Chronology of Events - 1940s

The following is a chronological listing of significant events in the development of the field of Information Technology between 1940 and 1949.

1940
1940 &mdash; Conrad Zuse completes the Z2, the first operational electromechanical computer.

1941
1941 &mdash; The non-programmable Atanasoff-Berry Computer is built. It uses vacuum tube-based computation, binary numbers, and a regenerative capacitor memory. It was not programmable.

1941 &mdash; Microwave transmission is invented.

May 12, 1941 &mdash; The Z3 is built by German Konrad Zuse. It is the first working machine featuring binary arithmetic, including floating point arithmetic and a measure of programmability.

October 6, 1941 &mdash; Chester Carlson receives a patent for electric photography, more commonly known today as xerography.

1942
1942 &mdash; Machines are built by NCR for the Navy Computing Machine Lab to decrypt German and Japanese codes.

1943
1943 &mdash; The German military first uses the Enigma encryption machine.

January 1943 &mdash; The Harvard Mark I is completed. It is a large-scale, electromechanical computer with limited programmability.

1944
January 1944 &mdash; The secret British Colossus computer, designed by Englishman Alan Turing, is built. It had limited programmability, but demonstrates that a device using thousands of vacuum tubes can be reasonably reliable and electronically reprogrammable. It was used for breaking German wartime codes.

1945
1945 &mdash; German Conrad Zuse completes the Z4 computer, It uses binary arithmetic, uses paper tape to input program instructions and ca produce printed output.

1945 &mdash; Alan Turing writes a paper titled Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), which described a sophisticated stored-program digital computer.

May 1945 &mdash; The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), designed by J. Presper Eckert and J. Mauchley, is completed at the University of Pennsylvania. It uses decimal arithmetic and is sometimes called the first general purpose electronic computer. It is used by the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory to compute ballistics tables. The first ENIAC instructions are typed in manually by 100 Navy women. It weighs more than 30 tons and uses more than 17,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors.

July 1945 &mdash; Vannevar Bush publishes As We May Think.

1946
1946 &mdash; Long-distance coaxial cable systems and mobile telephone services are introduced in the United States.

1946 &mdash; F.C. Williams develops the cathode ray tube (CRT) storage device.

1947
1947 &mdash; William Shockley invents the transistor at Bell Labs.

June 26, 1947 &mdash; Pres Eckert and John Mauchly apply for the "ENIAC patent," essentially a patent on the stored-program electronic digital computer. September 1947 &mdash; Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper discovers a moth trapped between the relays of a Navy computer. She calls it a "bug" &mdash; a term traditionally used to refer to a problem with an electrical device. She also coined the term "debugging" to describe efforts to fix a computer problem. [Date often erroneously reported as 1945.]

December 1947 &mdash; The point-contact transistor is invented at Bell Labs.

1948
1948 &mdash; The Monte Carlo computational estimation method is developed by S. Ulam and John von Neumann.

January 1948 &mdash; IBM announces its first large-scale, digital calculating machine, the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC). The SSEC is the first computer able to modify a stored program.

July, October 1948 &mdash; Mathematician Claude E. Shannon publishes "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (full-text), one of the foundational works of the field of information theory. It was later published in book format as "The Mathematical Theory of Communication."

1947 &mdash; Norbert Wiener (MIT) publishes "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine." It was the first book that applied theories of information and communication to both biological systems and machines.

1949
1949 &mdash; The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), a British computer, is the first practical stored-program electronic computer and the first to run a graphical computer game.

1949 &mdash; George Orwell publishes the dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

1949 &mdash; The U.S. Department of Justice files an antitrust suit against AT&T.

Source

 * Networking and Information Technology Research and Development: Advanced Foundations for American Innovation.