From Cave Paintings to the Internet An Annotated Interactive Timeline on the History of Information and Media 1950 to 1955 Timeline

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)

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.

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.

Maurice Wilkes, David 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.)

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.

Richard W. Hamming publishes Error Detecting and Error Codes. (See Reading 12.3.)

11,638 new books are published in the United Kingdom.

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 distribution medium for news reaches its peak in 1950 and 1954. Thereafter more news will be distributed through radio and television than by print.

Marcel Bich purchases the patent for the ballpoint pen from Lazlo Biro, who had been producing ballpoints in Argentina since 1943. Bich produces the very inexpensive Bic Cristal.

"A Bic Cristal ballpoint pen contains enough ink to draw a ontinuous line up to two miles (3.2 km) long. In 2005, Bic sold its hundred billionth ballpoint pen - enough ink to draw a line to Pluto and back more than 20 times."

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation is sold to Remington Rand.

Claude Shannon publishes Programming a computer for playing chess, the first technical paper on computer chess. (See Reading 11.3.)

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.”

IBM decides to produce their first electronic computer, the 701. It is a machine for scientific applications based on the Princeton IAS design.

David Shepard, a cryptanalyst at AFSA, the forerunner of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), builds "Gismo" in his spare time. Gismo is a machine to convert printed messages into machine language for processing by computer-- the first optical character recognition (OCR) system.

Three-dimensional magnetic-core memory replaces electrostatic memory on the Whirlwind I, leading to increased performance and reliability.

Louis N. Ridenour, Ralph R. Shaw, and Albert G. Hill publish a thin volume entitled Bibliography in an Age of Science. It consists of three lectures delivered at the University of Illinois the previous year. Though it is preceded by journal articles and technical reports, this may be the first separately published book to address the problems of applying new technologies to the searching and storage of printed information in libraries. Shaw's article includes illustrations on pp. 60-61 of the Rapid Selector prototype which is in operation at this time. This machine, which applies the ideas of Emanuel Goldberg (1928-1931) and the Memex idea of Vannevar Bush (1938-1945), stores 72,000 frames of information on a 2,000 foot reel of film. The prototype can search through the data at the rate of 78,000 "codes per minute." "Improvement of this searching speed to 120,000 codes per minute is now in sight."

The Paris symposium on “Calculating Machines and Human Thought” takes place. Unlike the other early computer conferences, there is no demonstration of a stored-program electronic digital computer. Louis Couffignal demonstrates the prototype of his non-stored-program machine.

The first Ferranti Mark I version of the Manchester University machine is delivered to Manchester University in England. Except for the unique BINAC delivered to Northrop Aviation in the United States, the Ferranti Mark I is the first commercially produced electronic digital computer delivered to a customer.

UNIVAC I, serial 1, is signed over to the United States Census Bureau. The official dedication occurs on June 14, 1951. Excluding the unique BINAC, the UNIVAC I is the first electronic computer to be commercially manufactured in the United States. Its development precedes the British Ferranti Mark I, but this British machine is actually delivered to its first customer one month earlier than the UNIVAC I. Though the United States Census Bureau owns UNIVAC I, serial 1, Eckert -Mauchly division of Remington Rand retains it in Philadelphia for sales demonstration purposes, and does not actually install it at government offices for twenty-one months.

Whirlwind I begins operation. It includes the first primitive graphics display on its vectorscope screen. (See Reading 8.7.)

The second English electronic computer conference is held at Manchester to inaugurate the first Ferranti Mark I. There Wilkes introduces the term microprogramming,referring to the design of control circuits. The idea is not widely accepted until the following decade. (See Reading 8.8.)

Bertram V. Bowden, the first computer salesman in England, discusses “The application of calculating machines to business and commerce” at the second English electronic computer conference held in Manchester. (See Reading 10.2.)

At the second English computer conference held in Manchester, J. M. Bennett and John Kendrew describe their use of the Cambridge EDSAC for the computation of Fourier Syntheses in the calculation of structure factors of the protein molecule myoglobin. This is the first application of an electronic computer to computational biology. (See Reading 10.3.)

Geoff Hill, a computer programmer with perfect pitch, programs the CSIR Mk1, the first stored-program computer in Australia, to play a melody, and runs the program at the inaugural Conference of Automatic Computing Machines in Sydney. The may be the first demonstration of computer music.

"The CSIR Mk1 operated in Sydney Australia from about November 1949 to June 1955. Geoff Hill was the main programmer at that time and he used the machine to play musical melodies. These melodies, mostly from popular songs, were; 'Colonel Bogey', 'Bonnie Banks', 'Girl with Flaxen Hair' and so on.

"The CSIR Mk1 was dismantled in mid 1955 and moved to The University of Melbourne, where it was renamed CSIRAC. Professor of Mathematics, Thomas Cherry, later Sir Thomas Cherry FRS, had a great interest in programming and music and he created music with CSIRAC. In Melbourne the practice of how CSIRAC was programmed for music was altered and refined somewhat. The program tapes for a couple of test scales still exist, along with the popular melodies 'So early in the Morning' and 'In Cellar Cool', which was a popular drinking song - it appears that the pursuit of computer music and social drinking have been intimately linked since the earliest years. There was also other music on the tape. In about 1957 Cherry wrote a music performance program that would allow a computer user who understood simple standard music notation to enter it easily into CSIRAC for performance, without negotiating all of the timing problems such as was normally required. The music itself may now seem very crude unless it is understood in the context of its creation. It was created by engineers who were not knowledgeable of the latest in musical composition practice and at a time when there was little thought of digital sound. The idea of using a computer, the world's most flexible machine, to create music was a leap of imagination at the time. It is a pity that composers were not invited to use CSIRAC, as they were with the Bell Labs developments, to discover how it could have solved several compositional problems."

The Ferranti Mark 1 performs  Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood in Manchester, England. The recording of these brief performances, which you can listen to from the BBC website at this link, are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music.

LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office) runs a program to "evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week's baked output" at tea shop operator J. Lyons and Company in England. This adaptation of the EDSAC is the first stored-program electronic computer to run business programs on a routine basis. “LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer.”

The EDVAC, planning for which had started in 1944, with development starting in 1947-48, is finally operational at the Moore School. By this time it is essentially obsolete.

Manufacturers begin producing vacuum tubes especially designed for use in digital circuits.

Three-dimensional magnetic-core memory replaces electrostatic memory on the Whirlwind I, leading to increased performance and reliability.

Compagnie des Machines Bull, the first French electronic computer manufacturer, produces its Gamma 3 electronic calculator. It is not a stored-program computer.

A. S. Douglas writes Noughts and Crosses, the first graphical computer game, on the cathode ray tube (CRT) screen of the EDSAC at Cambridge University.

Grace Hopper writes the first compiler (A-0) for UNIVAC.

Hopper publishes “The Education of a Computer,” in which she describes fundamental principles in programming and anticipates future developments. (See Reading 9.5.)

National Educational Television (NET) is founded by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

The English architect and classical scholar Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, an English linguist and classical scholar, decipher Linear B, proving this Mycenaean language (1400-1300 BCE) to be an early form of Greek.

Sergei Lebedev has MESM, the first Russian stored-program computer, operational.

The first electronic computer symposium on the west coast of the United States is held in Los Angeles.

The IAS computer is fully operational at Princeton.

At a meeting of the Medical Library Association Sanford Larkey reports on advances in the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project. This is probably the earliest effort to apply computer methods, including punched card tabulating, in library cataloguing and information retrieval.

Heinz Billing's G1 is in full operation at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, directed by Werner Heisenberg. It is the first electronic computer in Germany. It uses drum memory, but it is not a stored-program machine.

The ACM holds a special meeting in Toronto in honor of the installation of the first electronic digital computer in Canada, installed at the University of Toronto. It is a Ferranti Mark I (FERUT

Edmund Berkeley begins publication of Computing Machinery Field, the first journal on electronic computing, and the ancestor of all commercially published periodical publications on computing. The first three quarterly issues are mimeographed. By the March 1953 issue the title is changed to Computers and Automation.

The UNIVAC Short Code II is developed. This is the earliest extant version of a high-level programming language actually intended to be used on an electronic digital computer.

UNIVAC I, serial 5, used by the CBS television network, successfully predicts the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of the United States. This is the first time that millions of people see and hear about an electronic computer. The machine is later installed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in Livermore, California.

IBM introduces the 701, their first stored-program electronic computer for commercial production. Designed by Nathaniel Rochester, and based on the IAS machine at Princeton, it is intended for scientific use. Feeling that the word "computer" is too closely associated with UNIVAC, IBM calls the 701 an “electronic data processing machine.” IBM eventually sells nineteen of these machines. (See Reading 8.9.)

Bertram V. Bowden, computer salesman for Ferranti Limited, and later made Baron Bowden, edits Faster than Thought, the first widely read English book on electronic digital computing. It will remain in print without change until 1968.

Mortimer Taube proposes the Uniterm Indexing system.

Charles Townes invents the MASER (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). It is a precursor to the LASER that amplifies light.

Having written the entire book on a pay typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library, Ray Bradbury  publishes the dystopian science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, named after the temperature at which books are supposed to spontaneously combust. 

"The novel presents a future American society in which the masses are hedonistic, and critical thought through reading is outlawed. The central character, Guy Montag, is employed is a 'fireman' (which, in this future, means 'book burner'). The number '451' refers to the temperature (in Fahrenheit) at which the books burn when the 'Firemen' burn them 'For the good of humanity'. Written in the early years of the Cold War, the novel is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society.

Bradbury's original intention in writing Fahrenheit 451 was to show his great love for books and libraries. "He has often referred to Montag as an allusion to himself." (quotations from the Wikipedia article on Fahrenheit 451).

"The 701 has at least 25 times the over-all speed but is less than one-quarter the size of IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, which was dismantled to make room for its speedier successor."

"During its five-year reign as one of the world's best-known "electronic brains," the SSEC solved a wide variety of scientific and engineering problems, some involving many millions of sequential calculations. Such other projects as computing the positions of the moon for several hundred years and plotting the courses of the five outer planets -- with resulting corrections in astronomical tables which had been considered standard for many years -- won such popular acclaim for the SSEC that it stimulated the imaginations of pseudo-scientific fiction writers and served as an authentic setting for such motion pictures as "Walk East on Beacon," a spy-thriller with an FBI background.

"Though the 701 occupies the same quarters as the SSEC, which it rendered obsolete, it is not "built in" to the room as was its predecessor. Instead, it is smartly housed between serrated walls of soft-finished aluminum. A balconied conference room, overlooking the calculator and, separated from it by sloping plate glass, provides a vantage point for observing operations and discussing computations. Ample space is provided for writing the complex and abstract equations that are the stock in trade of engineers and scientists in an age of atomic energy and supersonic flight.

"The 701 uses all three of the most advanced electronic storage, or "memory" devices -- cathode ray tubes, magnetic drums and magnetic tapes. The computing unit uses small versions of the familiar electronic tubes, which are able to count at millions of pulses a second. In addition, several thousand germanium diodes are used in place of vacuum tubes, with resultant savings in space and power requirements.

"The 701 was designed for scientific and research purposes, and similar components are adaptable to the requirements of accounting and record-keeping. Research on commercial, data processing machines is under way.

"The 701 is capable of performing more than 16,000 addition or subtraction operations a second, and more than 2,000 multiplication or division operations a second. In solving a typical problem, the 701 performs an average of 14,000 mathematical operations a second."

(quotations from IBM's original press release from the IBM Archives website).

James D. Watson and Francis Crick discover the self-complimentary double-helical structure of the DNA molecule. In their paper, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids. A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” (Nature 171 [1953]: 737-38), they state that, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

James D. Watson and Francis Crick publish “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid” in Nature. In this paper they propose DNA’s means of replication. This discovery has been called as significant, or possibly even more significant, than the original discovery of the structure of the DNA published in April 1953.

Richard W. Appel and other students at Harvard Business school issue Electronic Business Mchines: A New Tool for Management. It is the first report on the application of electronic computers to business. The report is issued before any electronic computer is delivered to an American corporation. (See Reading 10.4.)

IBM announces the development of the 702, a version of the 701 designed for business rather than scientific applications.

Inge Edler and Carl Hellmuth Hertz at Lund University in Sweden obtain the first recording of the ultrasound echo from the heart. This is the beginning of echocardiography from which diagnostic sonography, or medical ultrasonography, will evolve.

"The principle for echocardiography is as follows. The vibrations in a piezoelectric crystal create a beam of high frequency sound waves that are transmitted into the chest. When the waves pass an interface, such as between the heart wall and the surrounding area or the surface of a cardiac valve, some of the sound is reflected, creating an echo. The crystal is reset, enabling it to receive the echo. The longer it took for the echo to return to the crystal, the longer the distance between the crystal and the surface that was the source of the echo. The principle was the same as for sonar, used to measure the depth of water under a vessel, only in this case you measure the distance from the structure that is the source of the echo to the chest wall."

Edler, Inge & Hertz, Carl Hellmuth. The Use of the Ultrasonic Reflectoscope for Continuous Recording of the Movements of Heart Walls. K. Fysiogr. Sellsk. Lund. Foresch., 24 (1954) 1-19.

English Electric constructs a commercial version of Alan Turing’s Pilot ACE called DEUCE. Thirty-three of the machines will be sold, the last in 1962.

Harley Tillet builds the first library information retrieval system on a general purpose computer (IBM 701) at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) at Inyokern, California, later called China Lake. "Searching started with a file of about 15,000 bibliographic records, indexed only by the Uniterms, and search output was limited to report accession numbers. The task was made even more difficult by the fact that the IBM 701, a scientific calculator, did not have any built-in character representation." (Bourne)

In Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish, "Human Relations"), J. A. Barnes coins the term, "Social Network."

George Gamow comes up with the idea of a genetic code in his paper “Possible Mathematical Relation between Deoxyribonucleic Acids and Proteins” (Det. Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab: Biologiske Meddeleiser 22, no. 3 [1954]: 1-13). In the fall of 1953 Gamov gave Crick an earlier draft of this paper entitled “Protein synthesis by DNA molecules.” “Gamov’s scheme was decisive, Crick has often said since, because it forced him, and soon others, to begin to think hard and from a particular slant--that of the coding problem--about the next stage now that the structure of DNA was known.” (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation

IBM announces the 704. It is the first commercially available computer to incorporate indexing and floating point arithmetic as standard features. The 704 also features a magnetic core memory, far more reliable than its predecessors’ cathode ray tube memories. A commercial success, IBM will produce one hundred twenty-three 704s between 1955 and 1960.

UNIVAC I, serial 8, is installed at General Electric Appliance Park outside Louisville, Kentucky. It is the first electronic computer sold to a nongovernmental customer in the United States.

J. H. Laning and Neil Zierler develop an algebraic compiler for the Whirlwind I, the first high-level algebraic language for a computer.

IBM develops and builds the Naval Ordnance Research Computer (NORC)--for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance. Is is the "first supercomputer", and "the most powerful computer on earth from 1954 to about 1963." The NORC’s multiplication unit remains the fastest ever built with vacuum tube technology. IBM introduces the input-output channel as a feature on the NORC. This innovation synchronizes the flow of data into and out of the computer while computation is in progress, relieving the central processor of that task.

The first pocket-sized commercial transistor radio, Regency TR-1, designed by Texas Instruments, is built and marketed by IDEA Corporation.

Development begins on the SAGE Air Defense System, using a computer built by IBM after a design based on the Whirlwind. It includes the first light pen. The full SAGE system will be completed by 1963.

Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery begins publication. At this time the ACM has twelve hundred members.

Developed jointly by Georgetown University and IBM, this experiment in computational linguistics involves completely automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English.

"Conceived and performed primarily in order to attract governmental and public interest and funding by showing the possibilities of machine translation, it was by no means a fully-featured system: It had only six grammar rules and 250 items in its vocabulary. Apart from general topics, the system was specialised in the domain of organic chemistry. The translation was done using a IBM 701 mainframe computer.

"Well publicized by journalists and perceived as a success, the experiment did encourage governments to invest in computational linguistics. The authors claimed that within three or five years, machine translation would be a solved problem."

The Federal Communications Commission approves the National Television Committee’s recommendation for a system of color television broadcasting based on the RCA Dot Sequential Color System.

RCA begins manufacture of its twelve-inch model CT100 color television set. It uses phosphor dots deposited on an internal glass plate. It costs $1,000.00. 5000 of these sets will be produced.

Texas Instruments manufactures the first silicon transistor, the 900-905 series.

Grace Hopper organizes the first symposium strictly on software for the Office of Naval Research. It is attended by over 200 people. The published proceedings will be entitled Symposium on Automatic Programming for Digital Computers (1954). (See Reading 9.6.)

Alan Turing commits suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.  "The apple itself was never tested for contamination with cyanide, but a post-mortem established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was re-enacting a scene from 'Snow White', his favourite fairy tale. Because Turing's homosexuality would have been perceived as a security risk, the possibility of assassination has also been suggested. His remains were cremated at Woking crematorium on 12 June 1954."