Moore School, the name of the machine is changed to Electronic Numerical Integrator. Because Mauchly stresses that the machine can be used for more general problems, the device is called an “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC).” Eckert is appointed laboratory supervisor and chief engineer on the project. Mauchly, along with Eckert, is put in charge of engineering and testing.
May 31	Construction of the ENIAC starts at the Moore School. The actual contract between the Moore School and the army does not go into effect until July 1. For security reasons, the understandable rumor that the project is a “white elephant” is promoted rather than denied.
September	The Bell Labs Relay Interpolator (later called the Model II) operates for the first time. Using programs from punched tape, this is possibly the first computer to run programs in the United States.
November 11	Helmut Schreyer’s small prototype of an electronic computer is damaged in an air raid on Germany. The machine will be lost soon thereafter.
1944	Erwin Schrödinger publishes What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, a popularization of ideas about the physical basis of biological phenomena developed by Max Delbrück and N. V. Timofeeff-Ressovsky in a paper published in 1935. The work influences the young James D. Watson and others. Sydney Brenner points out a fundamental mistake in Schrödinger’s understanding of how genes would operate: “Anyway, the key point is that Schrödinger says that the chromosomes contain the information to specify the future organism and the means to execute it. I have come to call this ‘Schrödinger’s fundamental error.’ In describing the structure of the chromosome fibre as a code script he states that. ‘The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are code law and executive power, or to use another simile, they are the architect’s plan and the builder’s craft in one.’ [Schrödinger, p. 20,]. What Schrödinger is saying here is that the chromosomes not only contain a description of the future organism, but also the means to implement the description, or program, as we might call it. And that is wrong! The chromosomes contain the information to specify the future organism and a description of the means to implement this, but not the means themselves. This logical difference was made crystal clear to me when I read the von Neumann article [Hixon Symposium] because he very clearly distinguishes between the things that read the program and the program itself. In other words, the program has to build the machinery to execute itself.” (Brenner, My Life, 33-34)
January 29	Pres Eckert submits a report entitled Disclosure of Magnetic Calculating Machine, which briefly describes means for storing data on magnetic disks and also the storing of programs on disks.
February	The top-secret Colossus programmable cryptanalysis machine designed by Tommy Flowers and his team is completed at Bletchley Park to crack the higher level encryption of the Nazi Lorenz SZ40 machine. It employs vacuum tubes and is between one hundred and one thousand times faster than Heath Robinson. By the end of the war there will be ten Colossi operating. They enable the decryption of sixty-three million characters of high-grade German messages. Even though these machines incorporate features of special purpose electronic digital computers, and have incalculable influence on the outcome of WWII, they will have little influence, in the conventional sense, on the development of future computing technology because they will remain top secret until about 1970.
May	Aiken’s Mark I moves from IBM Endicott Labs to Harvard University where it is officially operational. The machine solves addition problems in less than a second, multiplication in six seconds, and division in 12 seconds. Grace Hopper writes some of its first programs, which run on punched tape.
July	Eckert has two accumulators of the ENIAC operational.
September	John von Neumann visits the ENIAC two-accumulator system for the first time, and becomes deeply interested in the project.
September 27	Eckert and Mauchly state that their conception of the ENIAC is complete. Eckert writes a letter to other members of the project asking them to state written claims to inventions on the project. None is received.
October	The United States Army extends the ENIAC contract to cover research on the planned EDVAC stored-program computer.
December	IBM produces the Pluggable Sequence Relay Calculator (PSRC) for the United States Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground. This special-purpose punched-card calculator, developed for calculating artillery firing trajectories, is capable of performing a sequence of up to fifty arithmetic steps. For the rest of the war these punched-card calculators, programmed with plug boards, remain the fastest digital calculators in the United States. “These are the fastest relay calculators in operation; they perform six multiplications a second together with a great deal of addition, subtraction, reading, writing and consulting tables. They are not as elaborate as the Sequence Calculator at Harvard in that they have less storage capacity and less sequencing facilities; however, they are about twenty times as fast. Consequently, for those problems which can be handled in this way, they will do in one day what the Sequence Calculator will do in twenty days.” (W.J. Eckert, 1947). Because the ENIAC will not become operational until 1945, and stored-program computers following the EDVAC design will be a later development, the PSRC will sometimes be called "the missing link between punched card equipment and stored program computers." "As late as 1947, the Aberdeen machines still had the fastest calculating unit in existence. Their basic operations included addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, and column shift. These were the first punched-card machines to support division and square root. There were 36 storage and computing registers, and certain parallel processing capabilities, including the ability to read and process four input card streams simultaneously."

(This page was last revised on January 24, 2006. Please report errors and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.)

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