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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 |
|
1959 |
Wesley A. Clark designs and builds the TX-2 computer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories. It has 320 kilobytes of fast memory, about twice the capacity of the biggest commercial machines. Other features are magnetic tape storage, an on-line typewriter, the first Xerox printer, paper tape for program input, and a nine inch CRT screen. Among its applications will be development of interactive graphics and research on human-computer interaction. |
|
Gordon Gould files his patent on the LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) based on a discovery he made in 1957. The patent will not be granted until 1977. |
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Based on technology originally developed at the Stanford Research Institute, General Electric delivers the first 32 ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) computing systems to the Bank of America. The system uses MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Reading.) ERMA will serve as the Bank’s accounting computer and check handling system until 1970. |
|
Xerox introduces the xerographic copier. |
| Having been computed by human computers since 1767, the Nautical Almanac is finally produced by an electronic computer. "The computation of the data for the almanacs involved a considerable amount of effort. As late as the mid-20th century, HMNAO employed a small army of human computers to carry out this work. They used the latest technology available at the time: logarithm tables, mechanical calculating machines and electro-mechanical calculating machines. In 1959 the Office obtained its own electronic computer, making it the first part of the RGO to use this emerging technology." | |
|
Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson publish the first book on computer-generated music: Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer, based on work done on the University of Illinois’s ILLIAC computer. |
May |
A group representing computer users, manufacturers, universities, and the government, meets at the Pentagon to plan COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), a non proprietary computer language designed for business use that can be run on all electronic computers. Its specifications are inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper and the IBM COMTRAN language. |
July |
Arthur Lee Samuel first demonstrates that machines can learn from past errors, one of the earliest examples of non-numerical computation. |
Late 1950s |
In the late 1950s it becomes recognized that the longevity of paper is a function of its acidity or alkalinity: the lower the acidity and higher the alkalinity, the greater the longevity of paper. |
1959-1960 |
The United States banking industry adopts MICR, (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition), which allows computers to read the data printed on checks. |
1960 |
Reflecting the obsolescence of mathematical tables, Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation (MTAC), the first computing journal, changes its name to Mathematics of Computation. |
| John Horty at the Health Law Center, University of Pittsburgh, pioneers computer-assisted legal research by having the texts of relevant statutes keyed into punched cards and then transferred to computer tapes where they can be searched and retrieved by "key words in combination" (KWIC) | |
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The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Defense Department increases funding for computer research. |
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IBM introduces a transistorized version of its vacuum-tube-logic 709 computer, the 7090. It is the first commercially available general purpose computer with transistor logic. It becomes the most popular large computer of the early 1960s. |
|
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) introduces its first computer, the PDP (Programmed Data Processor)-1designed in part by C. Gordon Bell. Selling for $120,000, it is a commercialization of the TX-O and TX-2 computers designed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories. On advice from the venture-capital firm that financed the company, DEC does not call it a “computer” but a “programmed data processor” instead. The machine is credited as being the most important in the creation of hacker culture. Some references will identify this machine as the first minicomputer; however DEC will give either the PDP-5 introduced in 1963 or the PDP-8 introduced in 1965 that designation. |
| Lanston Monotype Machine Company introduces the Monomatic composing machine, a system perpetuating the concept of a separate keyboard and caster interfaced by a 31-channel punched paper tape. "The keyboard consisted of a two-alphabet layout (instead of the customary five or seven) augmented by four shift keys. In the caster, the matrix-case contained 324 characters arranged in 18 ¥ 18 rows. There were no restrictions on unit values within the rows." | |
|
The United States Department of Defense issues a requirement that all computers supplied to it must be capable of compiling the COBOL programming language. |
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William A. Fetter, a researcher at Boeing, coins the term "computer graphics." |
|
About six thousand computers are operational in the United States, and perhaps ten thousand worldwide. |
|
Drs. William Chardack and Andrew Gage, and electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch, report the success of the world’s first successful long-term implant in a human patient of a self-contained, internally powered artificial pacemaker in their paper, “A transistorized, self- contained, implantable pacemaker for the long-term correction of complete heart block.” |
| The U.S. Navy launches NAVSAT, also known as TRANSIT. It is the first operational satellite navigation system. Using a constellation of five satellites, the system is primarily used to obtain accurate location information by ballistic missile submarines, and is also used as a general navigation system by the Navy, and in hydrographic and geodetic surveying. Since there is no computer small enough to fit through a submarine's hatch, a new computer is designed, named the AN/UYK-1. It is built with rounded corners to fit through the hatch, and is about five feet tall, and sealed to be water-proof. | |
|
John McCarthy introduces LISP (LISt Processor), the language of choice for AI programming. |
March |
J. C. R. Licklider publishes Man-Computer Symbiosis, postulating that the computer should become an intimate symbiotic partner in human activity, including communication. (See Reading 10.5.) |
April |
The first report on COBOL is published. |
September 13-15 |
The first symposium on bionics (biological electronics) takes place at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. (See Reading 11.7.) |
1961 |
QUOTRON, a computerized stock-quotation system using a Control Data Corporation computer, is introduced. It becomes popular with stockbrokers, signaling the end of ticker tape. |
|
Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner and colleagues propose that DNA code is written in “words” called codons formed of three DNA bases. DNA sequence is built from four different bases, so a total of 64 (4 x 4 x 4) possible codons can be produced. They also propose that a particular set of RNA molecules subsequently called transfer RNAs (tRNAs) act to “decode” the DNA. Francis Crick, L. Barnett, Sydney. Brenner and R. J. Watts-Tobin, “General Nature of the Genetic code for Proteins,” Nature 192 (1961): 122732. “There was an unfortunate thing at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium that year. I said, ‘We call this messenger RNA’ Because Mercury was the messenger of the gods, you know. And Erwin Chargaff very quickly stood up in the audience and said he wished to point out that Mercury may have been the messenger of the gods, but he was also the god of thieves. Which said a lot for Chargaff at the time! But I don’t think that we stole anything from anybody--except from nature. I think it’s right to steal from nature, however.” (Brenner, My Life, 85). |
|
Edward Zajak at Bell Labs produces the first computer animated film, entitled Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient Attitude Control System. |
|
Over seven thousand people belong to the ACM. |
|
Fernando José Corbató and colleagues at MIT describe the first working time-sharing system. |
| Compugraphic engineers recognize that a computer can be programmed to automatically handle repetitious typesetter coding. The firm develops a prototype model of the Directory Tape Processor (DTP) which eliminates all operator decisions and produces a fully coded tape used for typesetting. | |
May 1961 |
Wesley A. Clark, a physicist at MIT, starts building the Linc (Laboratory instrument computer). The machine, which some will later call both the first mini-computer and the first personal computer, will be first used in 1962. It has small table-top size, “low cost” ($43,000), keyboard and display, file system and an interactive operating system. It's design is placed in the public domain. Eventually fifty of the machines will be sold by Digital Equipment Corporation. |
| One of the first time-sharing operating systems, CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) is developed at MIT.. | |
May 31 |
Leonard Kleinrock submits his MIT thesis proposal, Information Flow in Large Communication Nets. This is the first paper on what will later come to be known as data communications or data networking theory. (See Reading 13.2.) |
October 19 |
Texas Instruments delivers the first integrated circuit computer to the U.S. Air Force. “The advanced experimental equipment has a total volume of only 6.3 cubic inches and weighs only 10 ounces. It provides the identical electrical functions of a computer using conventional components which is 150 times its size and 48 times its weight and which also was demonstrated for purposes of comparison. It uses 587 digital circuits (Solid Circuit™ semiconductor net works) each formed within a minute bar of silicon material. The larger computer uses 8500 conventional components and has a volume of 1000 cubic inches and weight of 480 ounces.” |
1962 |
Steve Russell and his team at MIT take about 200 hours to program the first computer game for a commercially available computer on a PDP-1. It is called Spacewar! |
| Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring. This very carefully documented book convincingly proves the disastrous effects of DDT in the environment, and generates a storm of controversy. It will later be credited with founding the environmental movement in the United States. | |
|
Marshall McLuhan publishes The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in which he divides history in four epochs: oral tribe culture, manuscript culture, the Gutenberg galaxy and the electronic age. For the break between the time periods in each case the occurrence of a new medium is responsible. Writing before computing is pervasive, McLuhan is concerned with the influence of radio, television and film on print culture, and on the impact of media, independent of content, upon thinking, and social organization: "The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn impacts social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification." |
| The Los Angeles Times newspaper drives Linotype hot metal typesetters with perforated tape created from RCA computers, greatly speeding up typesetting.. The key to this advance is development of a dictionary and method to automate hyphenation and justification of text in columns. These tasks that had taken 40 percent of a manual operator's time. | |
| Inforonics develops and maintains "one of the first data publishing and retrieval systems used by organizations such as the U.S. Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library." | |
April |
Kleinrock publishes Information Flow in Large Communication Nets in RLE Quarterly Progress Reports. This is the first publication to describe and analyze an algorithm for chopping messages into smaller pieces, later to be known as packets. His MIT doctoral thesis, Message Delay in Communication Nets with Storage, filed in December 1962, will elaborate on the impact of this algorithm on data networks. (See Reading 13.3.) |
Summer |
Licklider publishes “Online man-computer communication,” calling for time-sharing of computers, and illustrating available graphic displays of information, and the need for an improved graphical interface. (See Reading 10.6.) |
July 10 |
A Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral launches the A T & T TELSTAR 1 satellite. It is the first privately owned active communications satellite. It transmits the first direct television pictures from the United States to Europe, becoming the first satellite to relay signals from the earth to a satellite and back. |
| July 28 | A bug in the flight software for the Mariner I space probe causes the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch. Mission control destroys the rocket over the Atlantic Ocean. "The investigation into the accident discovers that a formula written on paper in pencil was improperly transcribed into computer code, causing the computer to miscalculate the rocket's trajectory." In 2005 Wired Magazine will characterize this bug as the first of the "ten greatest software bugs of all time." |
October 1 |
Licklider is appointed Director of the Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), a division of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency).His initial budget is $10,000,000 per year. He eventually initiates the sequence of events leading to ARPANET. |
| October | Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute completes his report, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, for the Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research. |
December |
Demonstration of DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computers), a joint development effort between General Motors and IBM begun in 1959. This is the first computer-assisted design (CAD) program. |
1963 |
The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard is promulgated, specifying the pattern of seven bits to represent letters, numbers, punctuation, and control signals in computers. |
|
Digital Equipment Corporation introduces the PDP-5, DEC’s first 12 bit computer. This will be called “the world’s first commercially produced mini computer.” (The PDP-8 introduced in 1965 will also be given this designation.) |
|
Allen M. Cormack shows that changes in tissue density can be computed from x-ray data. No machine is constructed at this time because of limitations in computing power. This is a key discovery, leading in 1972 to the invention of computed tomography (CT). |
|
Ivan Sutherland, a student at MIT working on the experimental TX- 2 computer, creates the first graphical user interface, or first interactive graphics program, in his Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. (See Reading 10.7.) |
| Compugraphic introduces the Linasec I and II, the first general typesetting computers. These automated tapeprocessors produce justified tapes to drive the Linotype machines used in the newspaper industry. "The net production of the Linasec-in excess of 3,600 lines per hour compared to the manually-set 600 lines per hour, break open the market by enabling newspapers to carry more detailed, late breaking news stories." | |
April 25 |
Licklider sends a memo to members and affiliates of what he jokingly calls the "Intergalactic Computer Network, "outlining a key part of his strategy to connect all their individual computers and time-sharing systems into a single computer network spanning the continent.” (Waldrop) |
| 16-27 July | The Printing and the Mind of Man exhibition takes place. The lengthy and complex title of its catalogue reads: Catalogue of a display of printing mechanisms and printed materials arranged to illustrate the history of Western civilization and the means of the multiplication of literary texts since the XV century, organised in connection with the eleventh International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition, under the title Printing and the Mind of Man, assembled at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London, 16-27 July 1963. This will be followed in 1967 by a cloth-bound edition edition with more detailed annotations, and without discussion of "printing mechanisms," entitled Printing and the Mind of Man. A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization, compiled and edited by John Carter and Percy H. Muir, assisted by Nicholas Barker, H.A. Feisenberger, Howard Nixon and S.H. Steinberg. At this time the only references to computing are to Napier on logarithms, and to Leibnitz's stepped-drum calculator. There are references to the invention of radio and films, but not to television. Taking place at the dawn of online searching and the ARPANET, and twenty years before the development of the personal computer, this exhibition and its catalogues may record the peak of the print-centric view of information before the gradual development of electronic information technology leading to the Internet. |
November |
Touch-tone telephone dialing is introduced, enabling calls to be switched digitally. |
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| 1920194019501960 |
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September 3, 2007
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