1940–1949
| Date | Place | Event | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1940 Jan |
At Bell Labs, Samuel Williams and George Stibitz completed a calculator which could operate on complex numbers, and named it the 'Complex Number Calculator'; it was later known as the 'Model I Relay Calculator'. It used telephone switching parts for logic: 450 relays and 10 crossbar switches. Numbers were represented in 'plus 3 BCD'; that is, for each decimal digit, 0 is represented by binary 0011, 1 by 0100, and so on up to 1100 for 9; this scheme requires fewer relays than straight BCD. Rather than requiring users to come to the machine to use it, the calculator was provided with three remote keyboards, at various places in the building, in the form of teletypes. Only one could be used at a time, and the output was automatically displayed on the same one. On 9 September 1940, a teletype was set up at a Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a connection to New York, and those attending the conference could use the machine remotely. | |||||
| 1940 Apr 1 |
In 1940 Zuse presented the Z2 to an audience of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt ("German Laboratory for Aviation") in Berlin-Adlershof. | |||||
| 1941 May 11 |
Now working with limited backing from the DVL (German Aeronautical Research Institute), Konrad Zuse completed the 'Z3' (originally 'V3'): the first operational programmable computer. One major improvement over Charles Babbage's non-functional device is the use of Leibniz's binary system (Babbage and others unsuccessfully tried to build decimal programmable computers). Zuse's machine also featured floating point numbers with a 7-bit exponent, 14-bit mantissa (with a '1' bit automatically prefixed unless the number is 0), and a sign bit. The memory held 64 of these words and therefore required over 1400 relays; there were 1200 more in the arithmetic and control units. It also featured parallel adders. The program, input, and output were implemented as described above for the Z1. Although conditional jumps were not available, it was shown that Zuse's Z3 is indeed a universal computer. The machine could do 3-4 additions per second, and took 3–5 seconds for a multiplication. But, Z3 was destroyed in 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin. Also was Zuses Machines not important for Computer inventions in America or England. | |||||
| 1942 Summer |
Atanasoff and Berry completed a special-purpose calculator for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, later called the 'ABC' ('Atanasoff–Berry Computer'). This had 60 50-bit words of memory in the form of capacitors (with refresh circuits —the first regenerative memory) mounted on two revolving drums. The clock speed was 60 Hz, and an addition took 1 second. For secondary memory it used punched cards, moved around by the user. The holes were not actually punched in the cards, but burned. The punched card system's error rate was never reduced beyond 0.001%, and this was inadequate. Atanasoff left Iowa State after the U.S. entered the war, ending his work on digital computing machines. | |||||
| 1942 | Konrad Zuse developed the S1, the world's first process computer, used by Henschel to measure the surface of wings. | |||||
| 1943 Apr |
Max Newman, Wynn-Williams and their team at the secret Government Code and Cypher School ('Station X'), Bletchley Park, Bletchley, England, completed the 'Heath Robinson'. This was a specialized counting machine used for cipher-breaking, not a general-purpose calculator or computer, but a logic device using a combination of electronics and relay logic. It read data optically at 2000 characters per second from 2 closed loops of paper tape, each typically about 1000 characters long. It was significant since it was the forerunner of Colossus. Newman knew Turing from Cambridge (Turing was a student of Newman's), and had been the first person to see a draft of Turing's 1936 paper. Heath Robinson is the name of a British cartoonist known for drawings of comical machines, like the American Rube Goldberg. Two later machines in the series will be named after London stores with 'Robinson' in their names. | |||||
| 1943 Sep |
Williams and Stibitz completed the 'Relay Interpolator', later called the 'Model II Relay Calculator'. This was a programmable calculator; again, the program and data were read from paper tapes. An innovative feature was that, for greater reliability, numbers were represented in a biquinary format using 7 relays for each digit, of which exactly 2 should be "on": 01 00001 for 0, 01 00010 for 1, and so on up to 10 10000 for 9. Some of the later machines in this series would use the biquinary notation for the digits of floating-point numbers. | |||||
| 1943 Dec |
The Colossus was built, by Dr Thomas Flowers at The Post Office Research Laboratories in London, to crack the German Lorenz (SZ42) cipher. It contained 2400 vacuum tubes for logic and applied a programmable logical function to a stream of input characters, read from punched tape at a rate of 5000 characters a second. Colossus was used at Bletchley Park during World War II —as a successor to the unreliable Heath Robinson machines. Although 10 were eventually built, most were destroyed immediately after they had finished their work to maintain the secrecy of the work. | |||||
| 1944 Aug 7 |
The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was turned over to Harvard University, which called it the Harvard Mark I. It was designed by Howard Aiken and his team, financed and built by IBM —it became the second program controlled machine (after Konrad Zuse's). The whole machine was 51 feet (16 m) long, weighed 5 (short) tons (4.5 tonnes), and incorporated 750,000 parts. It used 3304 electromechanical relays as on-off switches, had 72 accumulators (each with its own arithmetic unit), as well as a mechanical register with a capacity of 23 digits plus sign. The arithmetic was fixed-point and decimal, with a control panel setting determining the number of decimal places. Input-output facilities include card readers, a card punch, paper tape readers, and typewriters. There were 60 sets of rotary switches, each of which could be used as a constant register —sort of mechanical read-only memory. The program was read from one paper tape; data could be read from the other tapes, or the card readers, or from the constant registers. Conditional jumps were not available. However, in later years, the machine was modified to support multiple paper tape readers for the program, with the transfer from one to another being conditional, rather like a conditional subroutine call. Another addition allowed the provision of plug-board wired subroutines callable from the tape. Used to create ballistics tables for the US Navy. | |||||
| 1945 | Konrad Zuse developed Plankalkül, the first higher-level programming language. He also presented the Z4 in March. | |||||
| 1945 | Vannevar Bush developed the theory of the memex, a hypertext device linked to a library of books and films. | |||||
| 1945 |
John von Neumann drafted a report describing the future computer eventually built as the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC includes the first published description of the design of a stored-program computer, giving rise to the term von Neumann architecture. It directly or indirectly influenced nearly all subsequent projects, especially EDSAC. The design team included John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. | |||||
| 1946 Feb 14 |
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer): One of the first totally electronic, valve driven, digital, program-controlled computers was unveiled although it was shut down on 9 November 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. Development had started in 1943 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, USA, by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. It weighed 30 tonnes and contained 18,000 electronic valves, consuming around 160 kW of electrical power. It could do 50,000 basic calculations a second. It was used for calculating ballistic trajectories and testing theories behind the hydrogen bomb. | |||||
| 1946 Feb 19 |
ACE (Automatic Computing Engine): Alan Turing presented a detailed paper to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Executive Committee, giving the first reasonably complete design of a stored-program computer. However, because of the strict and long-lasting secrecy around his wartime work at Bletchley Park, he was prohibited (having signed the Official Secrets Act) from explaining that he knew that his ideas could be implemented in an electronic device. | |||||
| 1947 Dec 16 |
Invention of the transistor at Bell Laboratories, USA, by William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. | |||||
| 1947 | Howard Aiken completed the Harvard Mark II. | |||||
| 1947 | The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), was founded as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. It remains to this day with a membership currently around 78,000. Its headquarters are in New York City. | |||||
| 1948 Jan 27 |
IBM finished the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator). It was the first computer to modify a stored program. "About 1300 vacuum tubes were used to construct the arithmetic unit and eight very high-speed registers, while 23000 relays were used in the control structure and 150 registers of slower memory." | |||||
| 1948 Jul 21 |
SSEM, Small-Scale Experimental Machine or 'Baby' was built at the University of Manchester. It ran its first program on this date. It was the first computer to store both its programs and data in RAM, as modern computers do. By 1949 the 'Baby' had grown, and acquired a magnetic drum for more permanent storage, and it became the Manchester Mark 1. | |||||
| 1948 | IBM introduced the '604', the first machine to feature Field Replaceable Units (FRUs), which cut downtime as entire pluggable units can simply be replaced instead of troubleshot. | |||||
| 1948 | The first Curta handheld mechanical calculator was sold. The Curta computed with 11 digits of decimal precision on input operands up to 8 decimal digits. The Curta was about the size of a handheld pepper grinder. | |||||
| 1949 Mar |
John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly construct the BINAC for Northrop. | |||||
| 1949 May 6 |
This is considered the birthday of modern computing. Maurice Wilkes and a team at Cambridge University executed the first stored program on the EDSAC computer, which used paper tape input-output. Based on ideas from John von Neumann about stored program computers, the EDSAC was the first complete, fully functional von Neumann architecture computer. | |||||
| 1949 Oct |
The Manchester Mark 1 final specification is completed; this machine was notably in being the first computer to use the equivalent of base/index registers, a feature not entering common computer architecture until the second generation around 1955. | |||||
| 1949 | CSIR Mk I (later known as CSIRAC), Australia's first computer, ran its first test program. It was a vacuum tube based electronic general purpose computer. Its main memory stored data as a series of acoustic pulses in 5 ft (1.5 m) long tubes filled with mercury. | |||||
| 1949 |
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Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Computing Hardware 2400 BC–1949