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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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1949 |
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.) |
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Grace Hopper leaves Harvard to join Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician/programmer. |
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In his novel 1984, George Orwell creates a world in which totalitarian bureaucracies use technology to enslave populations. |
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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. |
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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 in order to develop an automated detection and interception system to protect the entire U.S. from incoming bombers. This will evolve into the SAGE system. | |
| February | Albert A. Auerbach, one of the designers of the BINAC CPU, 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. |
March 15 & March 21 |
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. |
| April | 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. |
May 6 |
Maurice V. Wilkes’s EDSAC is fully operational at Cambridge, England. On May 6 it 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, becoming the first easily used, fully functional stored-program computer to run a program. |
June 9 |
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). |
July 15 |
Warren Weaver circulates a memorandum entitled Translation, suggesting that language translation by computer might be possible. (See Reading 10.1.) |
| August 22 | 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. |
Summer |
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. |
September 20 |
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 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). |
November |
The first test program is run on Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard’s CSIRAC, the first stored-program computer in Australia. Excluding the BINAC, which only operated for a short time, this is one of three stored-program computers operating in the world at this time. |
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| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
January 26, 2007
. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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