From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1950 to 1955 Timeline

Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he describes the “Turing test" for determining whether a machine is “intelligent.” (See Reading 11.2)

Jule Charney, Agnar Fjörtoff, and John von Neumann publish “Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation,” 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.

Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill of Cambridge University issue Report on the Preparation of Programmes for the EDSAC and the Use of the Library of Subroutines.

This dittoed document, published for private distribution in a very small number of copies, was the first treatise on software written for an operational stored-program computer. The book described “assemblers” and “subroutines”—segments of programs that are frequently used, so they can be kept in “libraries” and reused as needed in many software applications. The Cambridge group thus introduced the concept of reusable code, one of the principal tools for reducing software bugs and improving the productivity of programmers.

In 1951 this work was published as a conventional hard-cover book, with some changes and a new title by the American publishers Addison-Wesley in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, with special reference to the EDSAC and the use of a library of subroutines was the first conventionally published book on software. (See Reading 9.4.)

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

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

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

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

According to Asa Brigg’s The History of British Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 4, p. 524, newspaper circulation in Britain as a distribution medium for news reached its peak in 1950 and 1954. Thereafter more news was distributed over radio and television than through print.

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

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

The Federal Records Act of 1950 expands the definition of "record" to include "machine-readable materials."

At this time these records included primarily punched-cards.

German musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder publishes the Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach (Thematic-systematic catalogue of musical works of Johann Sebastian Bach). The numbering system by which Schmieder organized Johann Sebastian Bach's compositions became known as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, with the numbers Schmieder assigned to each work taking on the prefix BWV.

The cover by Boris Artzybasheff on the January 23, 1950 issue of TIME Magazine depicts the Harvard Mark III partly electronic and partly electromechanical computer as a Naval officer in Artzybasheff's "bizarrely anthropomorphic" style. The caption under the image reads, "Mark III. Can Man Build a Superman?" The cover story of the magazine is entitled "The Thinking Machine."

The Mark III, delivered to U.S. Naval Proving Ground at the US Navy base at Dahlgren, Virginia in March 1950, operated at 250 times the speed of the Harvard Mark I (1944). 

Among its interesting elements,  the Time article includes an early use of the word computer for machines rather than people. The review of Wiener's Cybernetics published in TIME in December 1948, and noticed in this database, referred to the machines as calculators.

"What Is Thinking? Do computers think? Some experts say yes, some say no. Both sides are vehement; but all agree that the answer to the question depends on what you mean by thinking.

"The human brain, some computermen explain, thinks by judging present information in the light of past experience. That is roughly what the machines do. They consider figures fed into them (just as information is fed to the human brain by the senses), and measure the figures against information that is "remembered." The machine-radicals ask: 'Isn't this thinking?'

"Their opponents retort that computers are mere tools that do only what they are told. Professor [Howard] Aiken, a leader of the conservatives, admits that the machines show, in rudimentary form at least, all the attributes of human thinking except one: imagination. Aiken cannot define imagination, but he is sure that it exists and that no machine, however clever, is likely to have any."

"Nearly all the computermen are worried about the effect the machines will have on society. But most of them are not so pessimistic as [Norbert] Wiener. Professor Aiken thinks that computers will take over intellectual drudgery as power-driven tools took over spading and reaping. Already the telephone people are installing machines of the computer type that watch the operations of dial exchanges and tot up the bills of subscribers.

"Psychotic Robots. In the larger, "biological" sense, there is room for nervous speculation. Some philosophical worriers suggest that the computers, growing superhumanly intelligent in more & more ways, will develop wills, desires and unpleasant foibles' of their own, as did the famous robots in Capek's R.U.R.

"Professor Wiener says that some computers are already "human" enough to suffer from typical psychiatric troubles. Unruly memories, he says, sometimes spread through a machine as fears and fixations spread through a psychotic human brain. Such psychoses may be cured, says Wiener, by rest (shutting down the machine), by electric shock treatment (increasing the voltage in the tubes), or by lobotomy (disconnecting part of the machine).

"Some practical computermen scoff at such picturesque talk, but others recall odd behavior in their own machines. Robert Seeber of I.B.M. says that his big computer has a very human foible: it hates to wake up in the morning. The operators turn it on, the tubes light up and reach a proper temperature, but the machine is not really awake. A problem sent through its sleepy wits does not get far. Red lights flash, indicating that the machine has made an error. The patient operators try the problem again. This time the machine thinks a little more clearly. At last, after several tries, it is fully awake and willing to think straight.

"Neurotic Exchange. Bell Laboratories' Dr. [Claude] Shannon has a similar story. During World War II, he says, one of the Manhattan dial exchanges (very similar to computers) was overloaded with work. It began to behave queerly, acting with an irrationality that disturbed the company. Flocks of engineers, sent to treat the patient, could find nothing organically wrong. After the war was over, the work load decreased. The ailing exchange recovered and is now entirely normal. Its trouble had been 'functional': like other hard-driven war workers, it had suffered a nervous breakdown" (quotations from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,858601-7,00.html, accessed 03-05-2009).

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, the world's first electronic computer company, is sold to Remington Rand.

The Diners Club issues the first "general purpose" credit card, invented by Diners Club founder Frank X. McNamara.

The card allowed members to charge the cost of restaurant bills only.

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

In an article published in Scientific American about “Simon,” the first personal computer, Edmund Berkeley predicts that “some day we may even have small computers in our homes, drawing energy from electric power lines like refrigerators or radios.”

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

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

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

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

Louis N. Ridenour, Ralph R. Shaw, and Albert G. Hill publish a thin volume entitled Bibliography in an Age of Science.

This book published three lectures delivered at the University of Illinois the previous year. Though it was preceded by journal articles and technical reports, this may be the first separately published book to address the problems of applying new technologies to the searching and storage of printed information in libraries.

Shaw's article includes illustrations on pp. 60-61 of the Rapid Selector prototype which was in operation at this time. This machine, which applied the ideas of Emanuel Goldberg and the Memex idea of Vannevar Bush, stored 72,000 frames of information on a 2,000 foot reel of film. The prototype could search through the data at the rate of 78,000 "codes per minute." "Improvement of this searching speed to 120,000 codes per minute is now in sight."

Fulton J. Sheen, Roman Catholic Bishop of Rochester, New York, and former radio broadcaster, becomes one of the first  televangelists.

From 1951 to 1957 Sheen hosted Life Is Worth Living first on the DuMont Television Network and later on ABC, winning an Emmy in 1952 for "Most Outstanding Personality". He later hosted The Fulton Sheen Program in syndication, with a virtually identical format, from 1961 to 1968.

Magnetic tape is used to record computer data on the Eckert-Mauchly UNIVAC I with its UNISERVO tape drive.

The UNISERVO was the first the tape drive for a commercially sold computer.

It's "recording medium was a thin metal strip of ½″ wide(12.7 mm) nickel-plated phosphor bronze. Recording density was 128 characters per inch (198 micrometre/character) on eight tracks at a linear speed of 100 in/s (2.54 m/s), yielding a data rate of 12,800 characters per second. Of the eight tracks, six were data, one was a parity track, and one was a clock, or timing track. Making allowance for the empty space between tape blocks, the actual transfer rate was around 7,200 characters per second. A small reel of mylar tape provided separation from the metal tape and the read/write head" (Wikipedia article on Univac I, accessed 04-26-2009).

The Paris symposium,  Les Machines á calculer et la pensée humaine (Calculating Machines and Human Thought) takes place at l'Institut Blaise Pascal.

Unlike the other early computer conferences, no demonstration of a stored-program electronic computer took place.  Louis Couffignal demonstrated the prototype of his non-stored-program machine.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 526.

The first Ferranti Mark I version of the Manchester University machine is delivered to Manchester University in England.

With the exception of the unique BINAC delivered to Northrop Aviation in the United States, the Ferranti Mark I was the first commercially produced electronic digital computer delivered to a customer.

American musician, bandleader, talent scout, and record producer Ike Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm, record in Memphis, Tennessee the rhythm and blues song, "Rocket 88."

This " hymn of praise" for the first American muscle car, the Oldsmobile Rocket 88, which had been introduced in 1949, has been called "the first rocket and roll song."  However:

"Rock 'n' roll was an evolutionary process – we just looked around and it was here. . . . To name any one record as the first would make any of us look a fool.

—Billy Vera, Foreword to "What Was the First Rock'n'Roll Record", Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, 1992" (Wikipedia article on First rock and roll recording, accessed 06-01-2009).

UNIVAC I, serial 1, is signed over to the United States Census Bureau.

The official dedication occurred on June 14, 1951. Excluding the unique BINAC, the UNIVAC I was the first electronic computer to be commercially manufactured in the United States. Its development preceded the British Ferranti Mark I, but the British machine was actually delivered to its first customer one month earlier than the UNIVAC I.

Though the United States Census Bureau owned UNIVAC I, serial 1, the Eckert -Mauchly division of Remington Rand retained it in Philadelphia for sales demonstration purposes, and does not actually install it at government offices for twenty-one months.

Whirlwind I begins operation.

Whirlwind I included the first primitive graphical display on its vectorscope screen. (See Reading 8.7.)

The second English electronic computer conference is held at Manchester to inaugurate the first Ferranti Mark I.

There Maurice Wilkes introduced the term microprogramming, referring to the design of control circuits. The idea was not widely accepted until the following decade. (See Reading 8.8.)

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

At the second English computer conference held in Manchester, computer programmer J. M. Bennett and biochemist and crystallographer John Kendrew describe their use of the Cambridge EDSAC for the computation of Fourier syntheses in the calculation of structure factors of the protein molecule myoglobin.

This was the first application of an electronic computer to computational biology or structural biology. The first published account of this research appeared in the very scarce Manchester University Computer Conference Proceedings (1951). (See Reading 10.3.)

Kendrew and Bennett formally published an extended version of their paper as "The Computation of Fourier Syntheses with a Digital Electric Calculating Machine," Acta Crystallographica 5 (1952) 109-116. Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) nos. 744 & 745.

In 1962 Kendrew received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of the 3-dimensional molecular structure of myoglobin, the first protein molecule to be "solved."

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

This was the first demonstration of computer music.

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

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

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

LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office) runs a program to "evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week's baked output" at tea shop operator J. Lyons and Company in England.

This adaptation of the EDSAC was the first stored-program electronic computer to run business programs on a routine basis. “LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

English architect and classical scholar Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, an English linguist and classical scholar, decipher Linear B, proving that this Mycenaean language is an early form of Greek.

Ventris & Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (1956), chapters 1-2.

Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (1958).

British electrical engineer Kenyon Taylor and team, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR project, invent the first trackball, a precursor of the computer mouse. It uses a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball.

Man Bait, originally released in England under the title of The Last Page, was a film noir directed by Terence Fisher starring George Brent and Marguerite Chapman. It also represented the screen debut of sexy Diana Dors, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike who was actually classically trained in acting, as the femme fatale.  

In the film the married manager (Brent) of a bookstore, which sells both new and rare books, is attracted to his sexy blonde clerk (Dors). He attempts to resist temptation but finally kisses her in his office, though the romance does not proceed beyond one kiss. Dors, who had become infatuated with a man played by Peter Reynolds who she witnessed stealing a rare book in the store, blackmails the bookstore manager for kissing her (remarkably), sending a letter to the manager's wife. The manager's wife, a bed-ridden invalid, unbelievably dies as she gets out of bed to burn the letter. Dors is murdered by the ex-con, with her body stuffed into a shipping crate that was intended for a book shipment. The manager is framed for the murder. 

As unlikely as the plot is, in my opinion and the opinion of many of my colleagues Man Bait is the best bookstore mystery film, and perhaps the most interesting film set in an antiquarian bookstore. The main area in which the film deviates from authenticity in book trade practice is the seemingly enormous bookstore staff (perhaps 10 people) working in a store which appears to do relatively insignificant business.

The original title of the film, The Last Page, is much more in character with the subdued, sultry sexuality of the film, compared to the graphic elements suggested in the revised title Man Bait, and the graphic elements of the posters advertising the film under that title which strongly emphasize the busty aspect of Ms. Dors.

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

The first electronic computer symposium on the west coast of the United States is held at UCLA. The proceeds appeared later that year as  Proceedings of the Electronic Computer Symposium . . .  at University of California, Los Angeles.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 842.

The IAS computer is fully operational at Princeton.

At a meeting of the Medical Library Association Sanford Larkey reports on advances in the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project.

This project was probably the earliest effort to apply computer methods, including punched card tabulating, in library cataloguing and information retrieval.

Heinz Billing's G1 is in full operation at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, directed by Werner Heisenberg.

This was the first electronic computer in Germany. It used drum memory, but it was not a stored-program machine.

The ACM holds a special meeting in Toronto in honor of the installation of the first electronic digital computer in Canada, installed at the University of Toronto. It is a Ferranti Mark I, 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 UNIVAC Short Code II is developed. This is the earliest extant version of a high-level programming language actually intended to be used on an electronic digital computer.

UNIVAC I, serial 5, used by the CBS television network, successfully predicts the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of the United States.

This was the first time that millions of people (including me, then aged 7) saw and heard about an electronic computer.

The computer, far too large and delicate for moving to be considered, was actually in Eckert-Mauchly's corporate office in Philadelphia. What was televised by Walter Cronkite from CBS studios in New York was actually a dummy terminal connected by teletype.

Univac 1, serial 5 was later installed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in Livermore, California.

IBM introduces the 701, their first stored-program electronic computer for commercial production.

Designed by Nathaniel Rochester, and based on the IAS machine at Princeton, the IBM 701 was intended for scientific use. Feeling that the word "computer" was too closely associated with UNIVAC, IBM called the 701 an “electronic data processing machine.” IBM eventually sold nineteen of these machines. (See Reading 8.9.)

Bertram V. Bowden, computer salesman for Ferranti Limited, and later made Baron Bowden, edits Faster than Thought, the first widely read English book on electronic digital computing.

Reflective of the slow speed of advances in computing at this time, the book remained in print without change until 1968.

Mortimer Taube proposes the Uniterm Indexing system.

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

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

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

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

François Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard wrote a screenplay based on the novel, and Truffault directed a film entitled Fahrenheit 451 starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner in 1966. The film was re-issued on DVD by Universal Studies in 2003.

William H. Sweet and Gordon L. Brownell at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, describe the first positron imaging device. and and the first attempt to record three dimensional data in positron detection in their paper entitled "Localization of brain tumors with positron emitters',' Nucleonics XI (1953) 40-45. This was the beginning of positron emission tomography (PET).

"Despite the relatively crude nature of this imaging instrument, the brain images were markedly better than those obtained by other imaging devices. It also contained several features that were incorporated into future positron imaging devices. Data were obtained by translation of two opposed detectors using coincidence detection with mechanical motion in two dimensions and a printing mechanism to form a two-dimensional image of the positron source. This was our first attempt to record three-dimensional data in positron detection" (Brownell, A History of Positron Imaging [1999], accessed 12-25-2008)

English cybernetician and psychologist Gordon Pask creates MusiColour, a computer-controlled aesthetic system that "drove an array of lights that adapted to a musician's performance" (Mason, a computer in the art room. the origins of british computer arts 1950-1980 [2008] 6). This was one of the earliest examples of "computer art."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James D. Watson and Francis Crick publish “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid, ” Nature 171 (1953) 964-7.

In this paper Watson and Crick proposed DNA’s means of replication. This discovery has been called as significant, or possibly even more significant, than their discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA published in April 1953.

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.

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

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

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

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

Thirty-three of the 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)

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

George Gamow comes up with the idea of a genetic code in his paper “Possible Mathematical Relation between Deoxyribonucleic Acids and Proteins” (Det. Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab: Biologiske Meddeleiser 22, no. 3 [1954]: 1-13).

In the fall of 1953 Gamov gave Crick an earlier draft of this paper entitled “Protein synthesis by DNA molecules.”

“Gamov’s scheme was decisive, Crick has often said since, because it forced him, and soon others, to begin to think hard and from a particular slant--that of the coding problem—about the next stage now that the structure of DNA was known.” (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation).

IBM announces the 704.

It 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.

UNIVAC I, serial 8, is installed at General Electric Appliance Park outside Louisville, Kentucky.

Serial 8 was the first electronic computer sold to a nongovernmental customer in the United States. It ran the "first successful industrial payroll application."

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

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

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.

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

Development begins on the SAGE Air Defense System, using a computer built by IBM after a design based on the Whirlwind. It includes the first light pen.

The full SAGE system was completed by 1963.

Probably the first widely used controlled vocabulary for searching information was the Subject Heading Authority List issued by the National Library of Medicine.

"The first official list of subject headings published by the National Library of Medicine appeared in 1954 under the title Subject Heading Authority List. It was based on the internal authority list that had been used for publication of Current List of Medical Literature which in turn had incorporated headings from the Library's Index-Catalogue and from the 1940 Quarterly Cumulative Index Medicus Subject Headings. With the inception of Index Medicus in 1960, a new and thoroughly revised Medical Subject Headings appeared.

"With the 1954 Subject Heading Authority List, there appeared a 'Categorical Listing' of standard subheadings. 'Abnormalities,' for instance, was listed as a standard subheading for use with terms for organs, tissues, and regions, and 'anesthesia and analgesia' was to be used under surgical procedure headings. But such subheadings could be used only for subject headings which fell within the category of headings to which they were to be applied. There were over 100 such subheadings, some of which varied only slightly according to the category of main heading with which they were used. For instance, 'therapeutic use' was used under physical agents and drugs and chemicals, and 'therapy' was used with diseases. In the 1960 Medical Subject Headings, the number of subheadings was reduced to sixty-seven. They could be used under any kind of main heading if the combination was not patently foolish or impossible. These sixty-seven subheadings were applied with more generalized meanings. For instance, the subheading "therapy" was used to mean 'therapy of,' 'therapeutic use of' or just 'therapeutic aspects.' Though this solution was simpler, many problems still remained. The use of one subheading might prevent the use of another. For instance, if a paper covered the etiology, pathology, and therapy of a disease, it might occur without further subdivision, or it might occur under the subheading which seemed most appropriate to the indexer. If 'therapy' was chosen, the article would be lost to the searcher looking for the etiology of the disease under the subheading 'etiology.' In addition, if the subheading 'diseases' had been appended to the term for an anatomic part, it would not be possible to subdivide further for the therapy or complications of such diseases. A related problem was the overlap in meaning of the subheadings themselves. It was difficult, for example, to decide whether a paper on chemical biosynthesis fit best under 'chemistry' or 'metabolism.'

"Categorized lists of terms were printed for the first time in the 1963 Medical Subject Headings and contained thirteen main categories and a total of fifty-eight separate groups in subcategories and main categories. These categorized lists made it possible for the user to find many more related terms than were in the former cross-reference structure. In 1963, the second edition of Medical Subject Headings contained 5,700 descriptors, compared with 4,400 in the 1960 edition. Of the headings used in the 1960 list, 113 were withdrawn in favor of newer terms. In contrast, the 2009 edition of MeSH contains 25,186 descriptors.

"In 1960, medical librarianship was on the cusp of a revolution. The first issue of the new Index Medicus series was published. On the horizon was a computerization project undertaken by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to store and retrieve information. The Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) would speed the publication process for bibliographies such as Index Medicus, facilitate the expansion of coverage of the literature, and permit searches for individuals upon demand. The new list of subject headings introduced in 1960 was the underpinning of the analysis and retrieval operation. MeSH was a new and thoroughly revised version of lists of subject headings compiled by NLM for its bibliographies and cataloging. Frank B. Rogers, then NLM director, announced several innovations as he introduced MeSH in 1960" (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/2009/introduction/intro_preface.html#pref_hist. accessed 05-04-2009).

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

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

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

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

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

RCA begins manufacture of its twelve-inch model CT100 color television set, which uses phosphor dots deposited on an internal glass plate.

5000 of these sets were produced and sold at the then very high retail price of $1000.

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

Grace Hopper organizes the first symposium strictly on software for the Office of Naval Research.

The symposium was attended by over 200 people. The published proceedings were entitled Symposium on Automatic Programming for Digital Computers (1954). (See Reading 9.6.)

Alan Turing commits suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide. 

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

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 BBC presents a television production of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four,  adapted for television by Nigel  Kneale.

"Kneale's script was a largely faithful adaptation of the novel as far as was practical with the limitations of the medium. The writer did, however, make some small additions of his own, the most notable being the creation of a sequence in which O'Brien observes Julia at work in PornoSec, and reads a small segment from one of the erotic novels being written by the machines there."

"When it had become clear what an important production Nineteen Eighty-Four was, it was arranged for the second performance [December 14, 1954] to be telerecorded onto 35mm film – the first performance having simply disappeared off into the ether, as it was shown live, seen only by those who were watching on the Sunday evening. At this stage, Videotape recording was still at the development stage and television images could only be preserved on film by using a special recording apparatus (known as "telerecording" in the UK and "kinescoping" in the USA), but was only used sparingly, then in Britain for historic preservation reasons and not for pre-recording. It is thus the second performance that survives in the archives, one of the earliest surviving British television dramas" (Wikipedia article on Nineteen Eight-Four (TV Programme), accessed 07-26-2009).

♦ The program is available for downloading or viewing at the Internet archive at this link.