From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1945 to 1950 Timeline

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.

Use of telegraphy peaks in the United States with the transmission of "236,169,000,000" messages during this year.

Charlton Hinman develops the Hinman Collator, a mechanical device for the visual comparison of different copies of the same printed text. 

By 1978, when the last machine was manufactured, around fifty-nine had been acquired by libraries, academic departments, research institutes, government agencies, and a handful of pharmaceutical companies. Though built for the study of printed texts and used primarily for the creation of critical editions of literary authors, the Hinman Collator has also been employed in other projects where the close comparison of apparently identical images is required, everything from the study of illustrations to the examination of watermarks to the detection of forged banknotes. 

"Hinman's invention greatly increased not only the speed at which texts could be compared but also the effectiveness of such comparisons, and it made collation on a large scale possible for the first time. The most famous use of the machine was by its inventor and resulted in his Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) and the Norton facsimile of the First Folio (1968). Hinman estimated that without the aid of his machine, the research for these projects would have taken over forty years. Without the collator, as he himself recognized, his study would have been a "practical impossibility", as would have the work of the many scholars who compiled dozens of bibliographies, produced hundreds of volumes of critical editions, and undertook countless bibliographical and textual investigations on his machine over the next five decades.

"The purpose of the machine for which he was seeking a patent was straightforward and grew directly from the needs of his research. During the Renaissance, the period of his specialty, books were proofread and corrected continually during the printing process, and early uncorrected sheets were commonly bound up with corrected ones from later in the print run. Thus the printed matter in the last book sold could, and usually did, differ substantially from that of the first, as it also could and quite often did from nearly every other copy in the printing. These variations are precisely the details the collator was developed to help detect. The operation of the device Hinman would eventually build was also straightforward. The operator sets up one book turned to a particular page on a platform on one side of the machine and another copy from the same printing turned to the same page on a platform on the other. He or she then views these items, which are superimposed via a set of mirrors, through a pair of binocular optics. After making adjustments to bring the two objects into registration, the operator activates a system of lights that alternately illuminates each page. If the pages are identical, they more or less appear as one; if they are not identical, the points of difference are called to the operator's eye by appearing to dance or wiggle about" (Smith, " 'The Eternal Verities Verified': Charlton Hinman and The Roots of Mechanical Collation," Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 53 [2000] includes images of the machines )

With the onset of World War II, the most precious holdings of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek at Dresden were dispersed to eighteen castles and offices. As a  result they largely survived the bombing raids of February and March 1945 on this major industrial center by the British and American Air Forces.

However, the raids destroyed the former library buildings and virtually the whole historic center of Dresden— with losses of about 200,000 volumes of twentieth-century manuscript and printed holdings. The losses included  irreplaceable musical manuscripts, including the major corpus of Tomasso Albinoni's unpublished music, though Georg Philipp Telemann's manuscripts were preserved. After the war, some 250,000 books from the library were taken to Russia.

The collapse of the Third Reich occurs after the meeting of Western and Russian armies at Torgau in Saxony.

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.

The unconditional surrender of Germany takes place on "Victory in Europe" (VE) Day.

Mathematician and physicist John von Neumann  privately circulates copies of his First Draft on a Report on the EDVAC to twenty-four people connected with the EDVAC project.

This document, written between February and June 1945, provided the first theoretical description of the basic details of a stored-program computer what later became known as the Von Neumann architecture.

To avoid the government's security classification, and to avoid engineering problems that might detract from the logical considerations under discussion, Von Neumann avoided mentioning specific hardware. Influenced by Alan Turing and by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, von Neumann patterned the machine to some degree after human thought processes. (See Reading 8.1.)

In June 2009 I was able to download a PDF of the text of von Neumann's report at this link: http://www.virtualtravelog.net/entries/2003-08-TheFirstDraft.pdf.

Vannevar Bush publishes an article entitled "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly (Vol. 176, No. 1 [1945] 641-49) describing the Memex, an electromechanical microfilm machine evolved from his "Rapid Selector "project, capable of making permanent associative links in information. This hypothetical  machine foreshadowed aspects of the personal computer and hyperlinks on the Internet. (See Reading 13.1.)

Vannevar Bush publishes a condensed, illustrated version of "As We May Think" in Life magazine, 19, No. 11 (1945) 112-114, 116, 121, 123-24.

Life's editors added the following subtitle: "A Top U.S. Scientist Foresees a Possible Future World in Which Man-Made Machines Will Start to Think." They also replaced the Atlantic Monthly's numbered sections with headings, and added illustrations of the "cyclops camera,' the "supersecretary" and the "Memex" in the form of a desk. This was the first published illustration of what the Memex might look like.

In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannever Bush and the Mind's Machine (1991) James Nyce and Paul Kahn published a version of "As We May Think" that shows the differences between the two 1945 published versions of Bush's essay. Nyce and Kahn also developed a brief animated film showing how the Memex might have operated. You can download it at this link: http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/Secondary.html

The surrender of Japan marks the end of World War II.

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.

British science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke publishes "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?," Wireless World (October 1945) 205-308. In article Clarke envisages a group of three manned space stations arranged in a triangle around the earth, launched by versions of the German V-2 (A4) or the larger planned but not constructed German A10 intercontinental ballistic missile.

The idea of satellites in geostationary orbit was first proposed by Herman Potočnik in his 1929 book, Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums - der Raketen-Motor. Clarke cited this work as a reference in his 1945 paper.

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.)

The Moore School lectures on “The theory and techniques for design of electronic digital computers” take place. This series of lectures, attended by twenty-eight highly qualified experts, led to widespread adoption of the EDVAC-type design, including stored programs, for nearly all subsequent computer development.

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.)

There are six television stations in the United States.

Alan Turing prepares a typed proposal, “Proposed electronic calculator,” outlining the development of the ACE.

In June 2009 I was able to download a PDF of Turing's report at this link: http://www.emula3.com/docs/Turing_Report_on_ACE.pdf

The world's first commercial television network, DuMont Television Network, begins operation in the United States.

"It was owned by DuMont Laboratories, a television equipment and set manufacturer. The network was hindered by the prohibitive cost of broadcasting, by Federal Communications Commission regulations which restricted the company's growth, and even by the company's partner, Paramount Pictures. Despite several innovations in broadcasting and the creation of one of television's biggest stars of the 1950s, the network never found itself on solid financial ground. Forced to expand on UHF channels during an era when UHF was not profitable, DuMont ceased broadcasting in 1956." (Wikipedia article on Dumont Television Network, accessed 12-07-2008).

At the initiative of Warren McCulloch, the Macy Conferences occurred in New York to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind.  They resulted in breakthroughs in systems theory, cybernetics, and what eventually became known as cognitive science.

The ENIAC is publicly unveiled in Philadelphia.

John von Neumann attempts to set up an electronic stored-program computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton.

Von Neumann tried to hire Pres Eckert, but Eckert refused the job, preferring to go into the computer business with John Mauchly.

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.

Arthur W. Burks, John von Neumann, and Herman Goldstine issue their Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, discussing ideas to be incorporated into the stored-program computer at the IAS. (See Reading 8.3.)

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

Pres Eckert lectures at University of Pennsylvania's Moore School on “A preview of a digital computing machine.” He proposes replacing  the three different kinds of memory used in the ENIAC (flip-flops in accumulators, function tables [read-only memory] and interconnecting cables with switches) with a single erasable high-speed memory --  the mercury delay-line memory that he invented for this purpose. The was a key step in the development of a stored-program computer.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly's Electronic Control Company, the world's first electronic computer company, obtains a grant of $75,000 from the National Bureau of Standards for a research project involving Eckert's mercury delay line memory system and tape input/output devices. "With the prospect of receiving some money," the company rented their first offices at 1215 Walnut Street in Philadelphia and begins to hire employees.

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).

The ENIAC is converted into an elementary stored-program computer via the use of function tables.

EDVAC information is declassified

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.

Design of the Whirlwind I begins at MIT.

Working at the Princeton IAS machine, Andrew D. Booth and Kathleen Britten write a program for realizing a translation dictionary on an electronic computing machine, provided that the necessary storage capacity is available. This may be the earliest work leading toward machine or computer translation.

The Fotosetter, the first phototypesetter, is invented.

The first phototypesetters were mechanical devices that replaced the metal type matrices with matrices carrying the image of the letters. They replaced the caster of hot metal typesetting machines with a photographic unit.

The Curta Model 1 pocket mechanical calculator is produced by Contina Ltd in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

The most advanced small mechanical calculator ever built, the Curta was designed by Curt Hertzstark, a calculating machine manufacturer, while he was a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1943 to 1945. The Nazis operating the concentration camp encouraged Hertzstark to complete the design while he was in Buchenwald, and produced a prototype by the end of the war. The Curta calculator was manufactured until 1973.

Young Bedouin shepherds, searching for a stray goat in the Judean Desert, enter a long-untouched cave and find jars filled with ancient scrolls. This initial discovery by the Bedouins yielded seven scrolls and began a search that lasted nearly a decade and eventually produced thousands of scroll fragments from eleven caves. During those same years, archaeologists searching for a habitation close to the caves that might help identify the people who deposited the scrolls, excavated the Qumran ruin, a complex of structures located on a barren terrace between the cliffs where the caves were found and the Dead Sea. This was the discovery of the "Dead Sea Scrolls."

The Society of Archivists is founded.

The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers is founded in The Hague  "to uphold and improve professional standards in the trade, to promote honorable conduct in business, and to contribute in various ways to a broader appreciation of the history and art of the book."

Hungarian physicist Dennis Gabor invents holography.

"Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that it appears as if the object is in the same position relative to the recording medium as it was when recorded. The image changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way as if the object was still present, thus making the recorded image (hologram) appear three dimensional. Holograms can also be made using other types of waves. The technique of holography can also be used to optically store, retrieve, and process information. While holography is commonly used to display static 3-D pictures, it is not yet possible to generate arbitrary scenes by a holographic volumetric display" (Wikipedia article on holography, accessed 04-26-2009).

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.

In a lecture to the London Mathematical Society that remained unpublished until 1986, Alan Turing stated that “digital computing machines such as the ACE. . . are in fact practical versions of the universal machine.”

The first part of Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann’s Planning and Coding Problems for an Electronic Computing Instrument is published. The remaining two parts appeared on April 15 and August 16, 1948. This was the first theoretical discussion of programming for stored program computers -- none of which yet operated. (See Reading 9.2.)

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly learn from a patent lawyer that John von Neumann’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is a publication barring their patenting the ENIAC because it was issued more than a year before they planned to apply for a patent.

The Electronic Control Company (Pres Eckert and John Mauchly) develops the tentative instruction code C-1 for what they call “a Statistical EDVAC.” This was the earliest document on the programming of an electronic digital computer intended for commercial use. (See Reading 9.3.)

The Electronic Control Company's planned “Statistical EDVAC” is renamed the UNIVAC.

Julian Bigelow and his team redesign the IAS machine to include error checking and parallel processing, essential features of what will become known as the von Neumann architecture.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly apply for the broad ENIAC patent, essentially a patent on the stored-program electronic digital computer, basing their description of the machine to a large extent on the government report they issued on November 30, 1945. (See Reading 8.10.)

The Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, predecessor of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), holds its first meeting at Columbia University in New York. Seventy-eight people attended. John H. Curtiss was elected president, John Mauchly, vice president, and Edmund Berkeley, secretary.

Northrop Aviation places the contract for the BINAC (BINary Automatic Computer) with Pres Eckert and John Mauchly’s Electronic Control Company. The BINAC consisted of two identical serial computers operating in parallel with mercury delay-line memory, and magnetic tape as a secondary memory and auxiliary input device.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly apply for a U.S. patent on the mercury acoustic delay-line electronic memory system. This was the "first device to gain widespread acceptance as a reliable computer memory system." (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace [2002] 1191). The patent 2,629,827 was granted in 1953.

The first brochure advertising the UNIVAC is issued by Pres Eckert and John Mauchly’s Electronic Control Company. This was the first sales brochure ever issued for an electronic digital computer. A special characteristic of this brochure was that it did not show the product since at this time the product was not yet  fully conceptualized either in design or external appearance.

The point-contact transistor is invented at Bell Labs by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Much smaller than vacuum tubes and consuming only a fraction of the energy, the transistor was able to switch currents on and off at substantially higher speeds.

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

IBM produces the 604 Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator (CPC). Based on vacuum-tube technology, and programmed by making wired connections on a plugboard, the mass-produced CPC 604 featured the industry’s first assemblage of digital electronics replaceable as a unit.

Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, a widely read and influential book that applied theories of information and communication to both biological systems and machines. Cybernetics was also the first conventionally published book to discuss electronic digital computing. Writing as a mathematician rather than an engineer, Wiener’s discussion was theoretical rather than specific.

Computer-related words with the “cyber” prefix, including "cyberspace," originate from Wiener’s book.

Wiener's book was reviewed in TIME Magazine on December 27, 1948. The review was entitled "In Man's Image." The reviewer used the word calculator to describe the machines; at this time the word computer was reserved for humans.

"Some modern calculators 'remember' by means of electrical impulses circulating for long periods around closed circuits. One kind of human memory is believed to depend on a similar system: groups of neurons connected in rings. The memory impulses go round & round and are called upon when needed. Some calculators use 'scanning' as in television. So does the brain. In place of the beam of electrons which scans a television tube, many physiologists believe, the brain has 'alpha waves': electrical surges, ten per second, which question the circulating memories.

"By copying the human brain, says Professor Wiener, man is learning how to build better calculating machines. And the more he learns about calculators, the better he understands the brain. The cyberneticists are like explorers pushing into a new country and finding that nature, by constructing the human brain, pioneered there before them.

"Psychotic Calculators. If calculators are like human brains, do they ever go insane? Indeed they do, says Professor Wiener. Certain forms of insanity in the brain are believed to be caused by circulating memories which have got out of hand. Memory impulses (of worry or fear) go round & round, refusing to be suppressed. They invade other neuron circuits and eventually occupy so much nerve tissue that the brain, absorbed in its worry, can think of nothing else.

"The more complicated calculating machines, says Professor Wiener, do this too. An electrical impulse, instead of going to its proper destination and quieting down dutifully, starts circulating lawlessly. It invades distant parts of the mechanism and sets the whole mass of electronic neurons moving in wild oscillations" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,886484-2,00.html, accessed 03-05-2009).

Andrew D. Booth creates a magnetic drum memory, two inches long and two inches wide and capable of holding 10 bits per inch.

Booth offered his magnetic memory units for sale in 1952.

William Grey Walter constructs some of the first electronic autonomous robots.

Grey Walter's first three-wheel machines, which he called "Machina Speculatrix" and named Elmer and Elsie (for ELectroMEchanical Robot, Light-Sensitive), were often described as tortoises because of their shape and slow rate of movement. They were capable of phototaxis.

Columbia Records introduces the 33 1/3 rpm Long Playing microgroove record with 17 minutes of music on each side.

The Catholic Church publishes the 32nd and final edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the first of which had appeared in 1559. "This 32nd edition contained 4,000 titles censored for various reasons: heresy, moral deficiency, sexual explicitness, political incorrectness, and so on. Among the notable writers on the list were Desiderius Erasmus, Lawrence Sterne, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe, Nicolaus Copernicus, Honore de Balzac, Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the Dutch Sexologist Theodor Hendrik van de Velde, author of the sex manual The Perfect Marriage. A complete list of the authors and writings present in the subsequent editions of the index are listed in J. Martinex de Bujanda, Index librorum prohibitorum, 1600-1966, Geneva, 2002. Almost every great Western philosopher was, or is, included on the list--even those that believed in God, such as Descartes, Kant, Berkeley. . . .That some atheists are not included is to to the general (Tridentine) rule that heretical works (i.e. works of non-Catholics) are ipso facto forbidden. That some important works are absent is due to the fact that nobody bothered to denounce them."

As host of Texaco Star Theater, Milton Berle's highly visual, sometimes outrageous vaudeville style proves ideal for the burgeoning new medium of television. Berle became the first great television star.

"Berle and Texaco owned Tuesday nights for the next several years, reaching the number one slot in the Nielsen ratings and keeping it, with as much as an 80% share of the recorded viewing audience. Berle and the show each won Emmy Awards after the first season. Fewer movie tickets were sold on Tuesdays. Some theaters, restaurants and other businesses shut down for the hour or closed for the evening so their customers wouldn't miss Berle's antics [2]. Berle's autobiography notes that in Detroit, "an investigation took place when the water levels took a drastic drop in the reservoirs on Tuesday nights between 9 and 9:05. It turned out that everyone waited until the end of the Texaco Star Theater before going to the bathroom." Berle is credited for the huge spike in the sale of TV sets. (Other comedians turned this into a punchline: 'I sold mine, my uncle sold his...') After Berle's show began, set sales more than doubled, reaching two million in 1949. His stature as the medium's first superstar earned Berle the sobriquet "Mr. Television." (Wikipedia article on Milton Berle, accessed 12-07-2008).

IBM announces its first large-scale digital calculating machine, the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC).

The SSEC was the first computer that could modify a stored program. It featured 12,000 vacuum tubes and 21,000 electromechanical relays.

“IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), built at IBM's Endicott facility under the direction of Columbia Professor Wallace Eckert and his Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory staff in 1946-47, . . . was moved to the new IBM Headquarters Building at 590 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, where it occupied the periphery of a room 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. . . . [Estimates of the] dimensions of its "U" shape [were] at 60 + 40 + 80 feet, 180 feet in all, (about half a football field!)”

 "Designed, built, and placed in operation in only two years, the SSEC contained 21,400 relays and 12,500 vacuum tubes. It could operate indefinitely under control of its modifiable program. On the average, it performed 14-by-14 decimal multiplication in one-fiftieth of a second, division in one-thirtieth of a second, and addition or subtraction on nineteen-digit numbers in one-thirty-five-hundredth of second... For more than four years, the SSEC fulfilled the wish Watson had expressed at its dedication: that it would serve humanity by solving important problems of science. It enabled Wallace Eckert to publish a lunar ephemeris ... of greater accuracy than previously available... the source of data used in man's first landing on the moon". "For each position of the moon, the operations required for calculating and checking results totaled 11,000 additions and subtractions, 9,000 multiplications, and 2,000 table look-ups. Each equation to be solved required the evaluation of about 1,600 terms — altogether an impressive amount of arithmetic which the SSEC could polish off in seven minutes for the benefit of the spectators" (http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/ssec.html#sources, accessed 03-24-2010).

The SSEC remained sufficiently influential in the popular view of mainframes that it was the subject of a cartoon by Charles Addams published on the cover of The New Yorker magazine in February 11, 1961, in which the massive machine produced a Valentine's Day card for its elderly woman operator!

John Walston introduces cable television, initially in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

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.]

Alan Turing writes a report for the National Physical Laboratory entitled Intelligent Machinery.

In the report Turing stated that a thinking machine should be given the blank mind of an infant instead of an adult mind filled with opinions and ideas. The report contained an early discussion of neural networks. Turing estimated that it would take a battery of programmers fifty years to bring this learning machine from childhood to adult mental maturity. The report was not published until 1968.

Claude Shannon publishes his Mathematical Theory of Communication. The theory determined how much information could be sent per unit of time in a system with a given, limited amount of transmission power. Shannon also introduced the term "bit" into the literature, and provided its current meaning in the context of information. (See Reading 12.2.)

Alan Turing joins the computer project at Manchester University as chief programmer.

The second module of the BINAC (the first was completed in August), is completed. Among its numerous innovations were germanium diodes in the logic processing hardware—probably the first application of semiconductors in computers. Until its delivery to Northrop Aviation in September 1949, the BINAC remained in Philadelphia for use in numerous sales demonstrations.

At the Hixon Symposium in Pasadena, California, John von Neumann delivers his General and Logical Theory of Automata. This was the first of a series of five works (some posthumous) in which he attempted to develop a precise mathematical theory allowing comparison of computers and the human brain.

Edmund Berkeley publishes Giant Brains or Machines that Think, the first popular book on electronic computers.

Among many interesting details, Giant Brains contains a discussion about a machine called Simon, which has been called the first personal computer. (See Reading 8.6.)

Grace Hopper leaves Harvard to join Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician/programmer.

René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud invent the Lithomat in France.

The Lithomat was the first successful phototypesetting machine. Later models called Lumitype could print more than 28,000 characters per hour.

10,000,000 television sets have been sold.

Ralph R. Shaw, Director of Libraries for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with Engineering Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, using funds provided by the Office of Technical Services of the Department of Commerce, develops the Rapid Selector machine for the electronic searching of information recorded in reels of film.

Shaw's device incorporated technology developed by Emanuel Goldberg in 1928-1931, and by Vannevar Bush starting in 1938. Shaw's Rapid Selector was an attempt to realize goals described in Bush's 1945 publication, As We May Think.

Betty Holbertson at Eckert-Mauchly develops UNIVAC Instructions Code C-10.

C-10 was the first software to allow a computer to be operated by keyboarded commands rather than dials and switches. It was also the first mnemonic code.

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 Haloid Company introduces the Model A  xerographic copier, the first commercial electrophotographic copier. 

"Manually operated, it was also known as the Ox Box. An improved version, Camera #1, was introduced in 1950" (Wikipedia article on Xerox 914, accessed 04-21-2009).

The company renamed itself Haloid Xerox in 1958 and shortened its name to Xerox Corporation in 1961.

The Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America is founded to promote ethical standards in the antiquarian booktrade both in America and internationally.

Claude Shannon's report, originally issued as a classified document entitled A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography, Memorandum MM 45-110-02, September 1, 1945,  is formally published as "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems" in Bell System Technical Journal, 28(4), 656–715.  This paper, discussing cryptography from the viewpoint of information theory, contained a proof that all theoretically unbreakable ciphers must have the same requirements as the one-time pad.

Eric Arthur Blair, under his pseudonym, George Orwell,  publishes the dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.  "The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of falsifying records and political literature, thus effectively perpetuating propaganda, who grows disillusioned with his meagre existence and so begins an ultimately futile rebellion against the system.

"The novel has become famous for its satirical portrayal of surveillance and society's increasing encroachment on the rights of the individual. Since its publication the terms Big Brother and Orwellian have entered the popular vernacular."

"Nineteen Eighty-Four's impact upon the English language is extensive; many of its concepts: Big Brother, Room 101 (the worst place in the world), the Thought Police, the memory hole (oblivion), doublethink (simultaneously holding and believing two contradictory beliefs), and Newspeak (ideological language), are common usages for denoting and connoting overarching, totalitarian authority; Doublespeak is an elaboration of doublethink; the adjective "Orwellian" denotes that which is characteristic and reminiscent of George Orwell's writings, specifically 1984. The practice of appending the suffixes "-speak" and "-think" (groupthink, mediaspeak) to denote unthinking conformity. Many other works, in various forms of media, have taken themes from Nineteen Eighty-four" (Wikipedia article on Nineteen Eighty-Four).

A Sand County Almanac by American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist Aldo Leopold is published one year after his death. A combination of natural history, philosophy, and poetic writing, it has informed the environmental movement. "It is perhaps best known for the following quote, which defines his land ethic: 'A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.' The concept of a trophic cascade is put forth in the chapter Thinking Like a Mountain, wherein Leopold realizes that killing a predator wolf carries serious implications for the rest of the ecosystem" (Wikipedia article on Aldo Leopold, accessed 01-18-2209).

"In 1949, an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Roberto Busa, began what even to this day is a monumental task: to make an index verborum of all the words in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and related authors, totaling some 11 million words of medieval Latin. Father Busa imagined that a machine might be able to help him, and, having heard of computers, went to visit Thomas J. Watson at IBM in the United States in search of support. Some assistance was forthcoming and Busa began his work. The entire texts were gradually transferred to punched cards and a concordance program written for the project. The intention was to produce printed volumes, of which the first was published in 1974" (Busa, R. Index Thomisticus, 1974- ).

"A purely mechanical concordance program, where words are alphabetized according to their graphic forms (sequences of letters), could have produced a result in much less time, but Busa would not be satisfied with this. He wanted to produce a "lemmatized" concordance where words are listed under their dictionary headings, not under their simple forms. His team attempted to write some computer software to deal with this and, eventually, the lemmatization of all 11 million words was completed in a semiautomatic way with human beings dealing with word forms that the program could not handle. Busa set very high standards for his work. His volumes are elegantly typeset and he would not compromise on any levels of scholarship in order to get the work done faster. He has continued to have a profound influence on humanities computing, with a vision and imagination that reach beyond the horizons of many of the current generation of practitioners who have been brought up with the Internet. A CD-ROM of the Aquinas material appeared in 1992 that incorporated some hypertextual features ("cum hypertextibus") and was accompanied by a user guide in Latin, English, and Italian. Father Busa himself was the first recipient of the Busa award in recognition of outstanding achievements in the application of information technology to humanistic research, and in his award lecture in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1998 he reflected on the potential of the World Wide Web to deliver multimedia scholarly material accompanied by sophisticated analysis tools" (Hockey, "The History of Humanities Computing," A Companion to Digital Humanities, Shreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth[eds.] [2004], accessed 03-26-2009).

Albert A. Auerbach, one of the designers of the BINAC CPU at Pres Eckert and John Mauchly's Electronic Control Company, runs a small test routine for filling memory from the A register. This was the first program run on the first stored-program electronic computer produced in the United States.

The United States Census Bureau writes test programs for the BINAC. These manuscript programs, dated March 15 and March 21, are possibly among the earliest extant programs for a stored-program computer built in the United States.

Librarian Sanford Larkey publishes The Army Medical Library Research Project at the Welch Medical Library. This was one of the earliest projects in library automation and information retrieval. 

Maurice V. Wilkes’s EDSAC, fully operational at Cambridge, England, runs a program written by Wilkes for calculating a table of squares. It also ran a program written by David Wheeler for calculating a sequence of prime numbers. The EDSAC was the first easily used, fully functional stored-program computer to run a program.

John Mauchly conceives the Short Code, the first high-level programming language for an electronic computer, to be used with the BINAC. It was also the first interpreted language and the first assembly language.

The Short Code first ran on UNIVAC I, serial 1, in 1950.

[In 2005 no copies of the Short Code existed with dates earlier than 1952.]

Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, a neurological surgeon at Manchester, delivers a speech entitled The Mind of Mechanical Man in which he discusses the differences between computers and the human brain. (See Reading 11.1).

Mathematician Warren Weaver, a student of Claude Shannon's information theory, circulates a memorandum entitled Translation, suggesting that language translation by computer might be possible.

Weaver's memorandum has been called the origin of statistical machine translation. 

(See Reading 10.1.)

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation issues a press release describing the sale of the BINAC. This was the first press release ever issued for the sale of an electronic computer.

At the Hixon Symposium in Pasadena, California, John von Neumann speaks on The General and Logical Theory of Automata.

Within this speech von Neumann compared the functions of genes to self-reproducing automata.

“For instance, it is quite clear that the instruction I is roughly effecting the functions of a gene. It is also clear that the copying mechanism B performs the fundamental act of reproduction, the duplication of the genetic material, which is clearly the fundamental operation in the multiplication of living cells. It is also easy to see how arbitrary alterations of the system E, and in particular of I, can exhibit certain typical traits which appear in connection with mutation, which is lethality as a rule, but with a possibility of continuing reproduction with a modification of traits.” (pp. 30-31).

Molecular biologist Sydney Brenner read this brief discussion of the gene within the context of information in the proceedings of the Hixon Symposium, published in 1951. Later he wrote about in his autobiography:

“The brilliant part of this paper in the Hixon Symposium is his description of what it takes to make a self-reproducing machine. Von Neumann shows that you have to have a mechanism not only of copying the machine, but of copying the information that specifies the machine. So he divided the machine--the automaton as he called it--into three components; the functional part of the automaton, a decoding section which actually takes a tape, reads the instructions and builds the automaton; and a device that takes a copy of this tape and inserts it into the new automaton. . . . I think that because of the cultural differences between most biologists on the one hand, and physicists and mathematicians on the other, it had absolutely no impact at all. Of course I wasn’t smart enough to really see then that this is what DNA and the genetic code was all about. And it is one of the ironies of this entire field that were you to write a history of ideas in the whole of DNA, simply from the documented information as it exists in the literature--that is, a kind of Hegelian history of ideas--you would certainly say that Watson and Crick depended upon von Neumann, because von Neumann essentially tells you how it’s done. But of course no one knew anything about the other. It’s a great paradox to me that in fact this connection was not seen” (Brenner, My Life, 33-36).

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.

Mathematician John von Neumann delivers lectures at the University of Illinois on The Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. In these lectures von Neumann showed that in theory a program could reproduce itself. The lectures were edited by A. W. Burks and published in 1966.

Years later one application of this plausibility result in computability theory was the development of what came to be known as malware.