COMPUTER HISTORY

By: Ronald Dayon

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 ordered eight of the 200B model to use
as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie Fantasia.

1940
The Complex Number Calculator (CNC) is completed. In 1939, 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
Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 computer. The Z3 was an early computer built by
German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments
elsewhere. Using 2,300 relays, the Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and
had a 22-bit word length. The original Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid of
Berlin in late 1943. However, Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in
the 1960s which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

1942
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed. After successfully
demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in 1939, Atanasoff received funds
to build the full-scale machine. Built at Iowa State College (now University),
the ABC was designed and built by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and
graduate student Cliff Berry between 1939 and 1942. The ABC was at the
center of a patent dispute relating to the invention of the computer, which was
resolved in 1973 when it was shown that ENIAC co-designer John Mauchly had
come to examine the ABC shortly after it became functional.

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 machines
thousands of component parts. The Mark-1 was used to produce
mathematical tables but was soon superseded by stored
program computers.

1945
John von Neumann wrote "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" in which he
outlined the architecture of a stored-program computer. Electronic storage of
programming information and data eliminated the need for the more clumsy
methods of programming, such as punched paper tape a concept that has
characterized mainstream computer development since 1945. Hungarian-born von
Neumann demonstrated prodigious expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics,
meteorology, game theory, statistics, and the use of mechanical devices for
computation. After the war, he concentrated on the development of Princetons
Institute for Advanced Studies computer and its copies around the world.

1946
In February, the public got its first glimpse of the ENIAC, a
machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved
by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.Start of
project:1943Completed:1946Programmed:plug board and
switchesSpeed:5,000 operations per secondInput/output:cards,
lights, switches, plugsFloor space:1,000 square feetProject
leaders:John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.

1948
IBMs Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator
computed scientific data in public display near
the companys Manhattan headquarters. Before
its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced
the moon-position tables used for plotting the

1949
Maurice Wilkes assembled the EDSAC, the first practical stored-program
computer, at Cambridge University. His ideas grew out of the Moore
School lectures he had attended three years earlier.
For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes established a library of short
programs called subroutines stored on punched paper
tapes.Technology:vacuum tubesMemory:1K words, 17 bits, mercury
delay lineSpeed:714 operations per second

1950
Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the
first commercially produced computer; the companys first customer
was the U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the
earliest magnetic storage devices. Drums registered information as
magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder. Read/write heads
both recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as
many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as fivethousandths of a second.

1951
MITs Whirlwind debuted on Edward R. Murrows
"See It Now" television series. Project director Jay
Forrester described the computer as a "reliable
operating system," running 35 hours a week at 90percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

1952
John von Neumanns IAS computer became operational at the
Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. Contract obliged
the builders to share their designs with other research
institutes. This resulted in a number of clones: the MANIAC at
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the ILLIAC at the University of
Illinois, the Johnniac at Rand Corp., the SILLIAC in Australia, and
others.

1953
IBM shipped its first electronic computer, the
701. During three years of production, IBM sold
19 machines to research laboratories, aircraft
companies, and the federal government.

1954
The IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator established
itself as the first mass-produced computer, with the
company selling 450 in one year. Spinning at 12,500
rpm, the 650s magnetic data-storage drum allowed
much faster access to stored material than drum
memory machines.

1956
MIT researchers built the TX-0, the first general-purpose, programmable
computer built with transistors. For easy replacement, designers placed
each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube.
Constructed at MITs Lincoln Laboratory, the TX-0 moved to the MIT
Research Laboratory of Electronics, where it hosted some early
imaginative tests of programming, including a Western movie shown on
TV, 3-D tic-tac-toe, and a maze in which mouse found martinis and
became increasingly inebriated.

1958
SAGE Semi-Automatic Ground Environment linked hundreds of radar stations in
the United States and Canada in the first large-scale computer communications
network. An operator directed actions by touching a light gun to the screen.

1959
IBMs 7000 series mainframes were the companys first transistorized
computers. At the top of the line of computers all of which emerged
significantly faster and more dependable than vacuum tube machines
sat the 7030, also known as the "Stretch." Nine of the computers,
which featured a 64-bit word and other innovations, were sold to
national laboratories and other scientific users. L. R. Johnson first used
the term "architecture" in describing the Stretch.

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THATS SOME PART OF THE HISTORY