Chronology of Events - 1950s

The following is a chronological listing of significant events in the development of the field of Information Technology between 1950 and 1959.

1950
1950 &mdash; The first electronic stored program machines, the Standards East/West Automatic Computers (SEAC and SWAC), are built by Department of Defense National Bureau of Standards.

1950 &mdash; Hideo Yamachito creates the first electronic computer in Japan.

1950 &mdash; The National Science Foundation established.

May 10, 1950 &mdash; The Pilot Model ACE computer, based on a design by Alan Turning, becomes operational. The computer used vacuum tubes for computation and mercury delay lines for memory.

October 1950 &mdash; Alan Turing publishes his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which helps create the Turing Test.

1951
1951 &mdash; EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Calculator), designed by J. Presper Eckert, J. Mauchley and John von Neumann, is built for Army ballistics calculations.

April 20, 1951 &mdash; The Whirlwind computer is completed at MIT for use as a flight simulator. It contains a Vectorscope graphics display and random-access, magnetic core drum memory.

1951 &mdash; UNIVAC I, designed by J. Presper Eckert and J. Mauchley, and built by Remington Rand, is delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau.

1951 &mdash; The A-O compiler, designed by Grace M. Hopper, translates machine language into higher-order code.

1951 &mdash; The videotape recorder is invented.

1952
1952 &mdash; The IBM 701 (Defense Calculator) is built. The 701 is a vacuum tube computer that used magnetic tape for storage. It was meant for scientific and defense calculations.

1952 &mdash; The Maniac I is built by LANL.

1952 &mdash; A.S. Douglas wrote created the first graphical computer game (a version of Tic-Tac-Toe).

1952 &mdash; President Harry S. Truman signs a letter that authorized the creation of the National Security Agency (NSA).

November 4, 1952 &mdash; UNIVAC I predicts the U.S. elections.

1954
1954 &mdash; The IBM 650 is built for business use.

1954 &mdash; TRADIC, the first transistorized computer, is built.

May 10, 1954 &mdash; Texas Instruments manufactures the first silicon transistor.

August 1954 &mdash; First hand-drawn input to a computer.

1955
1954 &mdash; President Eisenhower announces the U.S.'s intention to launch a satellite.

1954 &mdash; Bell Labs introduces its first transistor computer.

1956
1956 &mdash; TX-0, the first transistor-based computer, is built at MIT.

1956 &mdash; The LARC is built by Sperry Rand for atomic research.

1956 &mdash; Magnetic hard disk technology is developed by IBM.

1956 &mdash; Optical fiber is invented by Basil Hirschowitz, C. Wilbur Peters and Lawrence E. Curtiss.

1956 &mdash; William Bardeen, Walter Brattan and William Shockley of AT&T Bell Labs received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the transistor effect.

November 8, 1956 &mdash; The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overrules the FCC and holds that the Hush-a-phone can to be sold and used in conjunction with AT&T telephones. Many view this as the first step in the dissolution of AT&T's telephone monopoly.

1957
1957 &mdash; Field tests begin for the first pagers.

1957 &mdash; The first data transmissions are made over regular telephone circuits.

April 1957 &mdash; FORTRAN (FORmula TRANSlation), the first high-level computer language, developed by John Backus, is released commercially by IBM.

October 4, 1957 &mdash; The U.S.S.R. launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial earth satellite.

1958
1958 &mdash; The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is formed.

1958 &mdash; The first computer-controlled missile is launched.

1958 &mdash; John Wilder Tukey (Bell Labs) is the first to use the word "software" in a paper in a computer context.

February 7, 1958 &mdash; In response to Sputnik, President Eisenhower requests funds to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with the mission of becoming the leading force in science and new technologies. It is established pursuant to DoD Directive 5105.15.

September 12, 1958 &mdash; The integrated circuit is developed by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Gordon Moore at Fairchild Semiconductor.

October 18, 1958 &mdash; William Higinbotham publicly shows the first video game, "Tennis for Two," which he invented. It runs on an analog computer connected to an oscilloscope.

December 1, 1958 &mdash; SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) is operational. It is the first large-scale IT communications network. Whirlwind platforms are linked to remote radar in the North American Air Defense System. Innovations include: modems, digital phone-line transmission, system duplexing, software for real-time operations, and Cathode ray tube (CRT) screens.

1959
1959 &mdash; MIT student Sam Asano develops a technology to transmit scanned printed material over telephone lines, which is licensed to a Japanese telecom company and becomes the fax machine.

1959 &mdash; Gordon Gould of Columbia University files a patent on the LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).

1959 &mdash; Paul Baran theorizes on the "survivability of communication systems under nuclear attack," digital technology and symbiosis between humans and machine.

1959 &mdash; Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) patents the integrated circuit.

1959 &mdash; U.S. Navy builds the first satellite navigation system (called TRANSIT), a precursor to the GPS system.

1959 &mdash; J. McCarthy writes a memo to the director of the MIT Computation Center that began the timesharing movement at MIT.

Source

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