From Cave Paintings to the Internet An Annotated Interactive Timeline on the History of Information and Media 1945 to 1950 Timeline

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.

The collapse of the Third Reich occurs after the meeting of Western and Russian armies at Torgau in Saxony.

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 will remain the only operational electronic digital computer in the world until the short-lived Manchester “Baby” prototype becomes operational in 1948.

A preliminary version of First Draft on a Report on the EDVAC is circulated to John von Neumann’s collaborators on this informal document. It is the first theoretical description of the stored-program electronic digital computer

The unconditional surrender of Germany takes place on "Victory in Europe" (VE) Day.

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.

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 Alan Turing and by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, von Neumann patterns the machine to some degree after human thought processes. (See Reading 8.1.)

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 Internet. (See Reading 13.1.)

The surrender of Japan marks the end of World War II.

Alan Turing arrives at the National Physical Laboratory,Teddington, England, to work on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE).

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.

Project Whirlwind switches from analog to digital electronics.

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.)

The Moore School lectures on “The theory and techniques for design of electronic digital computers” take place. This series of lectures, attended by twenty-eight highly qualified experts, leads to widespread adoption of the EDVAC-type design, including stored programs, for nearly all subsequent computer development.

Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper publish A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. The instruction sequences scattered throughout this volume are among the earliest published examples of digital computer programs. (See Reading 9.1.)

There are six television stations in the United States.

Alan Turing prepares a typed proposal, “Proposed electronic calculator,” outlining the development of the ACE.

The ENIAC is publicly unveiled in Philadelphia.

John von Neumann attempts to set up an electronic stored-program computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton. He tries to hire Pres Eckert, who refuses the job.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly leave the Moore School, and establish their own firm, Electronic Control Company. This is the first electronic computer company in the world. Their business plan states that they expect to sell an electronic computer for between $5000 and $30,000.

Julian Bigelow, who previously collaborated with Norbert Wiener at MIT, joins von Neumann and Goldstine at the Princeton IAS Electronic Computer Project. He will be to a large extent responsible for implementing von Neumann's stored-program concepts.

Arthur W. Burks, John von Neumann, and Herman Goldstine issue their Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, discussing ideas to be incorporated into the stored-program computer at the IAS. (See Reading 8.3.)

Max Newman founds the computer laboratory at Manchester University via a grant from the Royal Society.

Pres Eckert lectures at University of Pennsylvania's Moore School on “A preview of a digital computing machine.” He proposes replacing  the three different kinds of memory used in the ENIAC (flip-flops in accumulators, function tables [read-only memory] and interconnecting cables with switches) with a single erasable high-speed memory, the mercury delay-line memory that he invented for this purpose. The is a key step in the development of a stored-program computer.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly's Electronic Control Company, the world's first electronic computer company, obtains a grant of $75,000 from the National Bureau of Standards for a research project involving Eckert's mercury delay line memory system and tape input/output devices. "With the prospect of receiving some money," the company rents their first offices at 1215 Walnut Street in Philadelphia and begins to hire employees.

In Tokyo a contest is held between a soroban (Japanese abacus) expert and the operator of an electronic calculator. "Operating the electronic machine was Thomas Wood of the 240th Finance Distributing Section of General MacArther's headquarters, who was the most experienced computer operator in Japan at the time. The Japanese representative was Kiyoshi Matsuzaki, a champion operator in the Savings Bureau of the Japanese postal administration. The abacus was declared the winner by a score of 4 to 1. . . ." (Erez Kaplan, article on Abacus, Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History, ed. Rojas [2001] I, 4.)

The ENIAC is converted into an elementary stored-program computer via the use of function tables.

EDVAC information is declassified

Louis Couffignal and Leon Brillouin hold a small conference on “large computers” in Paris, at which Couffignal discusses French work, and Brillouin summarizes American accomplishments in electronic digital computing. Couffignal decides against building a stored-program computer. This mistake causes France to fall behind England and America in this technology. The first stored-program computer will not be manufactured in France until 1956. The government agency where Couffignal works, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), will not obtain a stored-program computer (a British model) until 1955.

Design of the Whirlwind I begins at MIT.

Working at the Princeton IAS machine, Andrew D. Booth and Kathleen Britten write a program for realizing a translation dictionary on an electronic computing machine, provided that the necessary storage capacity is available. This may be the earliest work leading toward machine or computer translation.

The Fotosetter, the first phototypesetter, is invented. The first phototypesetters are mechanical devices that replace the metal type matrices with matrices carrying the image of the letters. They replace the caster of hot metal typesetting machines with a photographic unit.

The Curta Model 1 pocket mechanical calculator is produced by Contina Ltd in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. The most advanced small mechanical calculator ever built, it was designed by Curt Hertzstark, a calculating machine manufacturer, while he was a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1943 to 1945. The Nazis operating the concentration camp encouraged Hertzstark to complete the design while he was in Buchenwald, and produced a prototype by the end of the war. The Curta calculator will be manufactured until 1973.

Young Bedouin shepherds, searching for a stray goat in the Judean Desert, enter a long-untouched cave and find jars filled with ancient scrolls. This initial discovery by the Bedouins yields seven scrolls and begins a search that lasts nearly a decade and eventually produces thousands of scroll fragments from eleven caves. During those same years, archaeologists searching for a habitation close to the caves that might help identify the people who deposited the scrolls, excavate the Qumran ruin, a complex of structures located on a barren terrace between the cliffs where the caves are found and the Dead Sea. This is the discovery of the "Dead Sea Scrolls."

The Society of Archivists is founded.

The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers is founded in The Hague  "to uphold and improve professional standards in the trade, to promote honorable conduct in business, and to contribute in various ways to a broader appreciation of the history and art of the book."

Hungarian physicist Dennis Gabor invents holography.

"Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that it appears as if the object is in the same position relative to the recording medium as it was when recorded. The image changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way as if the object was still present, thus making the recorded image (hologram) appear three dimensional. Holograms can also be made using other types of waves. The technique of holography can also be used to optically store, retrieve, and process information. While holography is commonly used to display static 3-D pictures, it is not yet possible to generate arbitrary scenes by a holographic volumetric display." (quoted from the Wikipedia article on holography.)

The first large conference on electronic and electromechanical digital computers is held at Cambridge, Massachusetts. About 250 people attend. At the conference Samuel H. Caldwell suggests the formation of an organization of people engaged in this new field. This organization will be called the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery.

In a lecture to the London Mathematical Society that will remain unpublished until 1986, Alan Turing states that “digital computing machines such as the ACE. . . are in fact practical versions of the universal machine.”

The first part of Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann’s Planning and Coding Problems for an Electronic Computing Instrument is published. The remaining two parts appear on April 15 and August 16, 1948. This is the first theoretical discussion of programming for stored program computers--none of which yet operate. (See Reading 9.2.)

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly learn from a patent lawyer that John von Neumann’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is a publication barring their patenting the ENIAC because it was issued more than a year before they planned to apply for a patent.

Electronic Control Company (Eckert and Mauchly) develops the tentative instruction code C-1 for what they call “a Statistical EDVAC.” This is the earliest document on the programming of an electronic digital computer intended for commercial use. (See Reading 9.3.)

The Electronic Control Company's planned “Statistical EDVAC” is renamed the UNIVAC.

Julian Bigelow and his team redesign the IAS machine to include error checking and parallel processing, essential features of what will become known as the von Neumann architecture.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly apply for the broad ENIAC patent, essentially a patent on the stored-program electronic digital computer, basing their description of the machine to a large extent on the government report they issued on November 30, 1945. (See Reading 8.10.)

The Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, predecessor of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), holds its first meeting at Columbia University in New York. Seventy-eight people attend. John H. Curtiss is elected president, John Mauchly, vice president, and Edmund Berkeley, secretary.

Northrop Aviation places the contract for the BINAC (BINary Automatic Computer) with Eckert and Mauchly’s Electronic Control Company. The BINAC will consist of two identical serial computers operating in parallel with mercury delay-line memory, and magnetic tape as a secondary memory and auxiliary input device.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly apply for a U.S. patent on the mercury acoustic delay-line electronic memory system. This is the "first device to gain widespread acceptance as a reliable computer memory system." (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace [2002] 1191). The patent 2,629,827 will be granted in 1953.

The first brochure advertising the UNIVAC is issued by Eckert and Mauchly’s Electronic Control Company. This is the first sales brochure ever issued for an electronic digital computer. A special characteristic of this brochure is that it does not show the product since at this time the product has not yet been fully conceptualized either in design or external appearance.

The point-contact transistor is invented at Bell Labs by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Much smaller than vacuum tubes and consuming only a fraction of the energy, the transistor is able to switch currents on and off at substantially higher speeds.

A contract is drawn up between Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and the United States Census Bureau for the production of the UNIVAC.

IBM produces the 604 Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator (CPC). Based on vacuum-tube technology, and programmed by making wired connections on a plugboard, the mass-produced CPC 604 features the industry’s first assemblage of digital electronics replaceable as a unit.

Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, a widely read and influential book that applies theories of information and communication to both biological systems and machines. This is also the first conventionally published book to discuss electronic digital computing. Writing as a mathematician rather than an engineer, Wiener’s discussion is theoretical rather than specific. Computer-related words with the “cyber” prefix, including "cyberspace," originate from Wiener’s book.

IBM announces its first large-scale digital calculating machine, the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC). The SSEC is the first computer that can modify a stored program. It features 12,000 vacuum tubes and 21,000 electromechanical relays.

Andrew D. Booth creates a magnetic drum memory, which is two inches long and two inches wide and capable of holding 10 bits per inch. He will offer it for sale in 1952.

William Grey Walter constructs some of the first electronic autonomous robots. His first three-wheel machines, which he calls "Machina Speculatrix" and names Elmer and Elsie (for ELectroMEchanical Robot, Light-Sensitive), are often described as tortoises because of their shape and slow rate of movement. They are capable of phototaxis.

Columbia Records introduces the 33 1/3 rpm Long Playing microgroove record with 17 minutes of music on each side.

The Catholic Church publishes the 32nd and final edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the first of which had appeared in 1559. "This 32nd edition contained 4,000 titles censored for various reasons: heresy, moral deficiency, sexual explicitness, political incorrectness, and so on. Among the notable writers on the list were Desiderius Erasmus, Lawrence Sterne, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe, Nicolaus Copernicus, Honore de Balzac, Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the Dutch Sexologist Theodor Hendrik van de Velde, author of the sex manual The Perfect Marriage. A complete list of the authors and writings present in the subsequent editions of the index are listed in J. Martinex de Bujanda, Index librorum prohibitorum, 1600-1966, Geneva, 2002. Almost every great Western philosopher was, or is, included on the list--even those that believed in God, such as Descartes, Kant, Berkeley. . . .That some atheists are not included is to to the general (Tridentine) rule that heretical works (i.e. works of non-Catholics) are ipso facto forbidden. That some important works are absent is due to the fact that nobody bothered to denounce them."

John Walston introduces cable television, initially in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

The Manchester University "Baby" prototype computer runs its first program, written by Tom Kilburn. This small pilot version of a larger computer was built at the University of Manchester in England to demonstrate the Williams-Kilburn cathode ray tube (CRT) memory. The Manchester “Baby” is the first stored-program electronic digital computer. It operates for only a short time.

You can watch a streaming video of a 1948 BBC newsreel about the Manchester "Baby" at this link. [You will need to scroll down the page.]

Alan Turing writes a report for the National Physical Laboratory entitled Intelligent Machinery, in which he reasons that a thinking machine should be given the blank mind of an infant instead of an adult mind filled with opinions and ideas. The report contains an early discussion of neural networks. Turing estimates it will take a battery of programmers fifty years to bring this learning machine from childhood to adult mental maturity. The report will not be published until 1968.

Claude Shannon publishes his Mathematical Theory of Communication. The theory determines how much information can be sent per unit of time in a system with a given, limited amount of transmission power. Shannon also introduces the term "bit" into the literature, and provides its current meaning in the context of information. (See Reading 12.2.)

Alan Turing joins the computer project at Manchester University as chief programmer.

The second module of the BINAC (the first was completed in August), is completed. Among its numerous innovations are germanium diodes in the logic processing hardware—probably the first application of semiconductors in computers. Until its delivery to Northrop Aviation in September 1949, the BINAC remains in Philadelphia for use in numerous sales demonstrations.

At the Hixon Symposium in Pasadena, California, John von Neumann delivers his General and Logical Theory of Automata, the first of a series of five works (some posthumous) in which he attempts to develop a precise mathematical theory allowing comparison of computers and the human brain.

Edmund Berkeley publishes Giant Brains or Machines that Think, the first popular book on electronic digital computers. This book contains a discussion about a machine called Simon, which has been called the first personal computer. (See Reading 8.6.)

Grace Hopper leaves Harvard to join Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician/programmer.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell creates a world in which totalitarian bureaucracies use technology to enslave populations.

René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud invent the Lithomat in France. It is the first successful phototypesetting machine. Later models called Lumitype can print more than 28,000 characters per hour.

10,000,000 television sets have been sold.

Ralph R. Shaw, Director of Libraries for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with Electronic Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, using funds provided by the Office of Technical Services of the Department of Commerce, develop the Rapid Selector machine for the electronic searching of information recorded in reels of film. This device incorporates technology developed by Emanuel Goldberg in 1928-1931, and Vannevar Bush starting in 1938. The Rapid Selector is an attempt to realize goals described in Bush's 1945 publication, As We May Think.

Betty Holbertson at Eckert-Mauchly develops UNIVAC Instructions Code C-10. This is the first software to allow a computer to be operated by keyboarded commands rather than dials and switches. It is also the first mnemonic code.

Under the name Project Charles, the Air Force funds a project proposed by George Valley and Jay Forrester of MIT to develop a military grade version of the Whirlwind computer in order to develop an automated detection and interception system to protect the entire U.S. from incoming bombers. This will evolve into the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment or SAGE system.

The Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America is founded to promote ethical standards in the antiquarian booktrade both in America and internationally.

Eric Arthur Blair, under his pseudonym, George Orwell,  publishes the dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.  "The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of falsifying records and political literature, thus effectively perpetuating propaganda, who grows disillusioned with his meagre existence and so begins an ultimately futile rebellion against the system.

"The novel has become famous for its satirical portrayal of surveillance and society's increasing encroachment on the rights of the individual. Since its publication the terms Big Brother and Orwellian have entered the popular vernacular."

"Nineteen Eighty-Four's impact upon the English language is extensive; many of its concepts: Big Brother, Room 101 (the worst place in the world), the Thought Police, the memory hole (oblivion), doublethink (simultaneously holding and believing two contradictory beliefs), and Newspeak (ideological language), are common usages for denoting and connoting overarching, totalitarian authority; Doublespeak is an elaboration of doublethink; the adjective "Orwellian" denotes that which is characteristic and reminiscent of George Orwell's writings, specifically 1984. The practice of appending the suffixes "-speak" and "-think" (groupthink, mediaspeak) to denote unthinking conformity. Many other works, in various forms of media, have taken themes from Nineteen Eighty-four." (Quotations from the Wikipedia article on Nineteen Eighty-Four).

Albert A. Auerbach, one of the designers of the BINAC CPU at Eckert and Mauchly's Electronic Control Company, runs a small test routine for filling memory from the A register. This is the first program run on the first stored-program electronic computer produced in the United States.

The United States Census Bureau writes test programs for the BINAC. These manuscript programs, dated March 15 and March 21, are possibly among the earliest extant programs for a stored-program computer built in the United States.

Sanford Larkey publishes The Army Medical Library Research Project at the Welch Medical Library. This may be the beginning of research into machine methods of bibliographical cataloguing and research. By 1952 the project will be considerably advanced.

Maurice V. Wilkes’s EDSAC, fully operational at Cambridge, England, runs a program written by Wilkes for calculating a table of squares. It also runs a program written by David Wheeler for calculating a sequence of prime numbers. The EDSAC is the first easily used, fully functional stored-program computer to run a program.

John Mauchly conceives the Short Code, the first high-level programming language for an electronic computer, to be used with the BINAC.It is also the first interpreted language and the first assembly language. The Short Code first runs on UNIVAC I, serial 1, in 1950. [In 2005 no copies of the Short Code exist with dates earlier than 1952.]

Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, a neurological surgeon at Manchester, delivers a speech entitled The Mind of Mechanical Man in which he discusses the differences between computers and the human brain. (See Reading 11.1).

Warren Weaver circulates a memorandum entitled Translation, suggesting that language translation by computer might be possible. (See Reading 10.1.)

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation issues a press release describing the sale of the BINAC. This is the first press release ever issued for the sale of an electronic computer.

At the Hixon Symposium in Pasadena, California, John von Neumann speaks on The General and Logical Theory of Automata. Within this speech he compares the functions of genes to self-reproducing automata. “For instance, it is quite clear that the instruction I is roughly effecting the functions of a gene. It is also clear that the copying mechanism B performs the fundamental act of reproduction, the duplication of the genetic material, which is clearly the fundamental operation in the multiplication of living cells. It is also easy to see how arbitrary alterations of the system E, and in particular of I, can exhibit certain typical traits which appear in connection with mutation, which is lethality as a rule, but with a possibility of continuing reproduction with a modification of traits.” (pp. 30-31). Sydney Brenner reads and is influenced by this brief discussion of the gene within the context of information when the Hixon Symposium is published in 1951. “The brilliant part of this paper in the Hixon Symposium is his description of what it takes to make a self-reproducing machine. Von Neumann shows that you have to have a mechanism not only of copying the machine, but of copying the information that specifies the machine. So he divided the machine--the automaton as he called it--into three components; the functional part of the automaton, a decoding section which actually takes a tape, reads the instructions and builds the automaton; and a device that takes a copy of this tape and inserts it into the new automaton. . . . I think that because of the cultural differences between most biologists on the one hand, and physicists and mathematicians on the other, it had absolutely no impact at all. Of course I wasn’t smart enough to really see then that this is what DNA and the genetic code was all about. And it is one of the ironies of this entire field that were you to write a history of ideas in the whole of DNA, simply from the documented information as it exists in the literature--that is, a kind of Hegelian history of ideas--you would certainly say that Watson and Crick depended upon von Neumann, because von Neumann essentially tells you how it’s done. But of course no one knew anything about the other. It’s a great paradox to me that in fact this connection was not seen.” (Brenner, My Life, 33-36)

The first test program is run on Trevor Pearcey's and Maston Beard’s CSIR Mk1, the first stored-program computer in Australia. It will be renamed CSIRAC in 1956. Excluding the BINAC, which only operated for a short time, the CSIR Mk1 is one of three stored-program computers operating in the world at this time.