Chronology of Events - 1900-1930s

The following is a chronological listing of significant events in the development of the field of Information Technology between 1900 and 1959:

1924

 * IBM is formed by the merger of several other companies, including the company owned by Herman Hollerith.

1941

 * The Z3 (1941) is built by Konrad Zuse. It is the first working machine featuring binary arithmetic, including floating point arithmetic and a measure of programmability. The Z3 was the world's first operational computer.
 * The non-programmable Atanasoff-Berry Computer is built. It uses vacuum tube-based computation, binary numbers, and a regenerative capacitor memory.

1942

 * Machines are built by NCR for the Navy Computing Machine Lab to decrypt German and Japanese codes.

1944

 * The Harvard Mark I is completed. It is a large-scale, electromechanical computer with limited programmability.
 * The secret British Colossus computer is built. It had limited programmability, but demonstrated that a device using thousands of vacuum tubes could be reasonably reliable and electronically reprogrammable. It was used for breaking German wartime codes.

1945

 * 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.
 * Vannevar Bush publishes As We May Think.

1947

 * 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.]

1948

 * The Monte Carlo computational estimation method is developed by S. Ulam and John von Neumann.
 * The transistor is invented by J. Bordeen, W. Brattain and W. Shockley at Bell Labs.

1949

 * 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.

1950

 * 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.

1951

 * EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Calculator), designed by J. Presper Eckert, J. Mauchley and John von Neumann, is built for Army ballistics calculations.
 * The Whirlwind computer is built at MIT for flight simulation. It contains a Vectorscope graphics display and random-access, magnetic core drum memory.
 * UNIVAC I, designed by J. Presper Eckert and J. Mauchley, and built by Remington Rand, is delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau.
 * The A-O compiler, designed by Grace M. Hopper, translates machine language into higher-order code.

1952

 * The IBM 701 (Defense Calculator) is built.
 * The Maniac I is built by LANL.
 * UNIVAC I predicts the U.S. elections.

1954

 * The IBM 650 is built for business use.

1956

 * TX-0, the first transistor-based computer, is built at MIT.
 * The LARC is built by Sperry Rand for atomic research.
 * Magnetic hard disk technology is developed by IBM.

1957

 * SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) is developed. 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.
 * U.S.S.R. launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite.

1958

 * 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 approved as a line item in Air Force appropriations bill.
 * FORTRAN (FORmula TRANSlation), the first high-level computer language, is developed by John Backus at IBM.
 * The integrated circuit is developed by J. Kilby at Texas Instruments and G. Moore at Fairchild Semiconductor.
 * The first computer-controlled missile is launched.

Source

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