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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 |
|
1958 |
Zuse produces the Z22, the first commercial electronic digital computer in Germany. It uses vacuum tubes. Zuse KG is the first independent German electronic computer company. It will eventually be purchased by Siemens. |
|
Seymour Cray of Control Data Corporation builds the first transitorized supercomputer, the CDC 1604. |
| William Higinbotham, head of the Instrumentation Division at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, invents the first video game, "Tennis for Two" run on an analog computer hooked up to an oscilloscope. | |
|
Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments conceives of the integrated circuit and constructs a basic prototype. |
|
Independently of Kilby, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invents a process that makes it practical to manufacture integrated circuits. |
|
IBM announces their 1401: a relatively inexpensive computer that proves very popular with businesses, and which begins to compete seriously with existing punched-card equipment. |
| Luhn of IBM develops an automatic document indexing program for the production of literature abstracts. "The complete text of an article in machine-readable form is scanned by an IBM 704 data-processing machine and analyzed in accordance with a standard program. Statistical information derived from word frequency and distribution is used by the machine to compute a relative measure of significance, first for individual words and then for sentences. Sentences scoring highest in significance are extracted and printed out to become the "auto-abstract." | |
|
Though modems existed for teletype since the 1940s, these transmitted at speeds of about 150 bpi. To meet demands of the U.S. military, researchers at Bell Labs develop an improved modem (modulator-demodulator), using amplitude magnification to provide a way to convert digital signals to analog signals and back for transmission at speeds up to 1600 bpi over analog telephone lines. |
MITRE Corporation is founded to manage the development and production of SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) "an automated control system for collecting, tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft." This will be used by NORAD from the late into the 1980s.. |
|
| IBM begins production of the the AN/FSQ-7, a military grade version of the Whirlwind. "The AN/FSQ-7 used 55,000 vaccuum tubes, about 1/2 acre(2,000 m²) of floor space, weighed 275 tons and used up to three megawatts of power. Although the failure rate of an individual tube was low due to efforts in quality control. So many were used that the daily failure rate was in the hundreds. Each center had staff dedicated to replacing dead tubes by running up and down the racks of machinery with shopping carts filled with replacements. The AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built, and will likely hold that record in the future. Each SAGE site included two computers for redundancy, with one processor on "hot standby" at all times. In spite of the poor reliability of the tubes, this dual-processor design made for remarkably high overall system uptime. 99% availability was not unusual." | |
January 31 |
The U. S. launches its first artificial satellite, Explorer-1, officially known as Satellite 1958 Alpha. It was built at the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech. It ceases transmission on May 23 after less than 4 months. Explorer I is credited with the most important discovery of the International Geophysical Year--the discovery of one of the belts of radiation surrounding the earth, subsequently named the Van Allen Belts after James Van Allen, the scientist who identified them. |
February 7 |
In response to the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, President Dwight Eisenhower creates the Advanced Research Planning Agency of the Department of Defense (ARPA). It will be renamed DARPA in 1972. |
July |
Arthur Lee Samuel first demonstrates that machines can learn from past errors, one of the earliest examples of non-numerical computation. |
October |
Newell, Clifford Shaw, and Simon invent “game tree pruning,” an artificial intelligence technique. |
November |
Frank Rosenblatt invents the perceptron, the first precisely specified, computationally oriented neural network. |
November 24-27 |
The National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, England holds the first international symposium on artificial intelligence, calling it Mechanisation of Thought Processes. At this conference McCarthy delivers his paper Programs with Common Sense. (See Reading 11.6.) |
December 19 |
President Eisenhower's brief Christmas greeting is transmitted from the Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment) satellite. He says: "This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite traveling in outer space. My message is a simple one: Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind, America's wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere." This is the first voice transmission from the world's first communications satellite. |
|
| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
February 7, 2006. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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