Computer Timeline

COMPUTER TIME LINE

1939- Hewlett-Packard is Founded. David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. Walt Disney Pictures orderd eight of the 2008 model to use as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie "Fantasia".

1940- The Complex Number Calculator (CNC) is completed. In 1993, Bell Telephone Laboratories completed this calculator, designed by researcher George Stibitz. In 1940, Stibitz demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College. Stibitz stunned the group by performing calculations remotely on the CNC (located in New York City) using a Teletype connected via special telephone lines. This is considered to be the first demonstration of remote access computing.

1941- The first Bombe is completed. Based partly on the design of the Polish "Bomba," a mechanical means of decrypting Nazi military communicatons during WWII, the British Bombe design was greatly influenced by the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and others. Many bombes were built. Together they dramatically improved the intelligence gathering and processing capabilities of Allied forces.

1942- The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is completed. Built at Iowa State College (now University), the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was designed and built by Professor John Vicent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry between 1939 and 1942. While the ABC was never fully-functional, it won a patent dispute relating to the invention of the computer when Atanasoff proved that ENIAC co-designer John Mauchly had come to see the ABC shortly after it was completed.

1943-Project Whirlwind begins. During World War II, the U.S. Navy approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) about building a flight simulator to train bomber crews. The team first built a large analog computer, but found it inaccurate and inflexible. After designers saw a demonstration of the ENIAC computer, they decided on building a digital computer. By the time the Whirlwind was completed in 1951, the Navy had lost interest in the project, though the U.S. Air Force would eventually support the project which would influence the design of the SAGE program.

1944-Harvard Mark-1 is completed. Conceived by Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized, relay based calculator. The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machine's thousands of component parts. The Mark-1 was used to produce mathematical tables but was soon superseded by stored program computers.

1945-Korad Zuse began work on Plankalkul (Plan Calculus), the first algorithmic programming language, with an aim of creating the theoretical preconditions for the formulation of the problems of a gerneral nature. Seven years earlier, Zuse had develped and built the world's firlst binary digital computer, the Z1. He completed the first fully functional program-controlled electromechanical digital computer, the Z3, in 1941. Only the Z4 the most sophisticated of his crations-survived World WarII.



1946-An inspiring summer school on computing at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electical Engineering stimulated construction of stored program computers at universities and reaserch institutions. This free, public ste of lectures inspired the EDSAC, BINAC, and later,IAS machine collones like AVIDAC. Here Warren Kelleher completes the wiring of the arithmetic unit components of the AVIDAC at Argonne National Laboratory. Robert Dennis installs the inter-unit wiring at James Woddy Jr. adjusts the deflection control circuits of the memory unit.

1947- The Williams tube won the race for a parctical random-access memory. Sir Frederick Williams of the Manchester Universtity modified a cathode-ray tube to paint dots and dashes fo phosphorescent electrical charge on the screen, representing binary ones and zeros, Vacuum tube machines such as the IBM 701, used the Williams tube as primary memory.

1948-Norbert Wiener published "Cybernetics," a major influence on later research into artificial intelligence. He drew on his World War II experiments with anit-aircraft systems thay anticipated the course of enemy planes by the interpreting radar images. Wiener coined the term"cybernetics" from the Greek word for "steersman".
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