From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1955 to 1960 Timeline

IBM introduces the IBM 608 transistor calculator, the first all solid-state computer commercially marketed.

IBM develops magnetic core storage units, a dramatic improvement over cathode ray tube memory technology.

By successfully adapting pill-making machines for production, IBM greatly improved the manufacture of these tiny, “doughnut” shaped, iron oxide cores, making the cores reliable and cost effective enough to serve as the basic technology behind every computer’s main memory until the early 1970s.

The ENIAC is turned off for the last time.

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

Frederick Sanger sequences the amino acids of insulin, the first of any protein.

Sanger's work “revealed that a protein has a definite constant, genetically determined sequence--and yet a sequence with no general rule for its assembly. Therefore it had to have a code” (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation, 188).

Sanger received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1958.

Compagnie des Machines Bull launches the first stored-program electronic computer produced for commercial sale in France-- the Gamma ET.

Because of failing health, John von Neumann does not finish his last book, The Computer and the Brain, in which he compares the functions of computers and the human brain.

On the completion of the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project, five authors, including Eugene Garfield, issue the Final Report on Machine Methods for Information Searching.

Howard "Bud" Kettler designs the monospaced, or fixed-width or non-proportional, slab serif typeface to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter.

"The design of the original Courier typeface was commissioned in the 1950s by IBM for use in typewriters, but they did not secure legal exclusivity to the typeface and it soon became a standard font used throughout the typewriter industry. As a monospaced font, it has recently found renewed use in the electronic world in situations where columns of characters must be consistently aligned. . . .

"Kettler was once quoted about how the name was chosen. The font was nearly released with the name "Messenger." After giving it some thought, Kettler said, 'A letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability' " (Wikipedia article on Courier [typeface], accessed 04-26-2009).

Eugene Garfield publishes "Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas," Science, Vol. 122, No. 3159, 108-11. This paper may be the foundation of "bibliometrics" or citation analysis.

"Eugene Garfield . . . was deeply involved in the research relating to machine generated indexes in the mid-1950's and early 1960's. One of his earliest points of involvement was a project sponsored by the Armed Forces Medical Library (predecessor to our current National Library of Medicine). The Welch Medical Library Indexing project, as it was called, was to investigate the role of automation in the organization and retrieval of medical literature. The hope was that the problems associated with subjective human judgement in selection of descriptors and indexing terms could be eliminated. By removing the human element, one might thereby increase the speed with which information was incorporated in to the indexes. It might also increase the cost-effectiveness of the indexes. Garfield grasped early on that review articles in the journal literature were heavily reliant on the bibliographic citations that referred the reader to the original published source for the notable idea or concept. By capturing those citations, Garfield believed, the researcher could immediately get a view of the approach taken by another scientist to support an idea or methodology based on the sources that the published writer had consulted and cited as pertinent in the bibliography. As retrieval terms, citations could function as well as keywords and descriptors that were thoughtfully assigned by a professional indexer."

John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon invite participants to a summer session at Dartmouth College to conduct research on what they call Artificial Intelligence (AI), thereby coining the term. (See Reading 11.5.)

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

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

Ray Dolby, Charles Ginsberg and Charles Anderson of Ampex sell the first video tape recorder. It costs $50,000.

IBM introduces the 650 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) disk-storage system— a memory device based on rotating disks.

This was the first hard drive. It permitted random access to any of the million characters distributed over both sides of 50 two-foot-diameter disks. It stored about 2,000 bits of data per square inch and had a purchase price of about $10,000 per megabyte. By 1997 the cost of storing a megabyte on a hard drive dropped to around ten cents.

William Ross Ashby writes of intelligence amplification by machines in his book, Introduction to Cybernetics.

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

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

Storm Center, an American drama film directed by screenwriter Daniel Taradash, from a screenplay by Taradash and Elick Moll, and starring Bette Davis as the librarian, Alicia Hull, was first overtly anti-McCarthyism film to be produced in Hollywood during the height of the "Second Red Scare" (late 1940s through late 1950s).  During the Second Red Scare hundreds of Hollywood entertainment professionals lost their jobs as a result of the unofficial Hollywood blacklist, and thousands of people in other occupations also lost jobs.

"Alicia Hull is a widowed small town librarian dedicated to introducing children to the joy of reading. In exchange for fulfilling her request for a children's wing, the city council asks her to withdraw the book The Communist Dream from the library's collection. When she refuses to comply with their demand, she is fired and branded as a subversive. Judge Ellerbe feels she has been treated unfairly and calls a town meeting. Ambitious attorney and aspiring politician Paul Duncan, who is dating assistant librarian Martha Lockeridge, uses the meeting as an opportunity to make a name for himself by denouncing Alicia as a Communist. His forceful rhetoric turns the entire town, with the exception of young Freddie Slater, against her. The boy, increasingly upset by the mistreatment his mentor is suffering and affected by the influence of his narrow-minded father, finally turns on her himself and sets the library on fire. His action causes the residents to have a change of heart, and they ask Alicia to return and supervise the construction of a new building" (Wikipedia article on Storm Center, accessed 05-30-2009).

Raven, "Introduction: The Resonances of Loss," (Raven [ed.] Lost Libraries. The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity [2004] 31).

English director Michael Anderson directs 1984, a science fiction drama film based on the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and starring Edmond O'Brien, Jan Sterling, Michael Redgrave, and Donald Pleasance.

This was the first cinema rendition of the novel. It was released on DVD in 2004.

California inventor Henry Chamberlin introduces the Chamberlin, the first sample-playback keyboard.

FUJIC, the first Japanese stored-program electronic computer, is designed and built by essentially one person--Dr. Okazaki Bunji--for the Fuji Photo Film Company. The project began in 1949.

"Originally designed to perform calculations for lens design by Fuji, the ultimate goal of FUJIC's construction was to achieve a speed 1,000 times that of human calculation for the same purpose – amazingly, the actual performance achieved was double that number.

"Employing approximately 1,700 vacuum tubes, the computer's word length was 33 bits. It had an ultrasonic mercury delay line memory of 255 words, with an average access time of 500 microseconds. An addition or subtraction was clocked at 100 microseconds, multiplication at 1,600 microseconds, and division at 2,100 microseconds."

The First International Congress on Cybernetics is held in Namur, Belgium. Few, if any, of the computer pioneers attended.  By this time the field of cybernetics was separated from those of computing and artificial intelligence to emphasize issues of control and communication in learning, automation, and biology.

At the Dartmouth summer session on artificial intelligence, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon demonstrate the first AI program, the Logic Theorist, to find the basic equations of logic as defined in Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell.

For one of the equations, the Logic Theorist surpassed its inventors’ expectations by finding a new and better proof. This was the “the first foray by artificial intelligence research into high-order intellectual processes” (Feigenbaum and Feldman, Computers and Thought [1963]).

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

Sperry Rand agrees to cross-license patents with IBM, thereby turning over strategic technology.

Noam Chomsky publishes "Three Models for the Description of Language" in IRE Transactions on Information Theory IT-2  113-24.

In this work read at a symposium on information theory held at MIT a few months before the publication of his Syntactic Structures (1957), Chomsky introduced two key concepts— 'Chomsky's hierarchy' of syntactic forms, and transformational-generative grammar theory.  The latter attempts to define rules that can generate the infinite number of grammatical (well-formed) sentences possible in a language, and works to identify rules (transformations) that govern relations between parts of a sentence, on the assumption that beneath such aspects as word order a fundamental deep structure exists.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 531.

The first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT-1, becomes operational.

Since 1927 very expensive radio-based transatlantic telephone service was available. Radio-based transatlantic telephone service carried pnly around 2000 calls per year.

The first Italian computer conference is held in Rome.

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

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

IBM phases out vacuum tubes in computer design: “It shall be the policy of IBM to use solid-state circuitry in all machine developments. Furthermore, no new commercial machines or devices shall be announced which make primary use of tube circuitry.”

EDSAC 2, the first large-scale computer with a control unit based on microprogramming, becomes operational in Cambridge, England.

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

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

Hans Peter Luhn of IBM publishes A Statistical Approach to Mechanized Encoding of Library Information.

Commercial transistorized computers, including the UNIVAC Solid State 80 and the Philco TRANSAC S-2000, are introduced. These inaugurate the so-called second generation of electronic computers.

Grace Hopper writes the first English-language data-processing compiler, B-0 (FLOW-MATIC) for the UNIVAC II.

John Backus and his team at IBM ship FORTRAN for the IBM 704. This software was proprietary to IBM. It became the first high-level programming language to achieve high use.

Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson collaborate on the first significant computer music composition, the Illiac Suite. 

The Illiac Suite was composed on the University of Illinois ILLIAC I computer, the first von Neumann architecture computer built and owned by an American university.

Shigeo Satomura demonstrates the application of the Doppler shift in the frequency of ultrasound backscattered by moving cardiac structures.

This was the beginning of doppler ultrasound for evaluating blood flow and pressure by bouncing high-frequency sound waves (ultrasound) off red blood cells.

S. Satomura, Ultrasonic Doppler Method for the Inspection of Cardiac Functions. J. Accoust. Soc. Amer. 29 (1957) 1181-85.

The romantic comedy film, Desk Set, is the first film to dramatize and satirize the role of automation in eliminating traditional jobs.

The name of the computer in the film, EMERAC, and its room-size installation, was an obvious take-off on UNIVAC, the best-known computer at the time. In the film, the computer was brought-in to replace the library of books, and its staff—an early foreshadowing of the physical information versus digital information issue.  Directed by Walter Lang and starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Gig Young, Joan Blondell, and Dina Merrill, the screenplay was written by Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron from the play by William Marchant.

The film "takes place at the "Federal Broadcasting Network" (exterior shots are of Rockefeller Center, headquarters of NBC). Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) is in charge of its reference library, which is responsible for researching and answering questions on all manner of topics, such as the names of Santa's reindeer. She has been involved for seven years with network executive Mike Cutler (Gig Young), with no marriage in sight.

"The network is negotiating a merger with another company, but is keeping it secret. To help the employees cope with the extra work that will result, the network head has ordered two computers (called "electronic brains" in the film). Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), the inventor of EMERAC and an efficiency expert, is brought in to see how the library functions, to figure out how to ease the transition. Though extremely bright, as he gets to know Bunny, he is surprised to discover that she is every bit his match.

"When they find out the computers are coming, the employees jump to the conclusion the machines are going to replace them. Their fears seem to be confirmed when everyone on the staff receives a pink slip printed out by the new payroll computer. Fortunately, it turns out to be a mistake; the machine fired everybody in the company, including the president" Wikipedia article on Desk Set, accessed 12-23-2008).

American mathematician and researcher in artificial intelligence Ray Solomonoff publishes "An Inductive Inference Machine". IRE Convention Record, Section on Information Theory, Part 2,  56-62. This was the first paper written on machine learning. It emphasized the importance of training sequences, and the use of parts of previous solutions to problems in constructing trial solutions to new problems. Solomonoff presented an early version of this paper at the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence.  A copy of that version is available at this link.

Russell Kirsch and a team at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards build the first image scanner -- a drum scanner. 

"The first image ever scanned on this machine was a 5 cm square photograph of Kirsch's then-three-month-old son, Walden. The black and white image had a resolution of 176 pixels on a side" (Wikipedia article on Image Scanner, accessed 04-01-2009).

Swiss typographer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas type foundry) of Münchenstein, Switzerland design the sans-serif typeface Helvetica. Its original name was Die Neue Haas Grotesk.

"The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, had no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage.

"In 1960, the typeface's name was changed by Haas' German parent company Stempel to Helvetica — derived from Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland — in order to make it more marketable internationally" (Wikipedia article on Helvetica, accessed 04-26-2009).

In 2007 Gary Hustwit produced Helvetica a "feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which recently celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives" (from the superb website for the film, accessed 04-26-2009). You can watch several clips from the film at this link.

John von Neumann dies of cancer at the age of fifty-four.

Molecular Biologist Francis Crick delivers his paper “On Protein Synthesis,” published in Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol. 12 (1958): 138-63.

In it Crick proposed two general principles:

1) The Sequence Hypothesis:

“The order of bases in a portion of DNA represents a code for the amino acid sequence of a specific protein. Each ‘word’ in the code would name a specific amino acid. From the two-dimensional genetic text, written in DNA, are forged the whole diversity of uniquely shaped three-dimensional proteins

"In this context, Crick discussed the 'coding problem'—how the ordered sequence of the four bases in DNA might constitute genes that encode and disburse information directing the manufacture of proteins. Crick hypothesized that, with four bases to DNA and twenty amino acids, the simplest code would involve "triplets"—in which sequences of three bases coded for a single amino acid" (Genome News Network, Genetics and Genomics Timeline 1957).

2) The Central Dogma:

“Information is transmitted from DNA and RNA to proteins but information cannot be transmitted from a protein to DNA.” This paper “permanently altered the logic of biology.” (Judson)

The Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite.

Molecular biologist John Kendrew publishes  "A Three-Dimensional Model of the Myoglobin Molecule Obtained by X-ray Analysis" (with G. Bodo, H. M. Dintzis, R. G. Parrish, H. Wyckoff,) Nature 181 (1958) 662-666, and "Structure of Myoglobin: A Three-Dimensional Fourier synthesis at 2 Å Resolution" (with R. E. Dickerson, B. E. Strandberg, R. G. Hart, D. R. Davies, D. C. Phillips, V. C. Shore). Nature 185 (1960) 422-27.

These papers recorded the first solution of the three-dimensional molecular structure of a protein, for which Kendrew received the 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry, together with his friend and colleague Max Perutz, who solved the structure of the related and more complex protein, hemoglobin, two years after Kendrew’s achievement. 

Understanding the means of storing the genetic information in the cell nucleus, and the means of transferring the genetic information (the double helical structure of DNA, messenger RNA, the genetic code), solving the structure of proteins which construct themselves following instructions from the nucleus, and recombinant DNA and its applications in genetic engineering, remain central elements of molecular biology. Today roughly 100,000 people worldwide are involved in scientific research solving the structure of proteins, which evolved out of Kendrew’s and Perutz’s pioneering work.  

Kendrew began his investigation into the structure of myoglobin in 1949, choosing this particular protein because it was “of low molecular weight, easily prepared in quantity, readily crystallized, and not already being studied by X-ray methods elsewhere” (Kendrew, “Myoglobin and the structure of proteins. Nobel Prize Lecture [1962],” pp. 676-677). Protein molecules, which contain, at minimum, thousands of atoms, have enormously convoluted and irregular formations that are extremely difficult to elucidate. In the 1930s J. D. Bernal, Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz performed the earliest crystallographic studies of proteins at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory; however, the intricacies of three-dimensional structure of proteins were too complex for analysis by conventional X-ray crystallography, and the process of calculating the structure factors by slide-rules and electric calculators was far too slow. It was not until the late 1940s, when Kendrew joined the Cavendish Laboratory as a graduate student, that new and more sophisticated tools emerged that could be used to attack the problem. The first of these tools was the technique of isomorphous replacement, developed by Perutz during his own researches on hemoglobin, in which certain atoms in a protein molecule are replaced with heavy atoms. When these modified molecules are subjected to X-ray analysis the heavy atoms provide a frame of reference for comparing diffraction patterns. The second tool was the electronic computer, which Kendrew introduced to computational biology in 1951. The first electronic computer, the ENIAC, which became operational in Philadelphia in 1945, was 10,000 times the speed of a human performing a calculation. In 1951 Cambridge University was one of only three or four places in the world with a high-speed stored-program electronic computer, and Kendrew took full advantage of the speed of Cambridge’s EDSAC computer, and its more powerful successors, to execute the complex mathematical calculations required to solve the structure of myoglobin. Kendrew was the first to apply an electronic computer to the solution of a complex problem in biology.

Nevertheless, even with the EDSAC computer performing the calculations, the research progressed remarkably slowly. Only by the summer of 1957 did Kendrew and his team succeed in creating a three-dimensional map of myoglobin at a resolution the so-called “low resolution”of 6 angstroms; thus myoglobin became “the first protein to be solved” (Judson, p. 538).

“A cursory inspection of the map showed it to consist of a large number of rod-like segments, joined at the ends, and irregularly wandering through the structure; a single dense flattened disk in each molecule; and sundry connected regions of uniform density. These could be identified respectively with polypeptide chains, with the iron atom and its associated porphyrin ring, and with the liquid filling the interstices between neighboring molecules. From the map it was possible to ‘dissect out’ a single protein molecule . . . The most striking features of the molecule were its irregularity and its total lack of symmetry” (Kendrew, “Myoglobin,” p. 681).  

The 6-angstrom resolution was too low to show the molecule’s finer features, but by 1960 Kendrew and his team were able to obtain a map of the molecule at 2-angstrom resolution. “To achieve a resolution of 2 Å it was necessary to determine the phases of nearly 10,000 reflections, and them to compute a Fourier synthesis with the same number of terms . . . the Fourier synthesis itself (excluding preparatory computations of considerable bulk and complexity) required about 12 hours of continuous computation on a very fast machine (EDSAC II)” (Kendrew, “Myoglobin,” p. 682).

Konrad Zuse produces the Z22, the first commercial electronic digital computer in Germany.

It used vacuum tubes at this relatively late date for that technology. Zuse KG was the first independent German electronic computer company. It was eventually purchased by Siemens.

Seymour Cray of Control Data Corporation builds the first transistorized supercomputer, the CDC 1604.

William Higinbotham, head of the Instrumentation Division at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, invents the first video game, "Tennis for Two" run on an analog computer hooked up to an oscilloscope.

Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments conceives of the integrated circuit and constructs a basic prototype.

Independently of Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invents a process that makes it practical to manufacture integrated circuits.

IBM announces their 1401, a relatively inexpensive computer that proves very popular with businesses, and which begins to compete seriously with existing punched-card equipment.

Hans Peter Luhn of IBM develops an automatic document indexing program for the production of literature abstracts.

"The complete text of an article in machine-readable form is scanned by an IBM 704 data-processing machine and analyzed in accordance with a standard program. Statistical information derived from word frequency and distribution is used by the machine to compute a relative measure of significance, first for individual words and then for sentences. Sentences scoring highest in significance are extracted and printed out to become the "auto-abstract."

Though modems existed for teletype since the 1940s, these transmitted at speeds of about 150 bpi. To meet demands of the U.S. military, researchers at Bell Labs developed an improved modem (modulator-demodulator), using amplitude magnification to provide a way to convert digital signals to analog signals and back for transmission at speeds up to 1600 bpi over analog telephone lines.

MITRE Corporation is founded to manage the development and production of SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) "an automated control system for collecting, tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft."

SAGE was used by NORAD into the 1980s.

IBM begins production of the the AN/FSQ-7, a military grade version of the Whirlwind.

"The AN/FSQ-7 used 55,000 vaccuum tubes, about 1/2 acre(2,000 m²) of floor space, weighed 275 tons and used up to three megawatts of power. Although the failure rate of an individual tube was low due to efforts in quality control. So many were used that the daily failure rate was in the hundreds. Each center had staff dedicated to replacing dead tubes by running up and down the racks of machinery with shopping carts filled with replacements. The AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built, and will likely hold that record in the future. Each SAGE site included two computers for redundancy, with one processor on "hot standby" at all times. In spite of the poor reliability of the tubes, this dual-processor design made for remarkably high overall system uptime. 99% availability was not unusual."

In the late 1950s it becomes recognized that the longevity of paper is a function of its acidity or alkalinity: the lower the acidity and higher the alkalinity, the greater the longevity of paper.

Ian Donald, Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow, and his colleagues John MacVicar, an obstetrician, and Tom Brown, an engineer, publish a paper in The Lancet entitled "Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound." This article describes their experience using an ultrasound scanner on 100 patients, and includes 12 illustrations of various gynecologic disorders (eg, ovarian cysts, fibroids) as well as demonstration of obstetric findings such as the fetal skull at 34 weeks' gestation, "hydramnios" (polyhydramnios), and twins in breech presentation. The somewhat grainy and indistinct "Compound B-mode contact scanner" images are the first published obstetrical or gynecological sonograms.

J. M. Norman (ed),  Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed.(1991) no. 2682.

American statistician John Tukey coins the term "software" in a computing context in "The Teaching of Concrete mathematics," published in American Mathematical Monthly.

Tukey wrote:

"Today the 'software' comprising the carefully planned interpretive routines, compilers, and other aspects of automative programming are at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its 'hardware' of tubes, transitors, wires, tapes and the like" (http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_7_31_00.html, accessed 02-02-2010).

Note that Tukey referred to computers as "calculators." Up to this time the word "computer" typically referred to people and the use of the word computer for a machine was just coming into popular use.

The U. S. launches its first artificial satellite, Explorer-1, officially known as Satellite 1958 Alpha. It was built at the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech, and it ceased transmission on May 23 after less than 4 months.

Explorer I is credited with the most important discovery of the International Geophysical Year-- the discovery of one of the belts of radiation surrounding the earth. There were subsequently named the Van Allen Belts after James Van Allen, the scientist who identified them.

In response to the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, President Dwight Eisenhower creates the Advanced Research Planning Agency of the Department of Defense (ARPA). It was renamed DARPA in 1972.

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

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

Allan Newell, Clifford Shaw, and Herbert Simon invent “game tree pruning,” an artificial intelligence technique.

American Express launches the American Express card.

Because American Express previously had an international network of offices in place, and their traveler's' cheques had been accepted throughout the world for decades, this was the first credit card accepted internationally. 

". . . public interest had become so significant that they issued 250,000 cards prior to the official launch date. The card was launched with an annual fee of $6, $1 higher than Diners Club, to be seen as a premium product. The first cards were paper, with the account number and cardmember's name typed. It was not until 1959 that American Express began issuing embossed ISO 7810 plastic cards, an industry first" (Wikipedia article on American Express, accessed 12-27-2008).

Frank Rosenblatt invents the Perceptron, or Mark I at Cornell University. Completed in 1960, this was the first computer that could learn new skills by trial and error, using a type of neural network that simulated human thought processes.

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

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

The National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, England holds the first international symposium on artificial intelligence, calling it Mechanisation of Thought Processes.

At this conference John McCarthy delivered his paper Programs with Common Sense.(See Reading 11.6.)

President Eisenhower's brief Christmas greeting is transmitted from the Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment) satellite.

He said:

"This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite traveling in outer space. My message is a simple one: Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind, America's wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere."

This was the first voice transmission from the world's first communications satellite.

Based on technology originally developed at the Stanford Research Institute, General Electric delivers the first 32 ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) computing systems to the Bank of America.

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

Wesley A. Clark designs and builds the TX-2 computer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories. It had 320 kilobytes of fast memory, about twice the capacity of the biggest commercial machines. Other features were magnetic tape storage, an on-line typewriter, the first Xerox printer, paper tape for program input, and a nine inch CRT screen. Among its applications were development of interactive graphics and research on human-computer interaction.

Gordon Gould files his patent on the LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) based on a discovery he made in 1957. The patent was not granted until 1977.

Having been computed by human computers since 1767, the Nautical Almanac is finally produced by an electronic computer.

"The computation of the data for the almanacs involved a considerable amount of effort. As late as the mid-20th century, HMNAO employed a small army of human computers to carry out this work. They used the latest technology available at the time: logarithm tables, mechanical calculating machines and electro-mechanical calculating machines. In 1959 the Office obtained its own electronic computer, making it the first part of the RGO to use this emerging technology."

Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson publish the first book on computer-generated music: Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer, based on work done on the University of Illinois’s ILLIAC computer.

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

The British Museum (now the British Library) publishes its General Catalogue of Printed Books. Photolithographic Edition to 1955 in 263 folio volumes from 1959 to 1966. These volumes reproduced the catalogue cards of 4,350,000 items.

In 1971 and 1972 the BM issued a Ten-Year Supplement, 1956-1970 in 23 volumes. This set of nearly 300 folio volumes was the "most voluminous" printed catalogue of a single library ever published in print.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 109.

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

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

"Somewhat the same problem arises in communicating with a machine entity that would arise in communicating with a person of an entirely different language background than your own. A system of logical definition and translation would have to be available. In order that meanings should not be lost, such a system of translation would also need to be precise. We are all familiar with the unhappy results of language translations which are either lacking in precision or where suitable words of equivalent meaning cannot be found. Likewise, translating into a machine language cannot be anything but an exact operation. Machines even more than people must be addressed with clarity and unambiguity, for machines cannot improvise on their own or imagine that about which they have not been specifically informed, as a human might do within reasonable limits of error. . . .

"We must now ascertain how concepts are formulated within the framework of computer language. For analogy, let us first consider the manner in which instructions are usually given to a non-mechanical entity. When we instruct, for example, a human being, we are aided by the fact that the human is usually able to fill in gaps in our instructions through acumen acquired from his own past experiences. It is seldom necessary that instructions be either detailed or literal, although we may have lost sight of this fact.

"The computer in a correlate example is a mechanical 'being' which must be instructed at each and every step. But it can be given a very long list of instructions upon which it can be expected to subsequently act with great speed and accuracy and with untiring repetition. Machine traits are: low comprehension, high retention, extreme reliability, and tremendous speed. The use of superlatives here to describe these traits is not exaggerative. Since speed becomes in practice the equivalent of number, the machine might be, and has sometimes been, equated to legions — an army, if you will — of lowgrade morons whose conceptualization is entirely literal, who remember as long as is necessary or as you desire them to, whose loyalty and subservience is complete, who require no holidays, no spurious incentives, no morale programs, pensions, not even gratitude for past service, and who seemingly never tire of doing elementary repetitive tasks such as typing, accounting, bookkeeping, arithmetic, filling in forms, and the like. In about all these respects the machine may be seen to be the exact opposite of nature's loftiest creature, the intellligent human being, who becomes bored with the petty and repetitious, who is unreliable, who wanders from the task for the most trivial reasons, who gets out of humor, who forgets, who requires constant incentives and rewards, who improvises on his own even when to do so is impertinent to the objectives being undertaken, and who in summary (let's face it) is unsuitable to most forms of industry as the latter are ideally and practically conceived in our times. It becomes apparent in retrospect that the only excuse we might ever have had for employing him to do many of civilization's more literal and repetitious tasks was the absence of something more efficient with which to replace him!

"It is not the purpose of this volume to explore further the ramifications of the above statements of fact. . . ."(Nett & Hetzler, An Introduction to Electronic Data Processing [1959] 86-88).

Randolph Quirk founds the Survey of English Usage, the first research center in Europe to carry out research in corpus linguistics.

"The original Survey Corpus predated modern computing. It was recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, transcribed on paper, filed in filing cabinets, and indexed on paper cards. Transcriptions were annotated with a detailed prosodic and paralinguistic annotation developed by Crystal and Quirk (1964) Sets of paper cards were manually annotated for grammatical structures and filed, so, for example, all noun phrases could be found in the noun phrase filing cabinet in the Survey. Naturally, corpus searches required a visit to the Survey.

"This corpus is now known more widely as the London-Lund Corpus (LLC), as it was the responsibility of co-workers in Lund, Sweden, to computerise the corpus" (Wikipedia article on Survey of English Usage, accessed 06-07-2010).

A group representing computer users, manufacturers, universities, and the government meets at the Pentagon to plan COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), a non proprietary computer language designed for business use that can be run on all electronic computers. Its specifications were inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper, and the IBM COMTRAN language.

Peter R. Samson, Public Relations Committee of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, defines the term "hacker" in the Tech Model Railroad Club Dictionary as:

"1) an article or project without constructive end

"2) a project undertaken on bad self-advice

"3) an entropy booster

"4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack(3)."

Samson defined hacker is defined as "one who hacks, or makes them."

Much of the Tech Model Railroad Club jargon was later incorporated into early computer culture. In 2005 Samson commented:

"I saw this as a term for an unconventional or unorthodox application of technology, typically deprecated for engineering reasons. There was no specific suggestion of malicious intent (or of benevolence, either). Indeed, the era of this dictionary saw some 'good hacks:' using a room-sized computer to play music, for instance; or, some would say, writing the dictionary itself" (http://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html, accessed 06-01-2009).

Arthur Lee Samuel publishes "Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers," IBM Journal of Research and Development 3 (1959) no. 3, 210-29.

In this work Samuel demonstrated that machines can learn from past errors — one of the earliest examples of non-numerical computation.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 874.

Robert S. Ledley and Lee B. Lusted publish "Reasoning Foundations of Medical Diagnosis," Science, 130, no. 3366, 9-21.

This was highly influential in the development of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) — interactive computer programs,  or expert systems, designed to assist physicians and other health professionals with decision making tasks.

Haloid Xerox introduces the Xerox 914, the first successful commercial plain paper xerographic copier, roughly the size of a desk.

". . .  commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with 'key operator' training, and its own 20-amp circuit. In an episode of Mad Men, set in 1962, the arrival of the hulking 914 helps get Peggy Olson her own office, after she tells her boss, 'It’s hard to do business and be credible when I’m sharing with a Xerox machine' " (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-mother-of-all-invention/8123/, accessed 06-11-2010).

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

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

Selling for $120,000, the PDP-1 was a commercialization of the TX-O and TX-2 computers designed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories. On advice from the venture-capital firm that financed the company, DEC did not call it a “computer,” but instead called the machine a “programmed data processor.” The PDP-1 was credited as being the most important in the creation of hacker culture. Some references identified this machine as the first minicomputer; however DEC gave that designation to either the PDP-5 introduced in 1963 or the PDP-8 introduced in 1965.

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