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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 |
|
1945 |
Konrad Zuse completes the Z4 shortly before V-E Day. It is a large, electromechanical programmable machine, the construction of which began about 1943. The machine is dismantled and shipped from Berlin to a village in the Bavarian Alps. In 1950 it will be refurbished, modified, and installed at ETH in Zurich. For several years it will be the only working electronic digital computer in continental Europe. It will remain operational in Zurich until 1955. It is currently on display in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. |
|
Use of telegraphy peaks in the United States with the transmission of 236,169,000,000 messages during this year. |
Spring |
The ENIAC, the world’s first large-scale, electronic, general-purpose, digital computing machine, is completed and tested at the Moore School. With eighteen thousand vacuum tubes and weighing thirty tons, it is about one thousand times faster than the Harvard Mark I. The ENIAC is programmed by time-consuming plugging of patch cords from buses to panels for each individual problem. The ENIAC remains the only operational electronic digital computer in the world until the short-lived Manchester “Baby” prototype becomes operational in 1948. |
April 27 |
The collapse of the Third Reich occurs after the meeting of Western and Russian armies at Torgau in Saxony. |
May |
A preliminary version of First Draft on a Report on the EDVAC is circulated to John von Neumann’s collaborators on this informal document. |
May 8 |
The unconditional surrender of Germany takes place on "Victory in Europe" (VE) Day. |
Summer |
Grace Hopper, working on construction of Aiken’s Harvard Mark II, finds that a large moth beaten to death by a relay has caused the relay to fail. She removes the bug and enters the dead insect into a log book with the note, First actual case of bug being found. This is first use of the term “bug” and the concept of “debugging” within the context of computing. |
June 30 |
John von Neumann’s office privately circulates the First Draft on a Report on the EDVAC to twenty-four people connected with the EDVAC project. This document, written between February and June, provides the first theoretical description of the basic details of a stored-program computer. Specific hardware is not mentioned in order to avoid the government’s security classification, and to avoid engineering problems that might detract from the logical considerations under discussion. Influenced by Turing and by McCulloch and Pitts, von Neumann patterns the machine to some degree after human thought processes. (See Reading 8.1.) |
July |
Vannevar Bush publishes his article As We May Think, describing the futuristic memex system, a microfilm machine capable of making permanent associative links in information. This hypothetical machine foreshadows aspects of the personal computer and the hyperlinks on the World Wide Web. (See Reading 13.1.) |
September 2 |
The surrender of Japan marks the end of World War II. |
Fall |
Alan Turing arrives at the National Physical Laboratory,Teddington, England, to work on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). |
After September |
Howard Aiken publishes Tables of the Modified Hankel Functions of Order One-Third and of Their Derivatives. These tables, calculated by the Harvard Mark I, are the first published mathematical tables calculated by a programmed automatic computer, finally fulfilling the dream of Charles Babbage first expressed in 1822. They require the equivalent of forty-five days of computer time. Prior to the Mark I they would have required years of human computation. |
November 30 |
Eckert, Mauchly, Brainerd, and Herman Goldstine issue the first confidential published report on the completed ENIAC, discussing how it operates and the methods by which it is programmed. (See Reading 8.2.) |
Late 1945 |
Project Whirlwind switches from analog to digital electronics. |
|
| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
January 24, 2006. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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