a computer chronology

This is an unfinished chronology of computer history, by which I mean anything electronic and interesting, with some spillover into mathematics. It is also an excuse for me to try writing some PHP code.

about -8500

  1. Someone writes the prime numbers 11, 13, 17, and 19 on a bone.

1494

  1. DaVinci designs a calculator.

1620

  1. Edmund Gunter invents a logarithmic rule for calculating logarithms.

1632

  1. William Oughtred publishes his circular slide rule. He had invented the linear slide rule since 1620, inspired by Edmund Gunter.

1833

  1. Charles Babbage begins work on his Analytical Engine, which is never built and unappreciated until the 1890s. He also founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and invented the cowcatcher. He disliked music and hated street musicians. The U.K.'s "Babbage's Act" against "street nuisances" is due to his efforts.

1886

  1. Herman Hollerith invents a mechanical punch-card tabulating machine. It is used to calculate the 1890 Census and establishes computing machines for industrial use.
  2. Otto Büttner creates a calculator that accurately adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides.

1887

  1. The first private-line telegraph is installed between New York and Philadelphia for the L.H. Taylor & Co. brokerage firm.

1889

  1. Fusajiro Yamauchi founds Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto. The first product is hanafunda cards.

1893

  1. Otto Steiger introduces a mechanical multiplier with a built-in multiplication-table.

1895

  1. Herman Hollerith sells a tabulator to Russia for use in its first census.

1898

  1. Valdemar Poulsen invents magnetic storage in the form of a magnetic wire.

1906

  1. Lee DeForest invents the triode, which acts as an on-off switch.

1908

  1. First successful test of a teletype machine.

1925

  1. Dr. Vannevar Bush invents the Bush Differential Analyzer, an analog computer designed to perform integration.
  2. John Vincent Atanasoff graduates from the University of Florida with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.

1926

  1. John Vincent Atanasoff obtains his M.S. in Mathematics from Iowa State College.

1930

  1. John Vincent Atanasoff receives his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the University of Wisconsin.

1933

  1. Nintendo Koppai becomes Yamauchi Nintendo & Company.

1935

  1. A Bush Differential Analyzer is installed at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds' Ballistic Research Lab by the U.S. Army's Ordnance Department. This will be used to calculate trajectory tables for each gun to be used in WWII.

1939

  1. Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff builds the first electronic digital computer: the ABC, or Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Four new principals, which he devised while in a tavern, were that it must be electronic, use base-2 (binary) rather than the customary base-10 (decimal), use condensers for regenerative memory to avoid power loss, and would compute using direct logic rather than the normal enumeration method.

1940

  1. Dr. John Mauchly visits Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff at Iowa State and gets some neat ideas for an electronic digital computer upon seeing the ABC.

1941

  1. Dr. Mauchly went back to the University of Pennsylvania to draft a design with Dr. J. Presper Eckert. This design would become the ENIAC. There would later be a lawsuit over who invented the digital computer.

1943

  1. The U.S. Army's Ordnance Dept. signs a contract with the University of Pennsylvania on June 5 to design and build an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, also called the ENIAC. It was decimal rather than binary.

1944

  1. Dr. John Mauchly and Dr. J. Presper Eckert begin design of the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) while working to build ENIAC.

1946

  1. The ENIAC is dedicated on February 15 and is immediately used as part of the Manhattan Project.

1947

  1. The ENIAC is shipped to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to calculate ballistic tables.
  2. First public presentation of the EDVAC by Dr. Mauchly and Dr. Eckert.
  3. Walter Brattain and John Bardeen invent the first solid-state amplifier, which was also the first transistor.

1948

  1. Suggestions from Dr. John von Neumann are used to convert the ENIAC into a stored-program computer. This helped to greatly reduce the amount of rewiring necessary when using a new program.

1951

  1. Yamauchi Nintendo & Company becomes Nintendo Playing Cards under direction of the third company president, Hiroshi Yamauchi.
  2. The first UNIVAC I is delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau. The UNIVAC I was the first commercially-available computer, the first being purchased by The Prudential Insurance Company.

1952

  1. A high-speed electronic shifter is installed in the ENIAC, increasing computation speed 80%.
  2. The UNIVAC I accurately predicts the outcome of the presidential election on a live television broadcast. Political analysts expected Adlai Stevenson to win, despite the UNIVAC's prediction that evening that Eisenhower would win. This was announced by Walter Cronkite on CBS.
  3. The IBM 701 is introduced, and is the first computer to use magnetic tape.
  4. IBM is sued for violation of the Sherman Act due to its apparent monopoly, and comes under government investigation.

1953

  1. A one-hundred-word magnetic-core memory unit, the first ever, is installed in the ENIAC.

1954

  1. The Appliance Division of General Electric creates the first successful industrial payroll application for the UNIVAC I.
  2. Dr. Eiich Goto devises the Parametron principle which uses polarity oscillation to represent logic state rather than voltage changes.

1955

  1. Power to the ENIAC is permanently removed, October 2 at 2345 hours.

1956

  1. IBM introduces the RAMAC 305, the first hard drive. It has two fifty-foot-wide platters and 5MB of storage.

1958

  1. William Higinbotham, a chain-smoking physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and observed the detonation of the first atomic bomb, designs and builds the first computer game at Brookhaven National Lab: Tennis for Two. The display is a standard five-inch oscilloscope.
  2. The Parametron Computer I is completed at the University of Tokyo.
  3. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments completes the first integrated circuit.

1960

  1. Digital Equipment Corporation introduces the PDP-1, the first minicomputer.

1962

  1. The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT completes Spacewar! on the DEC PDP-1 computer.

1963

  1. Nintendo Playing Cards becomes Nintendo Company Limited and enters electronic entertainment with such products as light-gun games and love-testers.

1964

  1. John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz develop BASIC at Dartmouth.
  2. The American Standards Association accepts ASCII as a standard.

1965

  1. Douglas Engelbart invents the mouse. Perhaps he did it in 1963.

1966

  1. Steven Gray founds the Amateur Computer Society.

1968

  1. Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP 9100A, a RPN desktop calculator with several advanced functions.
  2. Ralph Baer of military contractor Sanders Associates files for the first videogame patent; a ping-pong type game, of course.
  3. Dr. Robert Dennard of IBM receives patent 3,387,286 for a one-transistor DRAM cell, the basis for modern memory.
  4. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore found Intel.
  5. Douglas Engelbart demonstrates a keyboard/mouse/window system at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. He also shows a word processor, hypertext system, and remote shared-screen collaboration.

1969

  1. The Honeywell H-316 Pedestal Model is introduced on the cover of a Neiman-Marcus catalog as the Kitchen Computer. This is the first computer with a built-in cutting board. No, really.
  2. Jerry Sanders and others from Fairchild Semiconductor found Advanced Micro Devices.

1970

  1. The Imlac PDS-1 is released, the first graphical workstation. It did not use a mouse, instead it had a lightpen which would be pressed to the screen with activation via footpedal. Yes, footpedal. It was also the first computer used to play games on the ancestor of the Internet, called the ARPAnet.
  2. The Intel 4004 CPU was introduced as the first microprocessor.
  3. Bell Labs develops UNIX.

1971

  1. The first coin-operated videogame is sold: Computer Space. It is based on Spacewar! and designed by Nolan Bushnell. The game is a flop but the cabinet shows up in the movie Soylent Green.
  2. IBM releases the first floppy disk drive. It is read-only and uses eight-inch disks.
  3. 3M introduces the first 1/4-inch tape drive and cartridge. It has 30MB storage capacity.
  4. Niklaus Wirth develops Pascal as a teaching language.

1972

  1. Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan develop the C programming language.
  2. Intel produces the first microcomputer, the SIM4.
  3. U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson ruled the ENIAC was "derived" from the ideas of Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff, establishing him as the inventor of the electronic digital computer.
  4. Magnavox releases the first commercial home video game system, using license from Sanders Associates: The Odyssey. It costs $100 and comes with overlays for the TV to change from say tennis to hockey, playing cards, poker chips, fake money, and a scorecard.
  5. Nolan Bushnell founds Atari, naming it after a Japanese word uttered when playing Go.
  6. Atari installs the first PONG machine in a bar called Andy Capp's in Sunnyvale, California. That evening the machine stops working because it is completely filled with quarters.
  7. Someone invents the 5-1/4" floppy.

1973

  1. Xerox introduces the Alto, the first computer with a mouse, ethernet networking, and a decent graphical interface. It was never commercially produced.
  2. The UPC " bar code" is developed.
  3. IBM releases the 3340 hard disk, also known as the Winchester. It has 80MB of storage.

1974

  1. The movie Soylent Green contains the first arcade videogame, Computer Space.

1975

  1. George Coulouris writes the em "editor for mortals" to replace ed.
  2. The MITS Altair is introduced. This is the first computer to run MicroSoft software.
  3. Bill Gates and Paul Allen tell MITS they have BASIC for the Intel 8080 (used in the Altair), then spend the next eight weeks writing it, having never seen an Altair. After loading BASIC via paper tape into an Altair, Paul Allen types in the code for Lunar Lander, which becomes the first program to run on what would become Micro-Soft BASIC.
  4. Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Micro-Soft and license BASIC to MITS for the Altair.
  5. Bill Gates publishes an open letter in an Altair newsletter, complaining about piracy.
  6. The $100 home version of PONG is released and is the biggest-selling item at Sears.
  7. Gun Fight from Taito, licensed to Midway for U.S production, is the first videogame to use a microprocessor: the Intel 8080. It is also the first Japanese game licensed for distribution in the U.S.

1976

  1. Bill Joy writes vi using em as inspiration.
  2. Death Race by Exidy becomes the first videogame that is blamed for causing kids to go astray due to violence. It is based on the movie Death Race 2000, released in 1975.
  3. Steve Jobs screws Steve Wozniak out of $2150, his half of the money for doing all the work building Breakout for Atari. Wozniak worked for Hewlett-Packard at the time.
  4. The First Annual World Altair Computer Convention is held in Albuquerque, and is the first personal computer convention. Bill Gates complains about piracy at the conference.

1977

  1. Apple introduces the Apple][.
  2. Nintendo Co. Ltd. releases The Color TV Game 6, a console which contains six PONG clones. It sells one million units.
  3. Industrial design major Shigeru Miyamoto joins Nintendo, designing console designs and some game art.

1978

  1. Toshihiro Nishikado of Taito designs and writes Space Invaders. It causes a severe nationwide coin shortage in Japan. Seriously.
  2. Atari Football is the first videogame to use a trackball.

1979

  1. Atari releases Asteroids, the first videogame to record high scores.
  2. Namco releases Galaxian, the first color videogame. Previous games used color overlays.

1980

  1. Stratovox from Taito is the first videogame with speech.
  2. Moru Iwatani designs Puckman, named after the Japanese phrase paku-paku which means to open and close your mouth quickly. This causes another yen shortage in Japan. Newly-appointed president of Bally/Midway has to have his arm twisted by fellow executives to agree to the distribution deal in the U.S. The name is changed to Pac-Man in North America to avoid kids replacing the P with an F. This is also the first videogame to spawn a multi-marketing effort, with everything from cereal to a cartoon.

1981

  1. IBM introduces the 5150 PC, from which comes the name "PC".
  2. Space Panic is the first ever platform game.
  3. Nintendo releases Donkey Kong, which also marketed cereal.

1982

  1. The government investigation and anti-trust suit filed against IBM in 1952 is finally dropped.

1983

  1. Namco's Galaga, sequel to Galaxian, is the first videogame with a Bonus Level.
  2. Dragon's Lair is the first game released that uses laserdisc technology, and the first one to cost two quarters.

1986

  1. IBM introduces the RT PC, their first RISC-based offering. It ran AIX v2.1 and v2.2.1, and was the predecessor of the RS/6000 and its latest incarnation, the eServer pSeries.

1990

  1. President George Bush presents Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff with the National Medal of Technology.
  2. IBM releases the first RISC System/6000, later named RS/6000, running AIX v3.

1992

  1. IBM announces the RS/6000 model 7011-220, the first implementation of their POWER architecture on a single chip.