From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Data Processing / Computing Timeline

"The first securely datable mathematical table in world history comes from the Sumerian city of Shuruppag, c. 2600 BCE. The table is ruled into three columns on each side with ten rows on the front or obverse side. The first columns of the obverse list length measures from c. 3.6km to 360 m in descending units of 360 m, followed by the Sumerian word sa ('equal' and/ or 'opposite') while the final column gives their products in area measure. Only six rows are extant or partially preserved on the reverse. They continue the table in smaller units, from 300 to 60 m in 60 m steps, and then perhaps (in the damaged and missing lower half) from 56 to 6 m in 6 m steps. While the table is organized along two axes, there is just one axis of calculation, namely, the horizontal multiplications. Around a thousand tablets were excavated from Shuruppage, almost all of them from houses and buildings which burned down in a city-wide fire in about 2600 BCE, but sadly we have no detailed context for this table because its excavation number was lost or never recorded." (Eleanor Robson, "Tables and tabular formatting in Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria, 2500 BCE-50," Campbell-Kelly et al [eds]. The History of Mathematical Tables from Sumer to Spreadsheets [2003] 27-29).

Because the numbering systems of the Mesopotamians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans are not convenient for extensive calculation, it is believed that they used some sort of mechanical calculating device. The simplest form of calculating device is a kind of table or tablet on which calculation can be written in sand or dust, and then easily erased. This is the "sandboard abacus". One derivation of the Latin word abacus comes from the Greek abakos from the Hebrew word abaq, meaning dust.

In his Histories Herodotus of Halicarnassus, written about this time, stated that the Egyptians "write their characters and reckon with pebbles, bringing their hand from right to left, while the Greeks go from left to right." D.E. Smith, in his History of Mathematics II, p. 160 quotes this statement by Herodotus and writes, "Right to left order was that of the hieratic script and there is probably some relation between this script and the abacus. No wall pictures thus far discovered give any evidence of the use of the abacus, but in any collection of Egyptian antiquities there may be found disks of various sizes which may have been used as counters."

Excluding counting on the fingers, counting boards are the earliest known counting device, and a precursor of the abacus. They were made from stone or wood and the counting was done on the board with beads or pebbles or or sand or dust.  These devices have also been called the "sandboard abacus." The earliest surviving example of a counting board or a gaming board may be a tablet found about 1850 CE on the Greek island of Salamis which dates back to about 300 BCE. It is preserved in the Greek National Museum at Athens. 

"It is a slab of white marble 149 cm long, 75 cm wide, and 4.5 cm thick, on which are 5 groups of markings. In the center of the tablet is a set of 5 parallel lines equally divided by a vertical line, capped with a semi-circle at the intersection of the bottom-most horizontal line and the single vertical line. Below these lines is a wide space with a horizontal crack dividing it. Below this crack is another group of eleven parallel lines, again divided into two sections by a line perpendicular to them, but with the semi-circle at the top of the intersection; the third, sixth and ninth of these lines are marked with a cross where they intersect with the vertical line."  Three sets of Greek symbols (numbers from the acrophonic system) are arranged along the left, right and bottom edges of the tablet.

The Antikythera Mechanism discovered off Antikythera, Greece in 1901, includes the only specimen preserved from antiquity of a scientifically graduated instrument, and also may also be thought of as the earliest extant mechanical calculator. "The Antikythera mechanism must therefore be an arithmetical counterpart of the much more familiar geometrical models of the solar system which were known to Plato and Archimedes and evolved into the orrery and the planetarium. The mechanism is like a great astronomical clock without an escapement, or like a modern analogue computer which uses mechanical parts to save tedious calculation . . . . It is certainly very similar to the great astronomical cathedral clocks that were built. . . ." in Europe beginning in the fourteenth century.

Applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, in 2008 experts deciphered inscriptions and reconstructed functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The results of this research, illustrated in a video available at this link, revealed details of dials on the instrument’s back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar. Scientists found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

In December 2008, Michael Wright described a more complete reconstruction of the device which he built, in a video available at this link.

The new findings also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C. Archimedes invented a planetarium calculating motions of the moon and the known planets, and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.

Hellenistic astronomer, geographer, and mathematician, Hipparchos of Rhodes, produces a table of chords, an early example of a trigonometric table. 

". . .some historians go so far as to say that trigonometry was invented by him. The purpose of this table of chords was to give a method for solving triangles which avoided solving each triangle from first principles. He also introduced the division of a circle into 360 degrees into Greece" (Mactutor biography of Hipparchus, accessed 11-27-2008).

The rudimentary astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog calculator capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy.

Among the numerous engineering and technological writings by Hero of Alexandria that have survived are designs for automata—machines operated by mechanical or pneumatic means. These include devices for for temples "to instill faith by deceiving believers with 'magical acts of the gods,' for theatrical spectacles, and machines like a statue that pours wine. These are the first recorded automata.

Probably at the Library of Alexandria mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and astrologer Claudius Ptolemaeus (Greek: Κλαύδιος Πτολεμαίος , Klaúdios Ptolemaîos) writes the Almagest, the Cosmographia, and the Tetrabiblos.

In the Almgagest (in Greek, Η Μεγάλη Σύνταξις, "The Great Treatise", originally Μαθηματική Σύνταξις, "Mathematical Treatise") Ptolemy compiled the astronomical knowledge of the ancient Greek and Babylonian world, relying mainly on the work of Hipparchus, which had been written three centuries earlier.

The Almagest is the only surviving comprehensive treatise on astronomy from antiquity. It was preserved, like most of classical Greek science, in Arabic manuscripts, hence its familiar Arabic name. The work was first translated from Arabic into Latin from Arabic texts found in Toledo by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century.

"Ptolemy formulated a geocentric model of the solar system which remained the generally accepted model in the Western and Arab worlds until it was superseded by the heliocentric solar system of Copernicus. Likewise his computational methods (supplemented in the 12th century with the Arabic computational Tables of Toledo), were of sufficient accuracy to satisfy the needs of astronomers, astrologers, and navigators, until the time of the great explorations. They were also adopted in the Arab world and in India. The Almagest also contains a star catalogue, which is probably an updated version of a catalogue created by Hipparchus. Its list of forty-eight constellations is ancestral to the modern system of constellations, but unlike the modern system they did not cover the whole sky (only the sky Ptolemy could see).”

Ptolemy’s Cosmographia “is a compilation of what was known about the world’s geography in the Roman Empire during his time. He relied mainly on the work of an earlier geographer, Marinos of Tyre, and on gazetteers of the Roman and ancient Persian empire, but most of his sources beyond the perimeter of the Empire were unreliable.

“Ptolemy also devised and provided instructions on how to create maps both of the whole inhabited world (oikoumenè) and of the Roman provinces. . . . Ptolemy was well aware that he knew about only a quarter of the globe.”

The maps in surviving manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Geography date only from about 1300, after the text was rediscovered by Maximus Planudes, a Byzantine scholar working in Constantinople.

♦The earliest printed editions of Ptolemy's Cosmographia are separately noticed in this database.

"Ptolemy's treatise on astrology, known in Greek as the Apotelesmatika ("Astrological Outcomes" or "Effects") and in Latin as the Tetrabiblos ("Four books"), was the most popular astrological work of antiquity and also had great influence in the Islamic world and the medieval Latin West. The Tetrabiblos is an extensive and continually reprinted treatise on the ancient principles of horoscopic astrology in four books (Greek tetra means "four", biblos is "book"). That it did not quite attain the unrivaled status of the Almagest was perhaps because it did not cover some popular areas of the subject, particularly electional astrology (interpreting astrological charts for a particular moment to determine the outcome of a course of action to be initiated at that time), and medical astrology" (Wikipedia article on Ptolemy, accessed 07-16-2009).

Dionysius Exiguus, a computist, uses a true zero in tables alongside Roman numerals, but he uses the zero as a word, nulla meaning nothing, not as a symbol. "When division produced zero as a remainder, nihil, also meaning nothing, was used. These medieval zeros were used by all future computists (calculators of Easter). 

"Computus (Latin for computation) is the calculation of the date of Easter in the Christian calendar. The name has been used for this procedure since the early Middle Ages, as it was one of the most important computations of the age."

♦ This is the root of the modern word "computer."

A manuscript entitled Romana computatio, dated 688, appears to be the earliest extant document on ancient Roman techniques of finger reckoning. It was probably used as a source by the Venerable Bede for his De tempore ratione liber (725).

Sherman, Writing on Hands. Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (2000) 28.

Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon monk, the Venerable Bede, writes De temporum ratione (On The Reckoning Of Time). 

"The noted historian of science, George Sarton, called the eighth century 'The Age of Bede'. Bede wrote several major scientific works: a treatise On the Nature of Things, modeled in part after the work of the same title by Isidore of Seville; a work On Time, providing an introduction to the principles of Easter computus; and a longer work on the same subject; On the Reckoning of Time, which became the cornerstone of clerical scientific education during the so-called Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century. He also wrote several shorter letters and essays discussing specific aspects of computus and a treatise on grammar and on figures of speech for his pupils.

"On the Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione) included an introduction to the traditional ancient and medieval view of the cosmos, including an explanation of how the spherical earth influenced the changing length of daylight, of how the seasonal motion of the Sun and Moon influenced the changing appearance of the New Moon at evening twilight, and a quantitative relation between the changes of the Tides at a given place and the daily motion of the moon. Since the focus of his book was calculation, Bede gave instructions for computing the date of Easter and the related time of the Easter Full Moon, for calculating the motion of the Sun and Moon through the zodiac, and for many other calculations related to the calendar. He gives some information about the months of the Anglo-Saxon calendar in chapter XV. Any codex of Bede's Easter cycle is normally found together with a codex of his 'De Temporum Ratione' " (Wikipedia article on Bede, accessed on 11-22-2008).

The first chapter of Bede's De temporum ratione liber entitled "De computo et loquela digitorum" (On computing and speaking with the fingers) explained the method of finger reckoning which had evolved since the ancient world, as a reliable method, especially when a writing surface or writing implements were not available. Though the method was mentioned by classical authors such as Herodotus, no treatises on the topic survived, and it is thought that the technique was passed down mainly through oral tradition.  Bede described "upwards of fifty finger symbols, the numbers extending through one million" (Smith, History of Mathematics [1925] II, 200).  Undoubtedly Bede's text, of which numerous medieval manuscripts survived, was influential on conveying the method during the Middle Ages. Bede's text on finger reckoning was first published by Johannes Aventinus in Abacus atque vetustissima veterum Latinorum per digitos manusque numerandi (1522).

For a discussion of Bede's manual calculating methods see Sherman, Writing on Hands. Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (2000) 28-30.

Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and geographer at the House of Wisdom (Arabic: بيت الحكمة‎; Bait al-Hikma) in Baghdad, develops the concept of a written process to be followed to achieve some goal.

Al-Khwarizmi wrote a book on Hindu-Arabic numerals, giving the name algorithm to this process through the Latinization of his last name:

"The Arabic text is lost but a Latin translation, Algoritmi de numero Indorum (in English Al-Khwarizmi on the Hindu Art of Reckoning) gave rise to the word algorithm deriving from his name in the title. Unfortunately the Latin translation . . . .  is known to be much changed from al-Khwarizmi's original text (of which even the title is unknown). The work describes the Hindu place-value system of numerals based on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 0. The first use of zero as a place holder in positional base notation was probably due to al-Khwarizmi in this work. Methods for arithmetical calculation are given, and a method to find square roots is known to have been in the Arabic original although it is missing from the Latin version" (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Al-Khwarizmi.html, accessed 01-23-2010).

Information in Al-Khwarizmi's work eventually reached Europe in books on Algorithmus by other authors that were distributed by manuscript copying, and eventually by print . . . .  Allard, "La diffusion en occident des premières oeuvres latines issues de l'arithmétique perdue d'al-Khwarizmi," J. Hist. Arabic Sci. 9 (1-2) (1991), 101-105, discusses seven twelfth century Latin treatises based on this lost Arabic treatise by al-Khwarizmi on arithmetic.

The astrolabe, an astronomical instrument used for observing planetary movements, was indispensable for navigation. A type of analog calculator, brass astrolabes were developed in the medieval Islamic world, and were also used to determine the location of the Kaaba in Mecca, in which direction all Muslims face during prayer. Planispheric, or flat, astrolabes, were more common than the linear or spherical types. In planispheric astrolabes the celestial sphere was drawn on a flat surface and represented on one plate.

The earliest known dated astrolabe is of the planispheric type. Made of cast bronze, it bears the name of its maker. The inscription at the back of the kursi, or throne, is written in Kufic , the oldest calligraphic form of the various Arabic scripts, and states that the astrolabe was made by Nastulus (or Bastulus) and gives the date, which corresponds to 927/28. The date is rendered in Arabic letters, whose numerical values total 315, signifying the year in the Islamic calendar in which the astrolabe was made. It is preserved in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Gerbert d'Aurillac, scholar, teacher, tutor and counsellor to Otto III, and Pope Sylvester II (or Silvester II) from 999 till his death in 1002, is considered influential in introducing Arabic knowledge of arithmetic, mathematics, and astronomy to Europe, reintroducing the abacus and armillary sphere which had been lost to Europe since the end of the Greco-Roman era.

"According to William of Malmesbury (c.1080 – c.1143), Gerbert stole the idea of the computing device of the abacus from a Spanish Arab. The abacus that Gerbert reintroduced into Europe had its length divided into 27 parts with 9 number symbols (this would exclude zero, which was represented by an empty column) and 1,000 characters in all, crafted out of animal horn by a shieldmaker of Rheims. According to his pupil Richer, Gerbert could perform speedy calculations with his abacus that were extremely difficult for people in his day to think through in using only Roman numerals. Due to Gerbert's reintroduction, the abacus became widely used in Europe once again during the 11th century" (Wikipedia article on Pope Sylvester II, accessed 11-24-2008).

A version of the abacus appears in China, called suanpan in Chinese. On each rod this abacus has 2 beads on the upper deck and 5 on the lower deck.

The suanpan style of abacus is also referred to as a 2/5 abacus. The 2/5 style survived unchanged until about 1850, at which time the 1/5 (one bead on the top deck and five beads on the bottom deck) abacus appeared.

♦ "In the famous long scroll Along the River During Qing Ming Festival painted by Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145) during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), a 15 column suanpan is clearly seen lying beside an account book and doctor's prescriptions on the counter of an apothecary).

"The similarity of the Roman abacus to the Chinese one suggests that one could have inspired the other, as there is some evidence of a trade relationship between the Roman Empire and China. However, no direct connection can be demonstrated, and the similarity of the abaci may be coincidental, both ultimately arising from counting with five fingers per hand. Where the Roman model and Chinese model (like most modern Japanese) has 4 plus 1 bead per decimal place, the old version of the Chinese suanpan has 5 plus 2, allowing less challenging arithmetic algorithms, and also allowing use with a hexadecimal numeral system. Instead of running on wires as in the Chinese and Japanese models, the beads of Roman model run in grooves, presumably making arithmetic calculations much slower.

"Another possible source of the suanpan is Chinese counting rods, which operated with a decimal system but lacked the concept of a zero as a place holder. The zero was probably introduced to the Chinese in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) when travel in the Indian Ocean and the Middle East would have provided direct contact with India and Islam allowing them to acquire the concept of zero and the decimal point from Indian and Islamic merchants and mathematicians."

Leonardo of Pisa, later known by his nickname Fibonacci, writes Liber Abaci or The Book of the Abacus or The Book of Calculation.

In Liber Abaci Fibonacci introduced Arabic numerals to the European public. These Fibonacci had learned while in Africa with his father who wanted him to become a merchant.

"Liber Abaci was not the first Western book to describe Arabic numerals, but by addressing tradesmen rather than academics, it was the book that convinced the public of the superiority of the new system. The first section introduces the Arabic numeral system. The second section presents examples from commerce, such as conversions of currency and measurements, and calculations of profit and interest. The third section discusses a number of mathematical problems. One example, describing the growth of a population of rabbits, was the origin of the Fibonacci sequence for which the author is most famous today. The fourth section derives approximations, both numerical and geometrical, of irrational numbers such as square roots. The book also includes Euclidean geometric proofs and a study of simultaneous linear equations."

Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari creates the first recorded designs of a progammable automaton and a set of humanoid automata.

Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī builds a his castle clock, a most sophisticated water-powered astronomical clock, which has been called the earliest programmable analog computer. 

"It was a complex device that was about 11 feet high, and had multiple functions alongside timekeeping. It included a display of the zodiac and the solar and lunar orbits, and a pointer in the shape of the crescent moon which travelled across the top of a gateway, moved by a hidden cart and causing automatic doors to open, each revealing a mannequin, every hour. It was possible to re-program the length of day and night everyday in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year, and it also featured five robotic musicians who automatically play[ed] music when moved by levers operated by a hidden camshaft attached to a water wheel. Other components of the castle clock included a main reservoir with a float, a float chamber and flow regulator, plate and valve trough, two pulleys, crescent disc displaying the zodiac, and two falcon automata dropping balls into vases" (Wikipedia article on Al-Jazari, accessed 04-02-2009).

The European table abacus or reckoning table  became standardized to some extent by this time. The pebbles previously used as counters were replaced by specially minted coin-like objects that were cast, thrown, or pushed on the abacus table. They were called jetons from jeter (to throw) in France, and werpgeld for “thrown money” in Holland.

The anonymous Arte dell’Abbaco . . . on the operation of the abacus, printed in Treviso, Italy, probably by Gerardus de Lisa, de Flandria, is the first dated book on arithmetic. It is possible that some undated pamphlets on Algorithmus may predate this work.

"Frank J. Swetz translated the complete work using Smith's notes in 1987 in his Capitalism & Arithmetic: The New Math of the 15th Century. Swetz used a copy of the Treviso housed in the Manuscript Library at Columbia University. The volume found its way to this collection via a curious route. Maffeo Pinelli (1785), an Italian bibliophile, is the first known owner. After his death his library was purchased by a London book dealer and sold at auction on February 6, 1790. The book was obtained for three shillings by Mr. [Michael] Wodhull. About 100 years later the Arithmetic appeared in the library of Brayton Ives, a New York lawyer. When Ives sold the collection of books at auction, George [Arthur] Plimpton, a New York publisher, acquired the Treviso and made it an acquisition to his extensive collection of early scientific [i.e. mathematics] texts. Plimpton donated his library to Columbia University in 1936. Original copies of the Treviso Arithmetic are extremely rare" (Wikipedia article Treviso Arithmetic, accessed 01-10-2009).

ISTC no. ia01141000.

German printer Erhard Ratdolt working in Venice publishes Tabulae Alphonsinae or the Alphonsine Tables, a compilation of astronomical data tabulating the positions and movements of the planets.

The Alphonsine Tables were among the first mathematical tables printed. The tables were computed at Toledo, Spain, from 1262 to 1272 by about 50 astronomers (human computers) assembled for the purpose by King Alfonso X of Castile and León, known as el Sabio, "the learned."  They were a revision and improvement of the Tables of the Cordoban mathematician/astronomer Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm al-Zarqālī, retaining the Ptolemaic system for explaining celestial motion. The original Spanish version was lost, and the tables became known through Latin translation.

ISTC no. ia00534000.

The Japanese adopt the Chinese 1/5 abacus via Korea. In Japanese the abacus is called soroban.

The 1/4 abacus appeared in Japan about 1630.

In 1599 Galileo Galilei developed his geometric and military compass into a general-purpose mechanical analog calculator, later known in English as the sector. 

As an instruction manual for purchasers of the compass, and to establish his priority for the invention, in 1606 Galileo published Le Operazioni del Compasso Geometrico et Militare in an edition of only sixty copies. To avoid having the compass pirated, Galileo had no illustrations of the device included in the pamphlet, which may be considered the first "computer manual."

During the seventeenth century the sector became one of the most widely used mechanical calculators for scientific purposes.

You may view a digital copy of Galileo's Compasso at this link.

Galileo publishes Difesa di Galileo Galilei ... contro alle calumnie & imposture di Baldessar Capra.

This booklet published the transcript of the trial resulting from the lawsuit that Galileo successfully brought against Baldessar Capra for copying the proportional and military compass that Galileo had invented. It was among the first, if not the very first, record of litigation over an invention, and most certainly the first litigation in the history of computing.

John Napier of Scotland publishes his Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio, announcing his invention of logarithms, with the goal of increasing calculating speed and reducing drudgery.

Scotish mathematician John Napier publishes Rabdologiae describing two calculating devices: “Napier’s bones,” and the Multiplicationis promptuarium, or the lightning calculator.

Johannes Kepler publishes Chilias Logarithmorum (1624) and Supplementum (1625), creating his logarithmic tables by a new geometrical procedure, the form thus differing from both Napier and Briggs.

Adriaan Vlacq, a bookseller, publisher, and human computer, computes and issues the first complete set of modern logarithms.

William Oughtred invents the circular form of slide rule. He publishes Circles of Proportion and the Horizontal Instrument in 1632 describing slide rules and sundials.

Mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal invents an adding machine, the Pascaline.

In 1645 Pascal published an eighteen-page pamphlet describing his calculating machine. It was called Lettre dédicatoire à Monseigneur le Chancelier sur le sujet de la machine nouvellement inventée par le Sieur B. P. pour faire toutes sortes d’opérations d’arithmétique, par un mouvement reglé, sans plume ny jettons avec un advis necessaire à ceux qui auront curiosité de voir ladite machine. . . . The pamphlet does not identify a place of printing or a printer’s name, so we may assume that Pascal paid for its printing. When we published Origins of Cyberspace OCLC cited only two copies of this pamphlet in one French library and no copies in North America.

Pascal's pamphlet was reprinted along with additional material related to the Pascaline in his Oeuvres (1779), vol. 4, 7-30. The additional material consisted of Pascal's 1650 letter describing the machine that he presented to Queen Christina of Sweden; the privilege for its construction and sale issued in 1649, and Denis Diderot's description of the machine published in the Encyclopédie.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 13.

The sliding-stick form of the slide rule is developed.

Gaspard Schott's posthumous Organum Mathematicum is published, in which he describes his “mathematical organ,” and his calculating machine based on Napier’s rods.

In Dissertations academiques. . . avec un discours sur. . . un cylindre arithmetique published in Paris Pierre Petit describes an arithmetic cylinder, which he says is more affordable and easier to use than Pascal’s Pascaline.

Samuel Morland publishes The Description and Use of Two Arithmetic Instruments, the first monograph on a calculating machine published in English. The book describes modifications to the Pascaline.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz makes a drawing of his calculating machine mechanism.

Using a stepped drum, the Leibniz Stepped Reckoner, or step reckoner, mechanized multiplication as well as addition by performing repetitive additions. Leibniz had only a wooden model and two brass examples of the machine constructed. These would have been seen by relatively few people. However, because of descriptions published from 1710 onward, the machine was well-enough known to have great influence. The stepped-drum gear was the only workable solution to certain calculating machine problems until about 1875.

Leibniz first published a brief illustrated description of his machine in "Brevis descriptio machinae arithmeticae, cum figura. . . ," Miscellanea Berolensia ad incrementum scientiarum (1710) 317-19, figure 73. The lower portion of the frontispiece of the journal volume also shows a a tiny model of Leibniz's calculator.

"Leibniz got the idea for a calculating machine in 1672 in Paris, from a pedometer. Later he learned about Pascal's machine when he read Pascal's Pensées. He concentrated on expanding Pascal's mechanism so it could multiply and divide. He presented a wooden model to the Royal Society of London on February 1, 1673, and received much encouragement. In a letter of March 26, 1673 to Johann Friedrich, where he mentioned the presentation in London, Leibniz described the purpose of the "arithmetic machine" as making calculations "leicht, geschwind, gewiß" [sic], i.e. easy, fast, and reliable. Leibniz also added that theoretically the numbers calculated might be as large as desired, if the size of the machine was adjusted; quote: "eine zahl von einer ganzen Reihe Ziphern, sie sey so lang sie wolle (nach proportion der größe der Machine)" [sic]. In English: "a number consisting of a series of figures, as long as it may be (in proportion to the size of the machine)". His first preliminary brass machine was built 1674 - 1685. His so-called 'older machine' was built 1686 - 1694. The 'younger machine', the surviving machine, was built from 1690 to 1720.

"In 1775 the 'younger machine' was sent to Göttingen University for repair, and was forgotten. In 1876 a crew of workmen found it in an attic room of a Göttingen University building. It was returned to Hannover in 1880. In 1894-1896 Artur Burkhardt, founder of a major German calculator company restored it, and it has been kept in the Niedersaächsischen Landesbibliothek ever since" (Wikipedia article on Stepped Reckoner, accessed 05-25-2009).

Tomash & Williams, The Erwin Tomash Library on the History of Computing (2009) L69 (p. 772-73).

A dated manuscript by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, preserved in the Niedersachsische Landesbibliothek, Hannover, “includes a brief discussion of the possibility of designing a mechanical binary calculator which would use moving balls to represent binary digits.”

Though Leibniz thought of the application of binary arithmetic to computing in 1679, the machine he outlined was never built, and he published nothing on the subject until his Explication de l'arithmétique binaire, qui se sert des seuls caracteres 0 & 1; avec des remarques sur son utilité, & sur ce qu'elle donne le sens des anciens figues Chinoises de Fohy' published in Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences année MDCCIII. Avec les mémoires de mathématiques which appeared in print in 1705.

"The publication of the Explication was prompted by Leibniz's correspondence with Joachim Bouvet, a member of the Jesuit Mission in China. Leibniz had developed an interest in China, and in April 1697 he edited a collection of letters and essays by members of the Mission, entitled Novissima Sinica. A copy of this came into the hands of Bouvet, who wrote to Leibniz on 18 October 1697 expressing his commendation of the work. Thus began an extended correspondence between the two men which proved to be very important for the dissemination of Leibniz's ideas about binary arithmetic. The crucial exchange began on 15 February 1701, when Leibniz wrote to Bouvet describing for his correspondent the principles of his binary arithmetic, including the analogy of the formation of all the numbers from 0 and 1 with the creation of the world by God out of nothing. Bouvet immediately recognised the relationship between the hexagrams of the I ching and the binary numbers and he communicated his discovery in a letter written in Peking on 4 November 1701. This reached Leibniz, after a detour through England, on 1 April 1703. With this letter, Bouvet enclosed a woodcut of the arrangement of the hexagrams attributed to Fu-Hsi, the mythical founder of Chinese culture, which holds the key to the identification. Within a week of receiving Bouvet's letter, Leibniz had sent to Abbé Bignon for publication in the Mémoires of the Paris Academy his Explication de l'Arithmétique binaire,... & sue ce qu'elle donne le sens des anciens figures Chinoises de Fohy. Ten days later he sent a brief account to Hans Sloane, the Secretary of the Royal Society. Leibniz viewed binary arithmetic less as a computational tool than as a means of discovering mathematical, philosophical and even theological truths. He remarked to Tschirnhaus in 1682 that he anticipated from the use of binary numbers discoveries in number theory that other progressions could not reveal. It was at the same time a candidate for the characteristica generalis, his long sought-for alphabet of human thought. With base 2 numeration Leibniz witnessed a confluence of several intellectual strands in his world view, including theological and mystical ideas of order, harmony and creation. Fontanelle, secretary of the Paris Academy, wrote the unsigned review of Liebniz's paper for the Mémoires section of the volume. He noted that arithmetic could have different bases besides ten; bases such as 12, and two as in the case of Leibniz's binary system. He also noted that although the binary system was not practical for common use Leibniz thought that it would be of advantage in advanced mathematics" (W.P. Watson, antiquarian book description, http://www.ilabdatabase.com/db/detail.php?booknr=360538539, accessed 01-21-2010).

This manuscript was first published, along with as well as facsimiles of Leibniz's "Explication de l'arithmétique binaire" (1705) and his two letters to Johann Christian Schulenberg on binary arithmetic (March 29 and May 17, 1698), published in the Opera Omnia of 1768, with historical articles and translations in German, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Leibniz's death as Herrn von Leibniz' Rechnung mit Null und Eins (1966).

Gottfried Wilhlem Leibniz publishes "Brevis descriptio Machinae Arithmeticae, cum Figura" in Miscellanea Berolinensis (1710) 317-19, fig. 73.

This was the first description of Leibniz's stepped-drum calculator, or stepped reckoner. Because Leibniz had only two working examples of the machine made, and one was lost, his invention of the stepped reckoner was primarily known through this and other publications.

The son of an organ maker, Basile Bouchon of Lyon adapted the concept of musical automata controlled by pegged cylinders to the repetitive task of weaving. He invented a loom that was controlled by perforated paper tape.

In order to make the input of instructions to the loom more flexible Jean Falcon substitutes a chain of punched paper cards for the perforated paper tape employed by his colleague Basile Bouchon.

English mathematician Thomas Simpson publishes "On the Advantage of Taking the Mean of a Number of Observations, in Practical Astronomy" in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 49, part 1, 82-93.

This paper is "a milestone in statistical inference, as well as the earliest formal treatment of any data-processing practice" (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace [2002] no. 16).

Two years after his death English clergyman and mathematician Thomas Bayes's "An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances" is published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 53 (1763) 370-418.

Bayes's paper enunciated Bayes's Theorem for calculating "inverse probabilities”—the basis for methods of extracting patterns from data in decision analysis, data mining, statistical learning machines, Bayesian networks, Bayesian inference.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 1.

The British Government sanctions Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, to produce each year a set of navigational tables, to be called the Nautical Almanac.

This was the first permanent table-making project in the world.

Known as the "Seaman's Bible," the Nautical Almanacs greatly improved the accuracy of navigation. However, the accuracy of the tables in the Nautical Almanacs was dependent upon the accuracy of the human computers producing them—human computers who worked by hand, and were separated geographically. During the time of Charles Babbage these tables became notorious for their errors, providing Babbage the incentive to develop mechanical systems, which he called calculating engines, to improve their accuracy.

Wolfgang von Kempelen builds his chess-playing Turk, an automaton that purports to play chess.

Although the machine displayed an elaborate gear mechanism, its cabinet actually concealed a small human controlling the moves of the machine. Von Kempelen's Turk became a commercial sensation, deceiving a very large number of people. It became the most famous, or the most notorious, automaton in history.

According to to a magazine article by Edgar Allan Poe, the original Turk was exhibited in Richmond, Virginia as late as 1836.

Even though the machine intelligence exhibited by the Turk was an illusion, von Kempelen's automaton was much later viewed as an analog to efforts in computer chess and artificial intelligence.

The first banker’s clearing house, the earliest large-scale data-processing organization, is founded in London.

Gaspard Riche de Prony completes two manuscript sets of massive logarithmic and trigonometric tables calculated by employing systematic division of mental labor, including the use of mathematically untrained hairdressers unemployed after the French Revolution.

The method of production of the tables inspired Charles Babbage in the design of his Difference Engine No. 1 in 1822.

Portions of de Prony's tables were published for the first time in 1891.

Joseph-Marie Jacquard receives a patent for the automatic loom, which he invented in 1801.

The Jacquard loom uses punched cards to store patterns, and reduces strenuous manual labor.

In 1806 Jacquard's loom was declared public property, and Jacquard received a pension. However, he was forced to flee from Lyon because of the anger of the weavers, who feared they would lose their jobs to the new technology. Jacquard persevered, and by the time of his death there were thirty thousand Jacquard looms installed in Lyon alone.

Although the Jacquard loom does no computation, and is not a digital device, it is considered an important conceptual step in the history of computing, as the Jacquard method of storing information in punched cards, and following a series of instructions using a train of punched cards, was used by Charles Babbage in his plans for data and program input, and data output and storage for his Analytical Engine.

Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar of Alsace invents the arithmometer, the first commercially produced adding machine. These machines, which use Leibniz’s stepped drum technology, do not gain many applications until the 1860s or 1870s, by which time Thomas de Colmar has improved them considerably.

The Thomas de Colmar arithmometers remained in relatively limited production through about the start of World War I.

Charles Babbage starts on a model of the Difference Engine, a special-purpose machine that links adding and subtracting mechanisms to one another to calculate the values of more complex mathematical functions.

Babbage's goal was to produce more accurate mathematical tables, the most widely-used calculating aids in his day. Babbage announced his plan to build the Difference Engine No. 1 in an open letter to Sir Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society, and received government funding. (See Reading 4.1)

Charles Babbage publishes On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, the first work on operations research, partially based on data he accumulated in order to build his Difference Engine. Babbage orders construction of a small working portion of his Difference Engine No. 1, approximately one-ninth of the full machine.

This was the only portion of any of his “calculating engines” that Babbage ever completed.

Charles Babbage conceives of the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that embodies in its design most of the features of the programmed digital computer.

In Note sur un moyen de tracer des courbes données par des équations différentielles The french physicist Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis desribes a mechanical device to integrate differential equations of the first order.This is the beginning of researches on solution of differential equations using mechanical devices.

American writer, poet, editor, literary critic, and magazinist Edgar Allan Poe publishes in the Southern Literary Messenger "Maelzel's Chess Player."

In this article on automata Poe provides a very closely reasoned explanation of the concealed human operation of  von Kempelen's Turk, which Poe had seen exhibited in Richmond, Virginia by Maelzel a few weeks earlier. 

Poe also briefly compares von Kempelen's Turk to Babbage's Difference Engine No. 1, which was limited to the computation of astronomical and navigation tables, suggesting essentially that if the Turk was fully automated and had the ability to use the results of one logical operation to make a decision about the next one—what was later called "conditional branching" —it would be far superior to Babbage's machine.  This feature was, of course, later designed into Babbage's Analytical Engine. 

Here is Poe's comparison of the two machines:

"But if these machines were ingenious, what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man? It will, perhaps, be said, in reply, that a machine such as we have described is altogether above comparison with the Chess-Player of Maelzel. By no means — it is altogether beneath it — that is to say provided we assume (what should never for a moment be assumed) that the Chess-Player is a pure machine, and performs its operations without any immediate human agency. Arithmetical or algebraical calculations are, from their very nature, fixed and determinate. Certain data being given, certain results necessarily and inevitably follow. These results have dependence upon nothing, and are influenced by nothing but the data originally given. And the question to be solved proceeds, or should proceed, to its final determination, by a succession of unerring steps liable to no change, and subject to no modification. This being the case, we can without difficulty conceive the possibility of so arranging a piece of mechanism, that upon starting it in accordance with the data of the question to be solved, it should continue its movements regularly, progressively, and undeviatingly towards the required solution, since these movements, however complex, are never imagined to be otherwise than finite and determinate. But the case is widely different with the Chess-Player. With him there is no determinate progression. No one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other. From no particular disposition of the men at one period of a game can we predicate their disposition at a different period. Let us place the first move in a game of chess, in juxta-position with the data of an algebraical question, and their great difference will be immediately perceived. From the latter — from the data — the second step of the question, dependent thereupon, inevitably follows. It is modelled by the data. It must be thus and not otherwise. But from the first move in the game of chess no especial second move follows of necessity. In the algebraical question, as it proceeds towards solution, the certainty of its operations remains altogether unimpaired. The second step having been a consequence of the data, the [column 2:] third step is equally a consequence of the second, the fourth of the third, the fifth of the fourth, and so on, and not possibly otherwise, to the end. But in proportion to the progress made in a game of chess, is the uncertainty of each ensuing move. A few moves having been made, no step is certain. Different spectators of the game would advise different moves. All is then dependent upon the variable judgment of the players. Now even granting (what should not be granted) that the movements of the Automaton Chess-Player were in themselves determinate, they would be necessarily interrupted and disarranged by the indeterminate will of his antagonist. There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind. Its original projector, however, Baron Kempelen, had no scruple in declaring it to be a "very ordinary piece of mechanism — a bagatelle whose effects appeared so marvellous only from the boldness of the conception, and the fortunate choice of the methods adopted for promoting the illusion." But it is needless to dwell upon this point. It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else. Indeed this matter is susceptible of a mathematical demonstration, a priori. The only question then is of the manner in which human agency is brought to bear. Before entering upon this subject it would be as well to give a brief history and description of the Chess-Player for the benefit of such of our readers as may never have had an opportunity of witnessing Mr. Maelzel's exhibition."

The British government abandons financial support for the construction of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1.

Mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea publishes "Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage" in Bibliothèque universelle de Genève, nouvelle série 41 (1842): 352–76.

This was the first published account of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and the first account of its logical design, including the first examples of computer programs ever published. As is well known, Babbage’s conception and design of his Analytical Engine—the first general purpose programmable digital computer—were so far ahead of the imagination of his mathematical and scientific colleagues that few expressed much curiosity regarding it. The only presentation that Babbage made concerning the design and operation of the Analytical Engine was to a group of Italian scientists.

In 1840 Babbage traveled to Torino to make a presentation on the Analytical Engine. Babbage’s talk, complete with charts, drawings, models, and mechanical notations, emphasized the Engine’s signal feature: its ability to guide its own operations—what we call conditional branching. In attendance at Babbage’s lecture was the young Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea (later prime minister of Italy), who prepared from his notes an account of the principles of the Analytical Engine. Reflecting a lack of urgency regarding radical innovation unimaginable to us today, Menabrea did not get around to publishing his paper until two years after Babbage made his presentation, and when he did so he published it in French in a Swiss journal. Shortly after Menabrea’s paper appeared Babbage was refused government funding for construction of the machine.

"In keeping with the more general nature and immaterial status of the Analytical Engine, Menabrea’s account dealt little with mechanical details. Instead he described the functional organization and mathematical operation of this more flexible and powerful invention. To illustrate its capabilities, he presented several charts or tables of the steps through which the machine would be directed to go in performing calculations and finding numerical solutions to algebraic equations. These steps were the instructions the engine’s operator would punch in coded form on cards to be fed into the machine; hence, the charts constituted the first computer programs [emphasis ours]. Menabrea’s charts were taken from those Babbage brought to Torino to illustrate his talks there"(Stein, Ada: A Life and Legacy, 92).

Menabrea’s 23-page paper was translated into English the following year by Lord Byron’s daughter, Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who, in collaboration with Babbage, added a series of lengthy notes enlarging on the intended design and operation of Babbage’s machine. Menabrea’s paper and Ada Lovelace’s translation represent the only detailed publications on the Analytical Engine before Babbage’s account in his autobiography (1864). Menabrea himself wrote only two other very brief articles about the Analytical Engine in 1855, primarily concerning his gratification that Countess Lovelace had translated his paper.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 60.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, translates Menabrea’s paper, "Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage".

Ada expanded her translation with annotations and software examples that provided further insight into Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine: Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage . . . with Notes by the Translator. (See Reading 6.1.)

Per and Georg Scheutz, inspired by Dionysius Lardner’s account of Babbage’s Difference Engine, construct the first working difference engine.

One of the reasons they were able to build the engine is that they were willing to machine the parts to lower tolerances than Babbage tolerated. Therefore the machine was prone to errors.

The anonymous author of the sensational evolutionary treatise Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Robert Chambers) includes a lengthy quote from Babbage’s discussion of programming the Difference Engine from the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise to explain how evolutionary change might occur through time.

This was one of the earliest references to computing within the context of biology.

The Prudential Mutual Assurance, Investment and Loan Association is founded.

The Prudential was the first of the great industrial life insurance companies that handled the insurance policies of millions of people, and processed an immense amount of data.

The use of flong for stereotype printing plates provides an advantage for the publication of mathematical tables since stereotype plates represent “an immutable form of information capture that offered immunity from the inherent vulnerability of moveable type to derangement during printing or storage” (Doron Swade, “The ‘Unerring Certainty of Mechanical Agency’: Machines and Table Making in the Nineteenth Century,” Campbell-Kelly [ed.] The History of Mathematical Tables [2003] 148).

In his book, The Process of Thought Adapted to Words and Language, Alfred Smee suggests the possibility of information storage and retrieval by a mechanical logical machine operating analogously to the human mind.

This was an attempt to produce an artificial system of reasoning based upon neurological principles which were then primarily a matter of speculation. The problem was that Smee's hypothetical “electro-biological” machine, built out of mechanical parts, which he conceived in generality but had no way of engineering, might have occupied a space larger than London.

The Scheutz team produce their second difference engine—an improvement over the first.

The British government, long after refusing funding to complete Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1, or to construct his Analytical Engine, paid for the construction of the Scheutzes' third difference engine.

Medical statistician William Farr first used the Engine in 1859 to print a table for his paper, published in Philosophical Transactions, “On the Construction of Life-Tables, Illustrated by a New Life-Table of the Healthy Districts of England.”

English statistician and epidemiologist William Farr uses the third Scheutz difference engine in the calculation of his English Life Table—the first instance of a printing calculator used extensively to do original work.

However, the machine was very troublesome, and the tables were completed by human computers. (See Reading 4.2)

English mathematician, engineer and computer designer Charles Babbage publishes his autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, in which he presents the most detailed descriptions of his Difference and Analytical Engines published during his lifetime, and writes about his struggles to have his highly futuristic inventions appreciated by society.

In the wording of his title Babbage used the word philosopher in its now obsolete sense of what we call a "scientist." The word scientist coined by William Whewell was not widely used until the end of the 19th or early 20th century. (See Reading 6.2.)

Charles Babbage’s scientific library is sold at auction. The auction catalogue, containing over two thousand items on topics such as mathematical tables, cryptography, and calculating machines, and including many rare volumes, may be the first catalogue of a library on computing and its history.

Frank S. Baldwin (United States) and W. T. Odhner (Russia) invent calculators using a true variable-toothed gear, the first real advance in mechanical calculating technology since Gottfried Leibniz's stepped drum (1673). These calculators are called "pinwheel calculators."

The greater ease of use of this technology, its general reliability, and the compact size of the equipment incorporating it caused an explosion of sales in the calculator industry.

The earliest international exposition exclusively of scientific instruments is held at the South Kensington Museum, London.

A small section of the exposition was devoted to arithmetic and calculating instruments.

Martin Wiberg uses his difference engine to produce Tables de Logarithms Calculées et Imprimées au Moyen de la Machine à Calculer du M. Wiberg. This set of tables of seven-place logarithms from 1 to 100,000 is the first logarithmic table produced by a calculating machine.

It takes three hundred clerks working at The Prudential six months to review its 2,500,000 policies with the assistance of twenty-four Thomas de Colmar arithmometers.

Bruno Abdank-Abakanowicz, a mathematician, inventor and electrical engineer, invents the integraph, a form of integrator.

"The integraph is an elaboration and extension of the planimeter, an earlier, simpler instrument used to measure area. It is a mechanical instrument capable of deriving the integral curve corresponding to a given curve. Hence, it is capable of solving graphically a simple differential equation.

"Sets of partial differential equations are commonly encountered in mathematical physics. Most branches of physics such as aerodynamics, electricity, acoustics, plasma physics, electron-physics and nuclear energy involve complex flows, motions and rates of change which may be described mathematically by partial differential equations. A well-established example from electromagnetics is the set of partial differential equations known as Maxwell's equations.

"In practice, differential equations can be difficult to integrate, that is to solve. The integraph is capable of solving only simple differential equations. The need to handle sets of more complex non-linear differential equations, led Vannevar Bush to develop the Differential Analyzer at MIT in the early 1930s. In turn, limitations in speed, capacity and accuracy of the Bush Differential Analyzer provided the impetus for the development of the ENIAC during World War II.

"Abdank-Abakanowicz’s instrument could produce solutions to a commonly encountered class of simple differential equations of the form dy/dx = F(x) so that y = ò F(x)dx. The basic approach was to draw a graph of the function F and then use the pointer on the device to trace the contour of the function. The value of the integral could then be read from the dials. The concept of the instrument was taken up and soon put into production by such well known instrument makers as the Swiss firm of Coradi in Zurich." From Gordon Bell's website, accessed 09-01-2010.

At the U.S. Census Bureau John Shaw Billings, founder and librarian of the Surgeons General's Library (now the National Library of Medicine), suggests to Herman Hollerith that there ought to be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work of tabulating population and similar statistics. 

Hollerith credited Billings for inspiring him to develop electric punched card tabulating for the census of 1890.

John H. Patterson and his associates acquire the Ritty patents and establish the National Cash Register Company (NCR).

Charles Babbage’s son Henry Prevost Babbage completes and publishes his father’s unfinished edition of writings on the Difference Engine No. 1 and the Analytical Engine, together with a listing of his father’s unpublished plans and notebooks. These appear under the title of Babbage’s Calculating Engines.

Herman Hollerith patents an electromechanical machine for tabulating information stored on punched cards.

Hollerith's electric punched card tabulator was used in the 1890 United States census — the first major data-processing project to use electrical machinery. It reduced data-processing time by 80 percent over manual methods. (See Reading 4.3.)

Dorr E. Felt introduces the Comptometer, a non-printing key-driven calculating machine whose chief advantages are speed, versatility, and ease of use.

The logarithmic and trigonometric tables of Gaspard Riche de Prony, compiled in 19 volumes of manuscript, mostly by hairdressers unemployed after the French Revolution, are finally published in an abbreviated form in one volume. They are the most monumental work of calculation ever carried out by human computers.

The "Millionaire" mechanical calculator is introduced in Switzerland.

The "Millionaire" allowed direct multiplication by any digit and was used by government agencies and scientists — especially astronomers — well into the twentieth century.

The recently established Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung holds an exhibition in Munich of Mathematical and Mathematical-Physical Models, Apparatus, and Instruments.

This was the first international exhibition limited to mathematical devices, including calculating instruments; it reflected the huge growth in the field since the London exposition of 1876. The exhibition had been planned for the previous year but was canceled because of an outbreak of cholera in northern Germany.

Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne publishes Le Calcul simplifiée par procèdes mécaniques et graphiques. This contains the first systematic classification of calculating machines.

To improve data processing of the 1900 census, Herman Hollerith adds an automatic card feed to his electric punched card tabulating machine. 

Percy Ludgate designs a new version of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, of which he publishes a brief description in 1909, and creates engineering drawings.

This would have been the first programmable computer since  Babbage's mid-19th century design. However, the machine was never constructed, and the drawings were lost. (See Reading 6.3.)

Charles R. Flint, a noted trust organizer, merges the Tabulating Machine Company with the Computing Scale Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Bundy Manufacturing Company to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), producing and selling Hollerith tabulating equipment, time clocks, and other business machinery.

James Powers begins manufacturing a punched-card system that competes with Hollerith’s, operating mechanically rather than electrically. His machines were eventually made and sold by Remington Rand.

Thomas J. Watson becomes president of Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, and focuses the company on electric card-tabulating equipment for businesses.

The Napier Tercentenary Celebration is held in Edinburgh, though the mathematical meeting scheduled to follow it is canceled because war is considered imminent.

The conference resulted in two scholarly publications on logarithms, mathematical tables, and mechanical calculators. These summarized both historical and current information for the period up to World War I. (See Readings 3.2 and 6.3.)

Lewis Fry Richardson, an early advocate of the team approach to the solution of large-scale computing problems, publishes Weather Forecasting by Numerical Process, in which he describes a fantasy weather forecast “factory” of sixty-four thousand human computers working in “a large hall like a theatre,” calculating the world’s weather forecasts from meteorological data supplied by weather balloons spaced two hundred kilometers apart around the globe.

IBM adopts the eighty-column punched card, the standard for about the next fifty years, and one of IBM's most profitable products.

Leslie J. Comrie discovers how to use a commercial accounting machine as a difference engine.

With this technique Comrie reformed the production of the Nautical Almanac.

Leslie J. Comrie uses punched-card machines to calculate the motions of the moon.

This project, in which twenty million holes were punched into five hundred thousand cards, continued into 1929. It was the first use of punched cards in a purely scientific application. (See Reading 4.4.)

IBM manufactures the 601 multiplying punch.

"It read two factors up to eight decimal digits in length from a card and punched their product onto a blank field of the same card. It could subtract and add as well as multiply. It had no printing capacity, so was generally used as an offline assistant for a tabulator or accounting machine."

Wallace J. Eckert commissions from IBM a special model of the 601 multiplying punch that  is "capable of doing direct interpolation, a very unusual feature, especially designed for Eckert by one of IBM's top engineers at Endicott [NY]."

Eckert connected the 601 to a Type 285 Tabulator and a Type 016 Duplicating Punch through a calculation control switch of his own design, forming the first machine to perform complex scientific computations automatically.

Konrad Zuse, a German mechanical engineer, realizes that an automatic calculator would need only a control, a memory, and an arithmetic unit.

The Social Security Act of 1935 requires the U. S. government to keep continuous records on the employment of 26 million individuals.

The first  Social Security Numbers (SSNs) were issued by the Social Security Administration in November 1936 as part of the New Deal Social Security program.

"Within three months, 25 million numbers were issued.

"Before 1986, people often did not have a Social Security number until the age of about 14, since they were used for income tracking purposes, and those under that age seldom had substantial income. In 1986, American taxation law was altered so that individuals over 5 years old without Social Security numbers could not be successfully claimed as dependents on tax returns; by 1990 the threshold was lowered to 1 year old, and was later abolished altogether." (Wikipedia article on Social Security Number, accessed 01-17-2010).

Vannevar Bush begins the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project at MIT.

In a paper called "Instrumental Analysis", he suggested how an electromechanical machine might be built to accomplish Charles Babbage’s goals for the Analytical Engine. This was almost exactly one hundred years after Babbage began designing his Analytical Engine.

In the same paper Bush wrote that four billion punched cards were being used annually in electric tabulating machines. This amounted to ten thousand tons of punched cards.

Leslie J. Comrie founds Scientific Computing Service in London. It is the first independent scientific computing service bureau in the world. (See Reading 4.5.)

George Stibitz, a research mathematician at Bell Telephone Labs in New York City, builds a binary adder out of a few light bulbs, batteries, relays and metal strips cut from tin cans on his kitchen table.

This device was similar to a theoretical design described by Claude Shannon in his master's thesis. Stibitz's "Model K" (for “Kitchen”) was the first electromechanical computer built in America.

Konrad Zuse completes his Z1 mechanical computer in his parents’ Berlin apartment.

Independently of Claude Shannon, Zuse developed a form of symbolic logic to assist in the design of the binary circuits. With Helmut Schreyer, he began work on the Z2.

John Atanasoff begins work on his special-purpose ABC machine, the earliest electronic digital computer. It will never be properly operational.

Konrad Zuse completes his Z2 machine. It uses the same kind of mechanical memory as the Z1 but uses 800 relays in the arithmetic and control units. .

George Stibitz and Samuel Williams of Bell Telephone Labs begin construction of the Complex Number Calculator (later known as the Bell Labs Model I).

This machine was called “the first electromechanical computer for routine use.” It used telephone relays and coded decimal numbers as groups of four binary digits (bits) each.

Konrad Zuse’s associate, Helmut Schreyer, writes a memorandum concerning the Z2, Rechnische Rechenmachine (unpublished at the time), in which he also says it would be possible to build a computer with vacuum tubes that would process “10,000 operations per second.”

Max Newman and his team at Bletchley Park, including Alan Turing, create the top-secret Heath Robinson cryptographic computer, named after the cartoonist-designer of fantastic machines.

This special-purpose relay computer successfully decoded messages encrypted by Enigma, the Nazis' first-generation enciphering machine.

The Bell Labs Complex Number Calculator is operational.

Vannevar Bush writes a memorandum entitled “Arithmetical Machine.”

This memorandum shows that the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project begun in 1936 was already well-advanced conceptually. Bush continued to focus most of his computational energy on building the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer II, a 100 ton machine  that included 2000 vacuum tubes and 150 electric motors.

John Atanasoff writes a thirty-five-page memorandum describing the design and principles of the ABC machine.

This may be the earliest extant document describing the principles of an electronic digital computer. It remained unpublished until 1973.

George Stibitz's Complex Number Calculator, an electromechanical relay machine located in New York, is demonstrated via a remote teletype terminal at the American Mathematical Association Meeting in Dartmouth, New Hampshire.

Norbert Wiener and John Mauchly spent a lot of time experimenting with the system. This was the first demonstration of remote computing.

At the suggestion of Wallace J. Eckert of Columbia University, physical chemist Linus Pauling and associates at Caltech use IBM electric punch card tabulating equipment to speed up the Fourier calculations in crystal structure analysis. The first paper resulting from these applications was David E. Hughes, "The Crystal Structure of Melamine," J.Amer. Chem. Soc. 63 (1941) 1737-52. 

Prior to this Leslie J. Comrie had attempted to introduce IBM Hollerith electric punched card tabulating to speed up Fourier calculations in crystal structure analysis in England, but the method did not gain acceptance.

Applications of IBM equipment in crystallographic research continued at Caltech but the method was not published until 1946:

Shaffer, Philip. A., Jr.; Schomaker, Verner; and Pauling, Linus  The use of punched cards in molecular structure determinations. I. Crystal structure calculations [II. Electron diffraction calculations], Journal of Chemical Physics 14 (1946) 648–658, 659–664.  The offprint version of the first paper contained a 10-page supplement with 5 full-age diagrams.

"Shaffer, Schomaker, and Pauling developed methods of carrying out Fourier calculations on IBM punched-card machines, using a Type 11 electric keypunch, a Type 80 electric sorting machine, and a Type 405 alphabetic direct-subtraction tabulating machine. This paper cites work as early as 1941 performed on the structure of various less-complex organic crystals using electric tabulation methods.

The supplement to Part I of this paper, which was included only in the offprint version, provided additional information on card design, plugboard wiring and operating procedures. 'The time factor is in all cases greatly in favor of the punched-card method relative to summation procedures used in the past. Fourier projections which by the Beevers-Lipson method required several days of calculation can now be made in 5 to 7 hours. At the same time the density of calculated points is much greater and the accuracy of the computation is assured. The machine steps in the least-squares calculations require only a few hours, as compared to one or two days with use of an adding machine, and again the accuracy of the work is assured. With the use of parameter cards and the structure-factor files the calculation of structure factors can be accomplished in about one-eighth of the time previously required.' (p. 658). Most of the detail in the technique of data processing, including information on card design, plugboard wiring, and operating procedures appears in the supplement" (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace [2002] no. 879).

Cranswick, "Busting out of crystallography’s Sisyphean prison: from pencil and paper to structure solving at the press of a button: past, present and future of crystallographic software development, maintenance and distribution," Acta Crystallographica Section A Foundations of Crystallography A64 (2008) 65-87. (Accessed 04-20-2010).

Konrad Zuse completes his Z3 machine—the world’s first fully functional Turing-complete electromechanical digital computer--with twenty-four hundred relays.

The Z3 ran programs punched into rolls of discarded movie film. In 1944 it was destroyed in bombing raids.

Because no one outside of Germany had any knowledge of the Z3, Zuse's design had no influence on the development of computing in the the United States or England during or after World War II.

J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly meet at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, and begin discussions on electronic computing.

Edmund C. Berkeley, an actuary at the Prudential Insurance Company in Boston, writes a report on the possible application of George Stibitz’s Complex Number Calculator for insurance-company calculations.

John Atanasoff’s special-purpose ABC machine is nearly operational when work on it is abandoned because of World War II.

Konrad Zuse starts work on the Z4 electromechanical computer.

Vannevar Bush completes the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer II, a monstrous machine more accurate and faster than the first Differential Analyzer. It contained two thousand vacuum tubes and weighed about one hundred thousand pounds. For security reasons its existence was not publicized until October 1945.

John Mauchly writes a privately circulated confidential memorandum on “The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating”

IBM develops the Vacuum Tube Multiplier.

This experimental machine was the first complete machine to perform arithmetic electronically. By substituting vacuum tubes for electro-mechanical relays it could process information thousands of times faster than electro-mechanical calculators.

Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation (MTAC), the world’s first computing journal, begins publication.

At this time mathematical tables prepared by human computers were the primary calculating aid. The journal reported on the new electromechanical and electronic “aids to computation” as they were developed.

Howard Aiken’s electromechanical Harvard Mark I operates at IBM Endicott Labs in New York under wartime security.

This was one of the first two programmed computers built by Americans.

With the goal of speeding up the calculation of artillery firing tables, Pres Eckert and John Mauchly of the Moore School of Electric Engineering submit a proposal to the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

It was entitled Report on an Electronic Difference Analyzer. The name tried to make the distinction between the electromechanical analog differential analyzer that the United States Army was using and the new electronic digital machine that would be developed. The proposal was submitted to army ordnance in May.

When the first contracts were signed between the United States Army and the Moore School, the name of the machine was changed to Electronic Numerical Integrator. Because Mauchly stressed that the machine could be used for more general problems, the device was called an “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC).” Eckert was appointed laboratory supervisor and chief engineer on the project. Mauchly, along with Eckert, was put in charge of engineering and testing.

Construction of the ENIAC starts at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

The actual contract between the Moore School and the army did not go into effect until July 1. For security reasons, the understandable rumor that the project was a “white elephant” was promoted rather than denied.

The Bell Labs Relay Interpolator (later called the Model II) operates for the first time.

Using programs from punched tape, this was possibly the first computer to run programs in the United States.

Helmut Schreyer’s small prototype of an electronic computer is damaged in an air raid on Germany. The machine was lost soon thereafter.

The top-secret Colossus programmable cryptanalysis machine designed by Tommy Flowers and his team is completed at Bletchley Park to crack the higher level encryption of the Nazi Lorenz SZ40 machine.

Colossus employed vacuum tubes and was between one hundred and one thousand times faster than Heath Robinson. The Colossus machines have been called the first operational programmable electronic digital computers; however, they were special purpose rather than general purpose machines.

Howard Aiken’s Mark I (ASCC) moves from IBM Endicott Labs to Harvard University where it is officially operational.

The electromechanical machine solved addition problems in less than a second, multiplication in six seconds, and division in 12 seconds. Grace Hopper wrote some of its first programs, which ran on punched tape.

The first improved Colossus Mark 2 is operational at Bletchley Park just in time for the Normandy Landings.

By the end of the war there were ten Colossus computers operating. They enabled the decryption of 63,000,000 characters of high-grade German messages. Even though these machines incorporated features of special purpose electronic digital computers, and had incalculable influence on the outcome of WWII, they had little influence, in the conventional sense, on the development of computing technology because they remained top secret until about 1970.

"The Colossus computers were used to help decipher teleprinter messages which had been encrypted using the Lorenz SZ40/42 machine — British codebreakers referred to encrypted German teleprinter traffic as "Fish" and called the SZ40/42 machine and its traffic as 'Tunny'. Colossus compared two data streams, counting each match based on a programmable Boolean function. The encrypted message was read at high speed from a paper tape. The other stream was generated internally, and was an electronic simulation of the Lorenz machine at various trial settings. If the match count for a setting was above a certain threshold, it would be sent as output to an electric typewriter" (Wikipedia article on Colossus computer, accessed 11-23-2008).

Pres Eckert has two accumulators of the ENIAC operational.

Faced with mathematical computations regarding the Atomic bomb that are too time-consuming for human computers, John von Neumann visits the ENIAC two-accumulator system for the first time, and becomes deeply interested in the project.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly state that their conception of the ENIAC is complete.

Eckert wrote a letter to other members of the project asking them to state written claims to inventions on the project. None was received.

The United States Army extends the ENIAC contract to cover research on the planned EDVAC stored-program computer.

IBM produces the Pluggable Sequence Relay Calculator (PSRC) for the United States Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground. This special-purpose punched-card calculator, developed for calculating artillery firing trajectories, was capable of performing a sequence of up to fifty arithmetic steps.

For the rest of the war these punched-card calculators, programmed with plug boards, remained the fastest digital calculators in the United States.

“These are the fastest relay calculators in operation; they perform six multiplications a second together with a great deal of addition, subtraction, reading, writing and consulting tables. They are not as elaborate as the Sequence Calculator at Harvard in that they have less storage capacity and less sequencing facilities; however, they are about twenty times as fast. Consequently, for those problems which can be handled in this way, they will do in one day what the Sequence Calculator will do in twenty days” (W.J. Eckert, 1947).

Because the ENIAC did not become operational until 1945, and stored-program computers following the EDVAC design were a later development, the PSRC has sometimes been called "the missing link between punched card equipment and stored program computers."

"As late as 1947, the Aberdeen machines still had the fastest calculating unit in existence. Their basic operations included addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, and column shift. These were the first punched-card machines to support division and square root. There were 36 storage and computing registers, and certain parallel processing capabilities, including the ability to read and process four input card streams simultaneously."

Konrad Zuse completes the Z4 shortly before V-E Day. 

The Z4 was a large, electromechanical programmable machine, the construction of which began about 1943. To safeguard it against bombing, the machine was dismantled and shipped from Berlin to a village in the Bavarian Alps. In 1950 it was refurbished, modified, and installed at ETH in Zurich. For several years it was the only working electronic digital computer in continental Europe, and it remained operational in Zurich until 1955. It is preserved in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

The ENIAC, the world’s first large-scale electronic general-purpose digital computer, is completed and tested at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

With eighteen thousand vacuum tubes and weighing thirty tons, the ENIAC was about one thousand times faster than the Harvard Mark I. The ENIAC was programmed by time-consuming plugging of patch cords from buses to panels for each individual problem.

The ENIAC remained the only operational electronic digital computer in the world until the short-lived Manchester “Baby” prototype became operational in 1948.

Grace Hopper, testing Aiken’s Harvard Mark II Relay Calculator, found that a large dead moth, trapped between points at Relay #70, Panel F,  caused the relay to fail. She removed the bug and entered the dead insect into a log book with the note, "First actual case of bug being found." This was first use of the term “bug” within the context of computing, and also perhaps the origin of the concept of “debugging” within the context of computing.

Alan Turing arrives at the National Physical Laboratory,Teddington, England, to work on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE).

Howard Aiken publishes Tables of the Modified Hankel Functions of Order One-Third and of Their Derivatives.

These tables, calculated by the Harvard Mark I, were the first published mathematical tables calculated by a programmed automatic computer, finally fulfilling the dream of Charles Babbage, which he first expressed in 1822. Calculating these tables required the equivalent of forty-five days of computer processing time. Prior to the Mark I calculating the tables would have required years of human computation.

Project Whirlwind switches from analog to digital electronics.

Pres Eckert, John Mauchly, John Brainerd, and Herman Goldstine issue the first confidential published report on the completed ENIAC, discussing how it operates and the methods by which it is programmed. (See Reading 8.2.)

Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper publish A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. The instruction sequences scattered throughout this volume are among the earliest published examples of digital computer programs. (See Reading 9.1.)

The ENIAC is publicly unveiled in Philadelphia.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly leave the Moore School,of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and establish their own firm, Electronic Control Company. This is the first electronic computer company in the world. Their business plan stated that they expected to sell an electronic computer for between $5000 and $30,000.

Julian Bigelow, who previously collaborated with Norbert Wiener at MIT, joins John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine at the Princeton IAS Electronic Computer Project. He was to a large extent responsible for implementing von Neumann's stored-program concepts.

Max Newman founds the computer laboratory at Manchester University via a grant from the Royal Society.

A contest is held in Tokyo between the Japanese soroban, used by Kiyoshi Matsuzaki, a champion operator in the Savings Bureau of the Japanese postal administration, and an electric calculator, operated by US Army Private Thomas Nathan Wood of the 240th Finance Distributing Section of General MacArthur's headquarters, who was the most experienced calculator operator in Japan at the time. The bases for scoring in the contest were speed and accuracy of results in all four basic arithmetic operations and a problem which combines all four. The soroban won 4 to 1, with the electric calculator prevailing in multiplication.

"About the event, the Nippon Times newspaper reported that "Civilization ... tottered" that day, while the Stars and Stripes newspaper described the soroban's "decisive" victory as an event in which "the machine age took a step backward. . . ."

"The breakdown of results is as follows:

"* Five additions problems for each heat, each problem consisting of 50 three- to six-digit numbers. The soroban won in two successive heats.

"* Five subtraction problems for each heat, each problem having six- to eight-digit minuends and subtrahends. The soroban won in the first and third heats; the second heat was a no contest.

"* Five multiplication problems, each problem having five- to 12-digit factors. The calculator won in the first and third heats; the soroban won on the second.

"* Five division problems, each problem having five- to 12-digit dividends and divisors. The soroban won in the first and third heats; the calculator won on the second.

"* A composite problem which the soroban answered correctly and won on this round. It consisted of:

"o An addition problem involving 30 six-digit numbers

"o Three subtraction problems, each with two six-digit numbers o Three multiplication problems, each with two figures containing a total of five to twelve digits

"o Three division problems, each with two figures containing a total of five to twelve digits" (Wikipedia article on Soroban, accessed 04-15-2009).

Louis Couffignal and Leon Brillouin hold a small conference on “large computers” in Paris, at which Couffignal discusses French work, and Brillouin summarizes American accomplishments in electronic digital computing.

Couffignal decided against building a stored-program computer. This mistake caused France to fall behind England and America in this technology. The first stored-program computer wasnot manufactured in France until 1956. The government agency where Couffignal worked, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), did not obtain a stored-program computer (a British model) until 1955.

The first large conference on electronic and electromechanical digital computers is held at Cambridge, Massachusetts. About 250 people attended. At the conference Samuel H. Caldwell suggested the formation of an organization of people engaged in this new field. This organization was later named the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery. It was the predecessor of the ACM.

A contract is drawn up between Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and the United States Census Bureau for the production of the UNIVAC.

The Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine or  Manchester "Baby" prototype computer, runs its first program, written by Tom Kilburn.

This small pilot version of a larger computer was built at the University of Manchester in England to demonstrate the Williams-Kilburn cathode ray tube (CRT) memory. The Manchester “Baby” was the first stored-program electronic digital computer. It operated for only a short time.

You can watch a streaming video of a 1948 BBC newsreel about the Manchester "Baby" at this link. [You will need to scroll down the web page.]

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 computer in order to develop an automated detection and interception system to protect the entire U.S. from incoming bombers. This  evolved into the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment or SAGE system.

The first test program is run on Trevor Pearcey's and Maston Beard’s CSIR Mk1, the first stored-program computer in Australia. The machine was renamed CSIRAC in 1956.

Excluding the BINAC, which only operated for a short time, the CSIR Mk1 was one of only three stored-program computers operating in the world at this time.

Jule Charney, Agnar Fjörtoff, and John von Neumann publish “Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation,” Tellus 2 (1950): 237-254.

Charney, Fjörthoff, and von Neumann's paper reported the first weather forecast by electronic computer. It took twenty-four hours of processing time on the ENIAC to calculate a twenty-four hour forecast.

"As a committed opponent of Communism and a key member of the WWII-era national security establishment, von Neumann hoped that weather modeling might lead to weather control, which might be used as a weapon of war. Soviet harvests, for example, might be ruined by a US-induced drought.

"Under grants from the Weather Bureau, the Navy, and the Air Force, he assembled a group of theoretical meteorologists at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). If regional weather prediction proved feasible, von Neumann planned to move on to the extremely ambitious problem of simulating the entire atmosphere. This, in turn, would allow the modeling of climate. Jule Charney, an energetic and visionary meteorologist who had worked with Carl-Gustaf Rossby at the University of Chicago and with Arnt Eliassen at the University of Oslo, was invited to head the new Meteorology Group.

"The Meteorology Project ran its first computerized weather forecast on the ENIAC in 1950. The group's model, like [Lewis Fry] Richardson's, divided the atmosphere into a set of grid cells and employed finite difference methods to solve differential equations numerically. The 1950 forecasts, covering North America, used a two-dimensional grid with 270 points about 700 km apart. The time step was three hours. Results, while far from perfect, justified further work" (Paul N. Edwards [ed], Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling: A Participatory History, accessed 04-26-2009).

Engineering Research Associates publishes High-Speed Computing Devices, the first textbook on how to build an electronic digital computer.

Written in the form of a “cookbook,” the book describes available computer components and how they worked. It has extensive bibliographies of the American computing literature and some of the English, and contains a brief reference to Vannevar Bush's Rapid Selector information retrieval device then under development.

The Library of Congress announces plans to compile the Union List of Serials using electric punched card tabulating.

Project Whirlwind is in limited operation at MIT as a general purpose computer.

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.”

David Shepard, a cryptanalyst at AFSA, the forerunner of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), builds "Gismo" in his spare time.

Gismo was a machine to convert printed messages into machine language for processing by computer— the first optical character recognition (OCR) system.

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

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, known as the FERUT computer

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 were mimeographed. By the March 1953 issue the title was changed to Computers and Automation.

"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).

Richard W. Appel and other students at Harvard Business school issue Electronic Business Mchines: A New Tool for Management.

This was the first report on the application of electronic computers to business. The report was issued before any electronic computer was 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.

English Electric constructs a commercial version of Alan Turing’s Pilot ACE called DEUCE.

Thirty-three of the DEUCE machines were sold, the last in 1962.

Harley Tillet builds the perhaps the first operating library information retrieval systems 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)

IBM announces the 704.

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

IBM develops and builds the Naval Ordnance Research Computer (NORC)—for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance.

The NORC was 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 introduced the input-output channel as a feature on the NORC. This innovation synchronized the flow of data into and out of the computer while computation was in progress, relieving the central processor of that task.

Staff Members of the Institute of Meteorology, University of Stockholm publish "Results of Forecasting with the Barotropic Model on an Electronic Computer (BESK)," Tellus 6 (1954): 139-149.

"The Royal Swedish Air Force Weather Service in Stockholm was first in the world to begin routine real-time numerical weather forecasting (i.e., with broadcast of forecasts in advance of weather). The Institute of Meteorology at the University of Stockholm, associated with the eminent meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby, developed the model. Forecasts for the North Atlantic region were made three times a week on the Swedish BESK computer using a barotropic model, starting in December, 1954" (P. N. Edwards, Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling: A Participatory History).

The ENIAC is turned off for the last time.

It was estimated that this single machine did more computation during the ten years of its operation than the entire human race had done up till the time of its invention.

Stanford Research Institute begins the computerization of the banking industry by demonstrating a prototype electronic accounting machine using its ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) system.

ETL-Mark-2, the first full-scale programmable computer in Japan, is produced by the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. It is built from twenty-one thousand relays and does not store a program.

Theoretical meterologist Norman A. Phillips publishes "The General Circulation of the Atmosphere: A Numerical Experiment," Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 82, no. 352 (1956) 123-164.  By 1955 Phillips completed a 2-layer, hemispheric, quasi-geostrophic computer model. "Despite its primitive nature, Phillips's model is now often regarded as the first AGCM" (P. N. Edwards, Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling: A Participatory History, accessed 06-20-2009)

"Norman Phillips was the first to show, with a simple General Circulation model, that weather prediction with numerical models was even feasible. The advent of numerical weather predictions in the 1950s also signaled the transformation of weather forecasting from a highly individualistic effort to one in which teams of experts developed complex computer programs, eventually for high-speed computers" (Franklin Institute, Franklin Laureate database, accessed 06-20-2009).

MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Reading) is demonstrated to the Bank Management Committee of the American Bankers’ Association.

The first Italian computer conference is held in Rome.

The first Japanese conference on electronic computers is held at Waseda University in Tokyo.

The Burroughs “Atlas Guidance” computer is used to control the launch of the Atlas missile. It is one of the first computers to use transistors.

The first SAGE AN/FSQ7 is operational for the SAGE Air Defense System on a limited basis.

The system allowed online access, in graphical form, to data transmitted to and processed by its computers. Fully deployed by 1963, the IBM-built early warning system remained operational until 1984. With 23 direction centers situated on the northern, eastern, and western boundaries of the United States, SAGE pioneered the use of computer control over large, geographically distributed systems.

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.

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."

SAGE was used by NORAD 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."

Bank of America creates the BankAmericard, the first credit card issued by a conventional bank.

Together with its overseas affiliates, this product eventually evolved into the Visa system.

Computer scientist Hans Peter Luhn of IBM publishes Bibliography and index: Literature on information retrieval and machine translation.  This contained titles indexed by the Key Word-in-Context system, or KWIC.

"The International Conference on Scientific Information (ICSI), Washington, DC, in November 1958, where Luhn introduced his new equipment and illustrated the practical results by producing the KWIC indexes for the conference program. Two new Luhn inventions, the 9900 Index Analyzer and the Universal Card Scanner, and the new Luhn Keyword-in-Context (KWIC) indexing technique were introduced. Following the conference, newspapers all over the country carried stories about the auto-abstracting and auto-indexing." (http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ssoy/organizing/l391d2c.htm, accessed 04-26-2009).

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 used MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Reading.) ERMA served as the Bank’s accounting computer and check handling system until 1970.

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."

The United States banking industry adopts MICR, (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition), which allows computers to read the data printed on checks.

Computer scientist Hans Peter Luhn publishes "Auto-Encoding of Documents for Information Retrieval Systems,  M. Boaz (ed) Modern Trends in Documentation (1959) 45-58.

"Luhn believed that the growing rate of information and document production necessitated the invention of methods allowing data to be retrieved from stores of documents without expensive human intervention. This paper discusses auto-encoding based on statistical procedures performed by a machine on the original text of a document already in machine-readable form. The prevalent machine-readable form of that time was primarily punched cards or paper tape and less frequently magnetic tape. The auto-encoding method used word frequency rates, a special thesaurus, and the development of multi-dimensional patterns based on word proximity. At the time, application of the method was limited to articles of 500 to 5000 words, but Luhn was confident that the logical capabilities of electronic machines, statistical methods, and "further research into the characteristics of human behavior as manifested in writing" would lead to better information dissemination and retrieval. Earlier articles by this author discuss the automatic creation of abstracts and the development of thesauri" (http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ssoy/organizing/l391d2b.htm, accessed 04-26-2009).

At the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) demonstrates the prototype of its first computer, the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1), designed by a team headed by Ben Gurley.

"The launch of the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) computer in 1959 marked a radical shift in the philosophy of computer design: it was the first commercial computer that focused on interaction with the user rather than the efficient use of computer cycles" (http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/decpdp-1/, accessed 06-25-2009).

Selling for $120,000, the PDP-1 was 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 did not call it a “computer,” but instead called the machine a “programmed data processor.” The PDP-1 was credited as being the most important in the creation of hacker culture. Some references identified this machine as the first minicomputer; however DEC gave that designation to either the PDP-5 introduced in 1963 or the PDP-8 introduced in 1965.

Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/Digital/timeline/1959-2.htm, accessed 08-25-2009.

Reflecting the obsolescence of mathematical tables as a result of the development of electronic computing,  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).

The U.S. Navy launches NAVSAT, also known as TRANSIT.

NAVSAT was the first operational satellite navigation system. Using a constellation of five satellites, the system was primarily used to obtain accurate location information by ballistic missile submarines, and was also used as a general navigation system by the Navy, and in hydrographic and geodetic surveying. Since there was no computer small enough to fit through a submarine’s hatch, a new computer was designed, named the AN/UYK-1. It was built with rounded corners to fit through the hatch, was about five feet tall, and sealed to be water-proof.

QUOTRON, a computerized stock-quotation system using a Control Data Corporation computer, is introduced.

Quotron became popular with stockbrokers, signaling the end of traditional ticker tape.

Compugraphic engineers recognize that a computer can be programmed to handle repetitious typesetter coding automatically.

The firm developed a prototype model of the Directory Tape Processor (DTP) which eliminated all operator decisions and produced a fully coded tape used for typesetting.

Mathematician and founder of Stanford University's Computer Science department, George E. Forsythe coins the term "computer science" in his paper "Engineering Students Must Learn both Computing and Mathematics", J. Eng. Educ. 52 (1961) 177-188, quotation from p. 177:

"In 1961 we find him using the term 'computer science' for the first time in his writing:

[Computers] are developing so rapidly that even computer scientists cannot keep up with them. It must be bewildering to most mathematicians and engineers...In spite of the diversity of the applications, the methods of attacking the difficult problems with computers show a great unity, and the name of Computer Sciences is being attached to the discipline as it emerges. It must be understood, however, that this is still a young field whose structure is still nebulous. The student will find a great many more problems than answers. 

"He identified the "computer sciences" as the theory of programming, numerical analysis, data processing, and the design of computer systems, and observed that the latter three were better understood than the theory of programming, and more available in courses" (Knuth, "George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science," Communications of the ACM, 15 (1972) 722).

Wesley A. Clark, a computer scientist at MIT, starts building the Linc (Laboratory instrument computer).

The machine, which some later called both the first mini-computer and a forerunner of  the personal computer, was first used in 1962. It had small table-top size, “low cost” ($43,000), keyboard and display, file system and an interactive operating system. It's design was placed in the public domain. Eventually fifty of the machines were sold by Digital Equipment Corporation.

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.”

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 was development of a dictionary and a method to automate hyphenation and justification of text in columns. These tasks had taken 40 percent of a manual Linotype operator's time.

Touch-tone telephone dialing is introduced, enabling calls to be switched digitally.

SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business-Related Environment), an online airline reservation system developed by American Airlines and IBM, becomes operational.

SABRE worked over telephone lines in “real time” to handle seat inventory and passenger records from terminals in more than 50 cities.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) begins using social security numbers as tax ID numbers.

Though its exact history is murky, email begins as a way for users on time-sharing mainframe computers to communicate. Among the first systems to have this facility were System Development Corporation (SDC) (Q32) and MIT (CTSS).

The U. S. Postal Sevice introduces OCR software to sort mail.

Programmer and systems analyst Henriette Avram completes the Library of Congress MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) Pilot Project, creating the foundation for the national and international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries. The MARC standards consist of the MARC formats, which are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form, and related documentation. . . . Its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogs.

Gordon Moore observes the exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit and predicts that this trend will continue. The press calls this “Moore’s Law.” (See Reading 8.10.)

The New York Stock Exchange completes automation of its basic trading functions.

The IRS completes computerization of income-tax processing, with a central facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and satellite locations around the United States.

Richard Gering's Data Corporation contracts with the U.S. Air Force to develop a computer-assisted, full-text system to keep track of procurement contracts and equipment inventory.

Hewlett Packard introduces the desk calculator, HP 9100A.

German electrical engineers Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff invent the smart card (chip card, or integrated circuit card [ICC]) and apply for the patent. The patent for the smart card was finally granted to both inventors in 1982. The first wide use of the cards was for payment in French pay phones—France Telecom Télécarte—starting in 1983-84.

The Museum Computer Network and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with funding from IBM, organize the first U.S. conference on museum computing.

Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, lunar module pilot, become the first human beings to walk on the moon.

Their landing was almost canceled in the final seconds because of an overload of the Apollo Guidance Computer’s memory, but on advice from Earth, they ignored the warnings and landed safely. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first recognizably modern embedded system used in real-time by astronaut pilots.

The first test of magnetic stripe transaction card technology developed by IBM takes place at the American Airlines terminal at Chicago's O'Hare Airport with the Automatic Ticket Vendor.

Reference: Computer History Museum, Jerome Svigals donation, "Automatic Ticket Vendor Press Kit", October 30, 1969. X3951.2007.

Though the test at O'Hare Airport was successful the airline did not implement the technology because of a recession. IBM patented the technology but did not announce its availability until 1973.

IBM’s first operational application of speech recognition enables customer engineers servicing equipment to “talk” to and receive “spoken” answers from a computer that can recognize about 5,000 words.

IBM introduces the first flexible magnetic storage diskette, or "floppy disk."

The Universal Product Code (UPC)—the familiar barcode—is accepted by a grocer’s trade association. It was developed by George J. Laurer of IBM.

The Alto computer system is operational at Xerox PARC.

Conceptually the first personal computer system, the Alto eventually featured the first WYSYWG (What You See is What You Get) editor, a graphic user interface (GUI), networking through Ethernet, and a mouse. When offered for sale the system was priced $32,000.

IBM introduces the 5100 Portable Computer for corporate users.

More luggable than portable, the machine weighed 50 pounds. The price, fully configured, was $19,975.

Steve Jobs and Steve "The Woz" Wozniak found Apple Computer Corporation, and introduce the Apple 1 at the price of $666.

IBM introduces the IBM 3800, the first commercially available laser printer for use with its mainframes.

This "room-sized" machine was the first printer to combine laser technology and electrophotography. The technology speeded the printing of bank statements, premium notices, and other high-volume documents.

C. Wayne Ratliff, working as a contractor at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, writes a database program he calls "Vulcan" (after Mr. Spock of Star Trek) to help him win the office football pool.

Written for his kit-built IMSAI 8080 microcomputer running PTDOS, Ratliff based the program on JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System), a mainframe (Univac 1108) database product. 

In early 1980, Ratliff and George Tate entered into a marketing agreement.

"Ratliff had given up trying to sell copies of the software for $50 each. Tate thought the product would sell better at $695, so they made a deal and dBASE II was the result. The program was renamed dBASE II because of a belief that a product called "version one" wouldn't sell. The software originally ran on a CP/M computer and then was ported to the IBM PC. In mid-1983 Ashton-Tate purchased the dBASE II technology and copyright from Ratliff, and he joined Ashton-Tate as vice president of new technology."

dBase II became the first best-selling database program for the PC.

IBM introduces their open architecture personal computer (PC) based on the Intel 8088 processor.

The IBM PC ran PC-DOS, the IBM-branded version of the 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS, provided by Microsoft. The IBM PC was originally designated as the IBM 5150, putting it in the "5100" series, though its architecture was not directly descended from the IBM 5100.

On August 1, 1981 a review of the IBM PC appeared on USENET (accessed 10-16-2009).

Mitchell Kapor, previously head of development at Visicorp, and Jonathan Sachs, with backing from Ben Rosen, found Lotus Development Corporation.

Kapor, who had been a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, named the company after 'The Lotus Position' or "Padmasana.''

The GRiD Compass 1100, introduced by Grid Systems Corporation, is probably the first commercial computer created in a "clamshell" laptop format, and one of the first truly portable machines.

The 1100 included a magnesium clamshell case with a screen that folded flat over the keyboard, a switching power supply, electro-luminescent display, non-volatile bubble memory, and a built-in modem.

Bob Doyle introduces, the first Desktop Publishing program, MacPublisher, for the Macintosh.  

"MacPublisher introduced WYSIWYG layout for multi-column text and graphics, but it would not have been possible without graphics primitives like QuickDraw that Bill Atkinson had originally developed for the Apple Lisa computer. QuickDraw was incorporated in the PASCAL toolbox for the new Macintosh and was the basis for MacPaint." (Wikipedia article on MacPublisher).

IBM introduces the model M keyboard, considered by PC World to be the "greatest keyboard of all time." (http://www.pcworld.com/article/147939/inside_the_worlds_greatest_keyboard.html) The PC World article contains a remarkable series of images showing how the keyboard was engineered and its many virtues.

The National Science Foundation Network connects five new supercomputer centers and allows access to these centers at no cost. The centers, which the NSF funded in 1985, were: the John von Neumann Center at Princeton, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

NSFNET used a TCP/IP-based protocol compatible with ARPANET, as a backbone to which regional and academic networks would connect. It experienced exponential growth in its network traffic.  As a result of a November 1987 NSF award to a consortium of universities in Michigan, the original 56- kbit/s links was upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s by July 1988 and again to 45 Mbit/s in 1991.

"The NSFNET was the principal Internet backbone starting in approximately 1988, bridging between the rather restrictive US DoD creation of the Internet, and its broad commercialization in the mid-1990s. Basically, the NSFNET opened up the Internet to the world. Some critical Internet technologies, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are a direct result of that period in Internet history. BGP was specifically created to allow the NSFNET backbone to differentiate routes learned via multiple paths from originally the Arpanet, but also from the regional networks. This then turned the Internet into a meshed infrastructure, backing away from the single-core architecture which the Arpanet had been using before."

The first volume of the Unicode standard is published by the Unicode Consortium. 

"Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version [5.2, 2009] of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 107,000 characters covering 90 scripts [including Egyptian hieroglyphs] a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts) " (Wikipedia article on Unicode, accessed 01-29-2010).

Supercomputer ASCI Blue-Pacific SST, jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM. It can perform 3.9 trillion calculations per second (15,000 times faster than the average desktop computer) and has over 2.6 trillion bytes of memory (80,000 times more than the average PC). It would take a person using a calculator 63,000 years to perform as many calculations as this computer can perform in a single second.

IBM announces the start of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, Blue Gene, which will be 500 times more powerful than the world’s fastest computers at the time of the announcement.

Initially Blue Gene was applied to the study of bio-molecular phenomena such as protein folding.

Edwin Black issues IBM and the Holocaust.

This book documents

"how IBM's New York headquarters and CEO Thomas J. Watson acted through its overseas subsidiaries to provide the Third Reich with punch card machines that could help the Nazis to track down the European Jewry (especially in newly conquered territory). The book quotes extensively from numerous IBM and government memos and letters that describe how IBM in New York, IBM's Geneva office and Dehomag, its German subsidiary, were intimately involved in supporting Nazi oppression. The book also includes IBM's internal reports that admit that these machines made the Nazis much more efficient in their efforts. Several documentaries, including the 2003 film The Corporation Screened, C-SPAN broadcast and The Times, the Village Voice, the JTA and numerous other publications published close-ups of several documents demonstrating IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. These included IBM code sheets for concentration camps taken from the files of the National Archives. For example, IBM's Prisoner Code listed 8 for a Jew and Code 11 for a Gypsy. Camp Code 001 was Auschwitz, Code 002 was Buchenwald. Status Code 5 was executed by order, code 6 was gas chamber. One extensively quoted IBM report written by the company's European manager during WWII declared “in Germany a campaign started for, what has been termed … ‘organization of the second front.’ ” The memo added, “In military literature and in newspapers, the importance and necessity of having in all phases of life, behind the front, an organization which would remain intact and would function with ‘Blitzkrieg’ efficiency … was brought out. What we had been preaching in vain for years all at once began to be realized.”

"The book documents IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson as being an active Nazi supporter. Watson made numerous statements in numerous venues that the international community ought to give Nazi Germany a break from the economic sanctions. As head of the International Chamber of Commerce, Watson engineered an annual meeting to be held in Berlin, where he was witnessed to publicly give a Nazi salute to Hitler in the infamous "Seig, Heil" fashion. Watson traveled to Germany numerous times after the Nazis took power in 1933, but it was on the Commerce trip that he received an honor medal from Hitler himself. Watson also dined privately with Hitler, and attended lavish dinners with many infamous Nazi officials at the same time that Jews were being officially robbed and driven from their homes.

"There was an IBM customer site, the Hollerith Abteilung, in almost every concentration camp, that either ran machines, sorted cards or prepared documents for IBM processing. The Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number.

"Although IBM actively worked with the Hitler regime from its inception in 1933 to its demise in 1945, IBM has asserted that since their German subsidiary came under temporary receivership by the Nazi authorities from 1941 to 1945, the main company was not responsible for its role in the latter years of the holocaust. Shortly after the war, the company worked aggressively to recover the profits made from the many Hollerith departments in the concentration camps, the printing of millions of punchcards used to keep track of the prisoners, the custom-built punchcard systems, and its servicing of the Extermination through labour program. The company also paid its employees special bonuses based on high sales volume to the Nazis and collaborator regimes. As in many corporate cases, when the US entered the war, the Third Reich left in place the original IBM managers who continued their contacts via Geneva, thus company activities continued without interruption" (Wikipedia article on IBM and the Holocaust, accessed 05-23-2009).

Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, designed between 1847 and 1849, but never previously built, is completed and fully operational at the Science Museum, London. Built from Babbage’s engineering drawings roughly 150 years after it was originally designed, the finished machine weighs 5 tons and consists of 8000 machined parts, equally divided between the calculating and automatic printing and stereotyping apparatus. It is operated by turning hand-cranks.

Diana Hook and the author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issue as a limited edition an annotated, descriptive bibliography entitled Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and Telecommunications. It was the first annotated descriptive bibliography on these subjects.

The United States Internal Revenue Service begins programming and development of CADE (Customer Account Data Engine), first discussed in the IRS Modernization Plan of 2000.

"The original operational date was set at Nov 1st 2006. Programming and development began in 2003 but actual processing on the system was delayed until 2005. The system initially processed only 1040EZ tax returns, the simplest type of electronic tax returns. In 2006 the capacity was increased for the system to begin processing a limited number of more complex 1040 forms and other support forms. In 2007 the system began to process Schedule C forms and other more complex tax forms.

"Because the system is still unable to handle the full load of IRS tax returns, a hybrid approach is used by the IRS with the overwhelming majority of tax returns still being processed with the old system. Current processing loads and returns done by CADE are used for testing purposes to determine the systems functionality.

"The system, although beset by regular set backs due to funding, is expected to be fully operational by 2012" (Wikipedia article on Customer Account Data Engine, accessed 12-27-2008).

The NASA supercomputer, Project Columbia, a cluster of 20 computers with a total of 10,240 processors, built by Silicon Graphics and Intel at NASA’s Ames Research Center, achieves sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second or teraflops.

“If you could do one calculation per second by hand, it would take you a million years to do what this machine does in a single second.” (NY Times).

The author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issues From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology.

This printed book was the first anthology to reflect the origins of the various technologies that converged to form the Internet.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announces that the BlueGene/L supercomputer built by IBM performs at 280.6 trillion operations per second (teraflops) on the Linpack benchmark, the standard by which major supercomputers are measured. This shatters the previous high mark of performing at 135.3 teraflops.

"IBM said in a statement that if every person in the world had a handheld calculator it would still take decades to perform the number of calculations Blue Gene performs every single second."

IBM, the largest patent holder in the U.S., announces that it "will publish its patent filings on the Web for public review as part of a new policy that the company hopes will be a model for others."

"Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel Corp. researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip ... 80 cores [on] a 275-square-millimeter, fingernail-size chip ... Intel ... [is] using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, in which future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, conduct multimedia data mining, play photorealistic games and interact with artificial intelligence.
Shrunk onto a single chip, that power would allow average consumers to use their PCs in new ways. They could use improved search functions on the vast amounts of digital media stored on home desktops, searching large photo archives for specific attributes such as all the shots where a certain person is smiling, or where that person is posing with a friend."

Statistical analyst and "sabermetrician" Nate Silver founds fivethirtyeight.com.

Silver correctly predicted on March 7, 2008, roughly eight months before the election, that Barack Obama would be elected President of the United States.

The American military supercomputer called the Roadrunner, designed and built by scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratories from components originally designed for video game machines, has processed more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

"To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

Petr Sojka of the Department of Computer Graphics and Design of Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, organizes the first conference, held at the University of Birmingham, entitled DML 2008 Towards a Digital Mathematics Library as part of the Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM) and Mathematics Knowledge Management (MKM).

"Mathematicians dream of a digital archive containing all peer-reviewed mathematical literature ever published, properly linked and validated/verified. It is estimated that the entire corpus of mathematical knowledge published over the centuries does not exceed 100,000,000 pages, an amount easily manageable by current information technologies.

"The workshop's objectives are to formulate the strategy and goals of a global mathematical digital library and to summarize the current successes and failures of ongoing technologies and related projects, asking such questions as:

"* What technologies, standards, algorithms and formats should be used and what metadata should be shared?

"* What business models are suitable for publishers of mathematical literature, authors and funders of their projects and institutions?

"* Is there a model of sustainable, interoperable, and extensible mathematical library that mathematicians can use in their everyday work?

* What is the best practice for

"o retrodigitized mathematics (from images via OCR to MathML and/or TeX);

"o retro-born-digital mathematics (from existing electronic copy in DVI, PS or PDF to MathML and/or TeX);

"o born-digital mathematics (how to make needed metadata and file formats available as a side effect of publishing workflow [CEDRAM model])?"

Stephen Wolfram and Wolfram Research launch Wolfram|Alpha, a computational data engine with a new approach to knowledge extraction, based on natural language processing, a large library of algorithms and an NKS (New Kind of Science) approach to answering queries.

The Wolfram|Alpha engine differs from traditional search engines in that it does not simply return a list of results based on a query, but instead computes an answer.

The Cray XT5 supercomputer, known as Jaguar, at the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laborary, in Oak Ridge,Tennessee, became the world's fastest supercomputer by operating at 1.75 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark.

Gary Wolf publishes "The Data-Driven Life" in The New York Times Magazine.

". . . . Another person I’m friendly with, Mark Carranza — he also makes his living with computers — has been keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using it. He navigates smoothly between an interaction with somebody in the present moment and his digital record, bringing in associations to conversations that took place years earlier. Most thoughts are tagged with date, time and location. What for other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is broken up into elements and cross-referenced.  

"These men all know that their behavior is abnormal. They are outliers. Geeks. But why does what they are doing seem so strange? In other contexts, it is normal to seek data. A fetish for numbers is the defining trait of the modern manager. Corporate executives facing down hostile shareholders load their pockets full of numbers. So do politicians on the hustings, doctors counseling patients and fans abusing their local sports franchise on talk radio. Charles Dickens was already making fun of this obsession in 1854, with his sketch of the fact-mad schoolmaster Gradgrind, who blasted his students with memorized trivia. But Dickens’s great caricature only proved the durability of the type. For another century and a half, it got worse.

"Or, by another standard, you could say it got better. We tolerate the pathologies of quantification — a dry, abstract, mechanical type of knowledge — because the results are so powerful. Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors of government, numbers have won fair and square. For a long time, only one area of human activity appeared to be immune. In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy.  

"And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed. On MedHelp, one of the largest Internet forums for health information, more than 30,000 new personal tracking projects are started by users every month. Foursquare, a geo-tracking application with about one million users, keeps a running tally of how many times players “check in” at every locale, automatically building a detailed diary of movements and habits; many users publish these data widely. Nintendo’s Wii Fit, a device that allows players to stand on a platform, play physical games, measure their body weight and compare their stats, has sold more than 28 million units.  

"Two years ago, as I noticed that the daily habits of millions of people were starting to edge uncannily close to the experiments of the most extreme experimenters, I started a Web site called the Quantified Self with my colleague Kevin Kelly. We began holding regular meetings for people running interesting personal data projects. I had recently written a long article about a trend among Silicon Valley types who time their days in increments as small as two minutes, and I suspected that the self-tracking explosion was simply the logical outcome of this obsession with efficiency. We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?  

"But I soon realized that an emphasis on efficiency missed something important. Efficiency implies rapid progress toward a known goal. For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.

"Ubiquitous self-tracking is a dream of engineers. For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. A hundred years ago, a bold researcher fascinated by the riddle of human personality might have grabbed onto new psychoanalytic concepts like repression and the unconscious. These ideas were invented by people who loved language. Even as therapeutic concepts of the self spread widely in simplified, easily accessible form, they retained something of the prolix, literary humanism of their inventors. From the languor of the analyst’s couch to the chatty inquisitiveness of a self-help questionnaire, the dominant forms of self-exploration assume that the road to knowledge lies through words. Trackers are exploring an alternate route. Instead of interrogating their inner worlds through talking and writing, they are using numbers. They are constructing a quantified self.  

"UNTIL A FEW YEARS ago it would have been pointless to seek self-knowledge through numbers. Although sociologists could survey us in aggregate, and laboratory psychologists could do clever experiments with volunteer subjects, the real way we ate, played, talked and loved left only the faintest measurable trace. Our only method of tracking ourselves was to notice what we were doing and write it down. But even this written record couldn’t be analyzed objectively without laborious processing and analysis.  "Then four things changed. First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.

"Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors do more than give us facts; they also remind us that our ordinary behavior contains obscure quantitative signals that can be used to inform our behavior, once we learn to read them."

". . . . Adler’s idea that we can — and should — defend ourselves against the imposed generalities of official knowledge is typical of pioneering self-trackers, and it shows how closely the dream of a quantified self resembles therapeutic ideas of self-actualization, even as its methods are startlingly different. Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?pagewanted=7&ref=magazine, accessed 05-07-2010).

According to The New York Times, people are now using their cell phones more for text messaging and data-processing than for speech. This should not come as a surprise to anyone with teen-age children.

". . . although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.  

"This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.  

"Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.  

"The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say. 'Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,' said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. 'But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.'  

"Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. 'Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,' said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.  

"But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/technology/personaltech/14talk.html?hp, accessed 05-14-2010).