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.

1910

 * The Man Elkins Act places telecommunications under Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) jurisdiction.

1913

 * AT&T agrees to become a regulated monopoly.

1914

 * Edward Kleinschmidt invents the teletype.

1919

 * The earliest version of the Enigma cipher machine is built in Europe.

1920

 * Czech novelist Karel Capek publishes the play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots") in Prague. It is the first publication in which the term "robot" appears. It explores the issue of whether worker-machines will replace humans.

1923

 * The Enigma, the first mechanical cipher rotor machine, is introduced.

1924

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

1925

 * Bell Telephone Laboratories is formed.

1928

 * IBM introduces the eighty-column punched card, which becomes the standard for about the next fifty years.

1934
June 19, 1934 &mdash; The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is established. The telecommunications industry now is regulated by the FCC.

July 1, 1934/July 11, 1934 &mdash; The Communications Act of 1934 takes effect.

1936
April 11, 1936 &mdash; Konrad Zuse applies for a patent on his electromagnetic, program-controlled calculator, called the Z1. It was the first freely programmable, binary-based calculating machine built, although it did not function reliably. The Z1 was destroyed in World War II.

1941
May 12, 1941 &mdash; The Z3 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.

1943
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 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
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.

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

1947
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
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.
 * 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.
 * The Monte Carlo computational estimation method is developed by S. Ulam and John von Neumann.

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.
 * George Orwell publishes the dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
 * The U.S. Department of Justice files an antitrust suit against AT&T.

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


 * The IBM 650 is built for business use.

1956
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.


 * 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
April 1957 FORTRAN (FORmula TRANSlation), the first high-level computer language, is developed by John Backus at IBM.

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


 * Field tests begin for the first pagers.

1958
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 approved as a line item in Air Force appropriations bill.

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

October 18, 1958 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 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.


 * The first computer-controlled missile is launched.

1959

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

Source

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