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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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1950 |
Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he describes the "Turing test" for determining whether a machine is “intelligent”. (See Reading 11.2) |
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Jule Charney, Agnar Fjörtoff, and John von Neumann publish “Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation,” the first weather forecast by electronic computer. It takes twenty-four hours of processing time on the ENIAC to calculate a twenty-four hour forecast. |
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Engineering Research Associates publishes High-Speed Computing Devices, the first textbook on how to build an electronic digital computer. In the form of a “cookbook,” it describes available computer components and how they work. It has extensive, up-to-date bibliographies of the American computing literature and some of the English. The book contains a brief reference to the Rapid Selector information retrieval device then under development. |
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Wilkes, Wheeler, and Stanley Gill issue Report on the Preparation of Programmes for the EDSAC and the Use of the Library of Subroutines. This dittoed document is the first treatise on software written for an operational stored-program computer. The book describes “assemblers” and “subroutines”--segments of programs that are frequently used, so they can be kept in “libraries” and reused as needed in many software applications. The Cambridge group thus introduces the concept of reusable code, one of the principal tools for reducing software bugs and improving the productivity of programmers. It will be published as a printed book, with some changes and a new title, in 1951. (See Reading 9.4.) |
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The Diner's Club issues the first credit card, invented by Diners’ Club founder Frank McNamara. It allows members to charge the cost of restaurant bills only. |
| The Library of Congress announces plans to compile the Union List of Serials using electric punched card tabulating. | |
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Richard W. Hamming publishes Error Detecting and Error Codes. (See Reading 12.3.) |
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11638 new books are published in the United Kingdom. |
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Project Whirlwind is in limited operation at MIT as a general purpose computer. |
| According to Asa Brigg's The History of British Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume 4 , p. 524, newspaper circulation in Britain, as a source of the news relative to radio and television, reaches its peak in 1950 and 1954. | |
February 6 |
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation is sold to Remington Rand. |
March |
Claude Shannon publishes “Programming a computer for playing chess,” the first technical paper on computer chess. (See Reading 11.3.) |
November |
In an article published in Scientific American about "Simon," the first personal computer, Edmund Berkeley predicts that “some day we may even have small computers in our homes, drawing energy from electric power lines like refrigerators or radios.” |
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| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
November 6, 2007
. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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