Computer & Calculator Design / Architecture Timeline

The Antikythera Mechanism discovered off the island of Antikythera, Greece in 1900 or 1901, includes the only specimen preserved from antiquity of a scientifically graduated instrument. It may also be considered the earliest extant mechanical calculator. The device is displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, accompanied by a reconstruction made and donated to the museum by physicist and historian of science Derek de Solla Price.

"The Antikythera mechanism must therefore be an arithmetical counterpart of the much more familiar geometrical models of the solar system which were known to Plato and Archimedes and evolved into the orrery and the planetarium. The mechanism is like a great astronomical clock without an escapement, or like a modern analogue computer which uses mechanical parts to save tedious calculation . . . . It is certainly very similar to the great astronomical cathedral clocks that were built. . . ." in Europe beginning in the fourteenth century.

Applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, in 2008 experts deciphered inscriptions and reconstructed functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The results of this research, illustrated in a video (accessed 01-2012) revealed details of dials on the instrument’s back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar. Scientists found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

In December 2008, Michael Wright described a more complete reconstruction of the device which he built, in a video (accessed 01-2012).

The new findings also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 BCE. It is known that Archimedes invented a planetarium which calculated motions of the moon and the known planets. It is also believed that Archimedes wrote a manuscript, which did not survive, on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.

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♦ On December 12, 2010 a video showing the operation of a remarkable working reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism using plastic Lego parts could be viewed on the blog of Make Magazine.

Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī built a his castle clock, a most sophisticated water-powered astronomical clock, which has been called the earliest programmable analog computer. 

"It was a complex device that was about 11 feet high, and had multiple functions alongside timekeeping. It included a display of the zodiac and the solar and lunar orbits, and a pointer in the shape of the crescent moon which travelled across the top of a gateway, moved by a hidden cart and causing automatic doors to open, each revealing a mannequin, every hour. It was possible to re-program the length of day and night everyday in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year, and it also featured five robotic musicians who automatically play[ed] music when moved by levers operated by a hidden camshaft attached to a water wheel. Other components of the castle clock included a main reservoir with a float, a float chamber and flow regulator, plate and valve trough, two pulleys, crescent disc displaying the zodiac, and two falcon automata dropping balls into vases" (Wikipedia article on Al-Jazari, accessed 04-02-2009).

The Japanese adopted the Chinese 1/5 abacus via Korea. In Japanese the abacus is called soroban.

The 1/4 abacus appeared in Japan about 1630.

Scotish mathematician John Napier published Rabdologiae in Edinburgh describing two calculating devices: “Napier’s bones,” and the Multiplicationis promptuarium, or the lightning calculator.

"He [Napier] wrote that the multiplication and division of great numbers is troublesome, involving tedious expenditure of time, and subject to "slippery errors." His tables reduced these difficulties to simple addition and subtraction, and won immediate recognition. A set of Napier’s bones are usually made of boxwood or ivory and often contained in a box or case that would fit in a pocket. A set usually contains 10 rods, plus extras representing squares and cubes.  

"Use. Addition is accomplished by reading the appropriate bones along the diagonal. To obtain a product of 224 x 44, the rods 2, 2, and 4 are put alongside each other, and the result is read off by combining the numbers in the fourth row -- 0/8, 0/8, 1/6 -- for the correct answer 896. This is repeated and the two products added together to give 9856. The bones are sometimes associated with an abacus to provide a store in the multiplication process" (Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

English priest and mathematician William Oughtred invented the circular form of slide rule. He published Circles of Proportion and the Horizontal Instrument in London in 1632 describing slide rules and sundials.

Mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal invented an adding machine, the Pascaline.

"Use. The dials show the French monetary unit, the livre, which was divided into 12 deniers, each subdivided into 20 sols. The essential part of the machine was its decimal carry; each toothed wheel moved forward one unit (one-tenth of a revolution on each wheel except those of deniers and sols) when the previous wheel had completed one revolution. Subtraction was based on complementary numbers that could be revealed by moving the strip at the top of the calculator" (Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

In 1645 Pascal published an eighteen-page pamphlet describing his calculating machine. It was called Lettre dédicatoire à Monseigneur le Chancelier sur le sujet de la machine nouvellement inventée par le Sieur B. P. pour faire toutes sortes d’opérations d’arithmétique, par un mouvement reglé, sans plume ny jettons avec un advis necessaire à ceux qui auront curiosité de voir ladite machine. . . . The pamphlet does not identify a place of printing or a printer’s name, so we may assume that Pascal paid for its printing. When we published Origins of Cyberspace OCLC cited only two copies of this pamphlet in one French library and no copies in North America.

Pascal's pamphlet was reprinted along with additional material related to the Pascaline in his Oeuvres (1779), vol. 4, 7-30. The additional material consisted of Pascal's 1650 letter describing the machine that he presented to Queen Christina of Sweden; the privilege for its construction and sale issued in 1649, and Denis Diderot's description of the machine published in the Encyclopédie.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 13.

German Jesuit scientist Gaspard Schott's posthumous Organum Mathematicum was published in Nuremberg, in which Schott described his “mathematical organ,” and his calculating machine based on Napier’s rods.

In Dissertations academiques. . . avec un discours sur. . . un cylindre arithmetique published in Paris Pierre Petit described an arithmetic cylinder, which he said was more affordable and easier to use than Pascal’s Pascaline.

English diplomat, mathematician and inventor Samuel Morland published in London The Description and Use of Two Arithmetic Instruments, the first monograph on a calculating machine published in English. The book described modifications to the Pascaline.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made a drawing of his calculating machine mechanism. Using a stepped drum, the Leibniz Stepped Reckoner, or step reckoner, mechanized multiplication as well as addition by performing repetitive additions. Leibniz had only a wooden model and two brass examples of the machine constructed. These would have been seen by relatively few people. However, because of descriptions published from 1710 onward, the machine was well-enough known to have great influence. The stepped-drum gear was the only workable solution to certain calculating machine problems until about 1875.

Leibniz first published a brief illustrated description of his machine in "Brevis descriptio machinae arithmeticae, cum figura. . . ," Miscellanea Berolensia ad incrementum scientiarum (1710) 317-19, figure 73. The lower portion of the frontispiece of the journal volume also shows a a tiny model of Leibniz's calculator.

"Leibniz got the idea for a calculating machine in 1672 in Paris, from a pedometer. Later he learned about Pascal's machine when he read Pascal's Pensées. He concentrated on expanding Pascal's mechanism so it could multiply and divide. He presented a wooden model to the Royal Society of London on February 1, 1673, and received much encouragement. In a letter of March 26, 1673 to Johann Friedrich, where he mentioned the presentation in London, Leibniz described the purpose of the "arithmetic machine" as making calculations "leicht, geschwind, gewiß" [sic], i.e. easy, fast, and reliable. Leibniz also added that theoretically the numbers calculated might be as large as desired, if the size of the machine was adjusted; quote: "eine zahl von einer ganzen Reihe Ziphern, sie sey so lang sie wolle (nach proportion der größe der Machine)" [sic]. In English: "a number consisting of a series of figures, as long as it may be (in proportion to the size of the machine)". His first preliminary brass machine was built 1674 - 1685. His so-called 'older machine' was built 1686 - 1694. The 'younger machine', the surviving machine, was built from 1690 to 1720.

"In 1775 the 'younger machine' was sent to Göttingen University for repair, and was forgotten. In 1876 a crew of workmen found it in an attic room of a Göttingen University building. It was returned to Hannover in 1880. In 1894-1896 Artur Burkhardt, founder of a major German calculator company restored it, and it has been kept in the Niedersaächsischen Landesbibliothek ever since" (Wikipedia article on Stepped Reckoner, accessed 05-25-2009).

Tomash & Williams, The Erwin Tomash Library on the History of Computing (2009) L69 (p. 772-73).

A dated manuscript by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, preserved in the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bibliothek Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hannover, “includes a brief discussion of the possibility of designing a mechanical binary calculator which would use moving balls to represent binary digits.”

Though Leibniz thought of the application of binary arithmetic to computing in 1679, the machine he outlined was never built, and he published nothing on the subject until his Explication de l'arithmétique binaire, qui se sert des seuls caracteres 0 & 1; avec des remarques sur son utilité, & sur ce qu'elle donne le sens des anciens figues Chinoises de Fohy' published in Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences année MDCCIII. Avec les mémoires de mathématiques, which appeared in print in 1705.

"The publication of the Explication was prompted by Leibniz's correspondence with Joachim Bouvet, a member of the Jesuit Mission in China. Leibniz had developed an interest in China, and in April 1697 he edited a collection of letters and essays by members of the Mission, entitled Novissima Sinica. A copy of this came into the hands of Bouvet, who wrote to Leibniz on 18 October 1697 expressing his commendation of the work. Thus began an extended correspondence between the two men which proved to be very important for the dissemination of Leibniz's ideas about binary arithmetic. The crucial exchange began on 15 February 1701, when Leibniz wrote to Bouvet describing for his correspondent the principles of his binary arithmetic, including the analogy of the formation of all the numbers from 0 and 1 with the creation of the world by God out of nothing. Bouvet immediately recognised the relationship between the hexagrams of the I ching and the binary numbers and he communicated his discovery in a letter written in Peking on 4 November 1701. This reached Leibniz, after a detour through England, on 1 April 1703. With this letter, Bouvet enclosed a woodcut of the arrangement of the hexagrams attributed to Fu-Hsi, the mythical founder of Chinese culture, which holds the key to the identification. Within a week of receiving Bouvet's letter, Leibniz had sent to Abbé Bignon for publication in the Mémoires of the Paris Academy his Explication de l'Arithmétique binaire,... & sue ce qu'elle donne le sens des anciens figures Chinoises de Fohy. Ten days later he sent a brief account to Hans Sloane, the Secretary of the Royal Society. Leibniz viewed binary arithmetic less as a computational tool than as a means of discovering mathematical, philosophical and even theological truths. He remarked to Tschirnhaus in 1682 that he anticipated from the use of binary numbers discoveries in number theory that other progressions could not reveal. It was at the same time a candidate for the characteristica generalis, his long sought-for alphabet of human thought. With base 2 numeration Leibniz witnessed a confluence of several intellectual strands in his world view, including theological and mystical ideas of order, harmony and creation. Fontanelle, secretary of the Paris Academy, wrote the unsigned review of Liebniz's paper for the Mémoires section of the volume. He noted that arithmetic could have different bases besides ten; bases such as 12, and two as in the case of Leibniz's binary system. He also noted that although the binary system was not practical for common use Leibniz thought that it would be of advantage in advanced mathematics" (W.P. Watson, antiquarian book description, http://www.ilabdatabase.com/db/detail.php?booknr=360538539, accessed 01-21-2010).

This manuscript was first published in 1966 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Leibniz's death as Herrn von Leibniz' Rechnung mit Null und Eins. That book included facsimiles of Leibniz's "Explication de l'arithmétique binaire" (1705), his two letters to Johann Christian Schulenberg on binary arithmetic (March 29 and May 17, 1698), published in the Opera Omnia of 1768, and historical articles and German translations.

In 1710 German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhlem Leibniz published "Brevis descriptio Machinae Arithmeticae, cum Figura" in Miscellanea Berolinensis (1710) 317-19, fig. 73. This was the first description of Leibniz's stepped-drum calculator, or stepped reckoner. Because Leibniz had only two working examples of the machine made, and one was lost, his invention of the stepped reckoner was primarily known through this and other publications.

French mathematician and engineer Gaspard Clair François Marie Riche de Prony, Engineer-in-Chief of the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, undertook, beginning in 1793, the production of logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the French Cadastre. He was asked to produce the tables by the French National Assembly, which, after the French Revolution, wanted to bring uniformity to the multiple measurements and standards used throughout the nation. The tables and their production were vast, with values calculated to between fourteen and twenty-nine decimal places.

Inspired by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, de Prony produced the tables through the systematic division of labor, bragging that he could manufacture logarithms as easily as one could manufacture pins. At the top of the organizational hierarchy were scientists and mathematicians who devised the formulas. Next were workers who created the instructions for doing the calculations. At the bottom were about ninety human computers who were not trained in mathematics, but who followed instructions very carefully. De Prony found that hairdressers unemployed after the French Revolution, who were meticulous by nature, made excellent human computers. In spite of the division of labor it took eight years for the tables to be completed, and because of the inflation during the French Revolution the tables were never published in full. Portions were published for the first time in 1891.    

Though the tables remained unpublished the manuscripts could be examined and consulted. De Prony's method of production of the tables inspired Charles Babbage in the design of his Difference Engine No. 1 in 1822.

In 1803 Joseph-Marie Jacquard of Lyon received a patent for the automatic loom, which he invented in 1801. Jacquard's loom used punched cards to store patterns, and reduced strenuous manual labor.

In 1806 Jacquard's loom was declared public property, and Jacquard received a pension. However, he was forced to flee from Lyon because of the anger of the weavers, who feared they would lose their jobs to the new technology. Jacquard persevered, and by the time of his death there were thirty thousand Jacquard looms installed in Lyon alone.

The Jacquard loom did no computation, and was not a digital device. However, it is considered an important conceptual step in the history of computing because the Jacquard method of storing information in punched cards, and weaving a pattern by following the series of instructions recorded in a train of punched cards, was used by Charles Babbage in his plans for data and program input, and data output and storage in his general purpose programmable computer, the Analytical Engine. Trains of Jacquard cards were programs in the modern sense of computer programs, though the word "program" did not have that meaning until after the development of electronic computers after World War II.

In 1820 Charles Xavier Thomas of Alsace, an entrepreneur in the insurance industry, invented the arithmometer, the first commercially produced adding machine, presumably to speed up and make more accurate, the enormous amount of daily computation insurance companies required. Remarkably, according to the Wikipedia, Thomas received almost immediate acknowledgement for this invention, as he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor only one year later, in 1821.  At this time he changed his name to Charles Xavier Thomas, de Colmar, later abbreviated to Thomas de Colmar.

"Initially Thomas spent all of his time and energy on his insurance business, therefore there is a hiatus of more than thirty years in between the first model of the Arithmometer introduced in 1820 and its true commercialization in 1852. By the time of his death in 1870, his manufacturing facility had built around 1,000 Arithmometers, making it the first mass produced mechanical calculator in the world, and at the time, the only mechanical calculator reliable and dependable enough to be used in places like government agencies, banks, insurance companies and observatories just to name a few. The manufacturing of the Arithmometer went on for another 40 years until around 1914" (Wikipedia article on Charles Xavier Thomas, accessed 10-10-2011).

The success of the Arithmometer, which to a certain extent paralleled Thomas's success in the insurance industry, was, of course, in complete contrast to the problems that Charles Babbage faced with producing and gaining any acceptance for his vastly more sophisticated, complex, ambitious and expensive calculating engines during roughly the same time frame. Thomas, of course, produced an affordable product that succeeded in speeding up basic arithmetical operations essential to the insurance industry while Babbage's scientific and engineering goals initially of making mathematical tables more accurate, and later, of automating mathematical operations in general, did not attempt to meet a recognized industrial demand. 

"The [Arithmometer] mechanism has three parts, concerned with setting, counting, and recording respectively. Any number up to 999,999 may be set by moving the pointers to the numbers 0 to 9 engraved next to the six slots on the fixed cover plate. The movement of any of these pointers slides a small pinion with ten teeth along a square axle, underneath and to the left of which is a Leibniz stepped wheel.  

"The Leibniz wheel, a cylinder having nine teeth of increasing length, is driven from the main shaft by means of a bevel wheel, and the small pinion is thus rotated by as many teeth as the cylinder bears in the plane corresponding to the digit set. This amount of rotation is transferred through one of a pair of bevel wheels, carried on a sleeve on the same axis, to the ‘results’ figure wheel on the back row on the hinged plate. This plate also carried the figure wheel recording the number of turns of the driving crank for each position of the hinged plate. The pair of bevel wheels is placed in proper gear by setting a lever at the top left-hand cover to either "Addition and Multiplication" or "Subtraction and Division." The ‘results’ figure wheel is thereby rotated anti-clockwise or clockwise respectively.  

"Use. Multiplying 2432 by 598 may be performed as follows: Lift the hinged plate, turn and release the two milled knobs to bring all the figure wheels to show zero; lower the hinged plate in its position to the extreme left; set the number 2432 on the four slots on the fixed plate; set the lever on the left to "multiplication" and turn the handle eight times; lift the hinged plate, slide it one step to the right, and lower it into position; turn the handle nine times; step the plate one point to the right again and the turn the handle five times. The product 1,454,336 will then appear on the top row, and the multiplier 598 on the next row of figures" (From Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

Mathematician Charles Babbage started on a model his first Difference Engine, a special-purpose machine that linked adding and subtracting mechanisms to one another to calculate the values of more complex mathematical functions.

Babbage's goal was to produce more accurate mathematical tables, the most widely-used calculating aids in his day. In 1822 Babbage announced his plan to build the Difference Engine No. 1 in an open letter to Sir Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society, and received government funding. 

Mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage published "On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery," Philosophical Transactions 111 (1826) 250-65, 4 plates. This was the first publication of Babbage's system of mechanical notation that enabled him to describe the logic and operation of his machines on paper as they would be fabricated in metal. Babbage later stated that "Without the aid of this language I could not have invented the Analytical Engine; nor do I believe that any machinery of equal complexity can ever be contrived without the assistance of that or of some other equivalent language. The Difference Engine No. 2 . . . is entirely described by its aid" (Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher [1864], 104).  

Babbage considered his mechanical notation system to be one of his finest inventions, and thought it should be widely implemented. It was a source of frustration to him that no other machine designer adopted it (probably because no other engineer during Babbage's time attempted to build machines as logically and mechanically complex as Babbage's). More than one hundred years later, in the 1930s, when developments in logic were applied to switching systems in the earliest efforts to develop electromechanical calculators, Claude Shannon demonstrated that Boolean algebra could be applied to the same types of problems for which Babbage had designed his mechanical notation system.  

"While making designs for the Difference Engine, Babbage found great difficulty in ascertaining from ordinary drawings-plans and elevations-the state of rest or motion of individual parts as computation proceeded: that is to say in following in detail succeeding stages of a machine's action. This led him to develop a mechanical notation which provided a systematic method for labeling parts of a machine, classifying each part as fixed or moveable; a formal method for indicating the relative motions of the several parts which was easy to follow; and means for relating notations and drawings so that they might illustrate and explain each other. As the calculating engines developed the notation became a powerful but complex formal tool. Although its scope was much wider than logical systems, the mechanical notation was the most powerful formal method for describing switching systems until Boolean algebra was applied to the problem in the middle of the twentieth century. In its mature form the mechanical notation was to comprise three main components: a systematic method for preparing and labeling complex mechanical drawings; timing diagrams; and logic diagrams, which show the general flow of control" (Hyman, Charles Babbage [1982], 58).

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) no. 37.

in 1832 Charles Babbage published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, the first work on operations research, partially based on data he accumulated in order to build his Difference Engine No. 1. Primary themes of the book were the division of labor and the division of mental labor, to which Babbage devoted chapters 19 and 20. His chapter on the division of mental labor was an analysis of the methods used by de Prony in the production of his celebrated mathematical tables. Babbage had seen de Prony’s manuscript tables in 1819, and around 1820 began planning the Difference Engine No. 1 based on the principles of the division of labor. With this goal, Babbage visited factories throughout England, inspecting every machine and every industrial process. Rather than a study limited to engineering and manufacturing techniques, his book turned out to be an analysis of manufacturing processes within their economic context. Written when manufacturing was undergoing rapid development and radical change, the book represents an original contribution to British economics.  "Adam Smith had never really abandoned the belief, reasonable enough in his day, that agriculture was the principal source of Britain’s wealth; Ricardo’s ideas were focused on corn; Babbage for the first time authoritatively placed the factory in the centre of the stage. The book is at once a hymn to the machine, and analysis of the development of machine-based production in the factory, and a discussion of social relations in industry. . . .

"The Economy of Manufactures established Babbage’s position as a political economist and its influence is well attested, particularly on John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Babbage’s pioneering discussion of the effect of technical development on the size of industrial organizations was followed by Mill and the prediction of the continuing increase in the size of factories, often cited as one of Marx’s successful economic predictions, in fact derives from Babbage’s analysis. . . . Babbage wrote with many talents: a natural philosopher and mechanical engineer, his knowledge of factory and workshop practice was encyclopaedic; he was well-versed in relevant business practice; and he was without rival as a mathematician among contemporary British political economists (Hyman 1982, 103–4).

On the Economy of Machines and Manufactures was also the first book on operations research, discussing topics like the regulation of power, control of raw materials, division of labor, time studies, the advantage of size in manufacturing, inventory control, and duration and replacement of machinery. On pages 166 and 167 Babbage analyzed the production of his book as an example of the cost of each step in a particular production process, thus also contributing to book history. The work was Babbage’s most complete and professional piece of writing, and the only one of his books that went through four editions during his lifetime. The first edition of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures was issued in two versions: a large-paper version (222 x 142 mm.), of which a small number were printed for presentation only; and the regular version,  of which three thousand copies were issued. The work was also translated into several languages. Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) No. 42.

While working in the statistics department of the Police Ministry, Semen Nikolaevich Korsakov (Russian: Семён Николаевич Корсаков; Semyon Nikolayevich Korsakov),  a Russian government official and inventor, developed several "machines for the comparison of ideas" to "enhance natural intelligence."  In the design of his machines Korsakov appears to have been the earliest to use punched cards for information processing and storage.

Korsakov's machines "included the 'linear homeoscope with movable parts', the 'linear homeoscope without movable parts', the 'flat homeoscope', the 'ideoscope', and the 'simple comparator'. The purpose of the devices was primarily to facilitate the search for information, stored in the form of punched cards or similar media (for example, wooden boards with perforations). Korsakov announced his new method in September 1832, and rather than seeking patents offered the machines for public use.

"The punch card had been introduced in 1805, but until that time had been used solely in the textile industry to control looms. Korsakov was reputedly the first to use the cards for information storage.

"Korsakov presented his ideas to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, but their experts rejected his application, failing to see the potential of mechanizing searches through large stores of information. His machines were largely forgotten until after the Second World War, when a revival of historical interest resulted in the publication (in 1961) of several documents from the Academy's archives relating to Korsakov's machines and the uncovering of a book about them written by Korsakov himself" (Wikipedia article on Semen Korsakov, accessed 10-07-2010).

Charles Babbage first conceived the Analytical Engine in 1834. This general-purpose mechanical machine— never completely constructed—embodied in its design most of the features of the general-purpose programmable digital computer. In its conception and design Babbage incorporated ideas and names from the textile industry, including data and program input, output, and storage on punched cards similar to those used in Jacquard looms, a central processing unit called the "mill," and memory called the "store."

In Note sur un moyen de tracer des courbes données par des équations différentielles  French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis described a mechanical device to integrate differential equations of the first order. This was the beginning of researches on solution of differential equations using mechanical devices.

American writer, poet, editor, literary critic, and magazinist Edgar Allan Poe published in the Southern Literary Messenger issued from Richmond, Virginia "Maelzel's Chess Player." In this article on automata Poe provided a very closely reasoned explanation of the concealed human operation of von Kempelen's Turk, which Poe had seen exhibited in Richmond by Maelzel a few weeks earlier. 

Poe also briefly compared von Kempelen's Turk to Babbage's Difference Engine No. 1, which was limited to the computation of astronomical and navigation tables, suggesting essentially that if the Turk was fully automated and had the ability to use the results of one logical operation to make a decision about the next one—what was later called "conditional branching" —it would be far superior to Babbage's machine.  This feature was, of course, later designed into Babbage's Analytical Engine. 

Here is Poe's comparison of the two machines:

"But if these machines were ingenious, what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man? It will, perhaps, be said, in reply, that a machine such as we have described is altogether above comparison with the Chess-Player of Maelzel. By no means — it is altogether beneath it — that is to say provided we assume (what should never for a moment be assumed) that the Chess-Player is a pure machine, and performs its operations without any immediate human agency. Arithmetical or algebraical calculations are, from their very nature, fixed and determinate. Certain data being given, certain results necessarily and inevitably follow. These results have dependence upon nothing, and are influenced by nothing but the data originally given. And the question to be solved proceeds, or should proceed, to its final determination, by a succession of unerring steps liable to no change, and subject to no modification. This being the case, we can without difficulty conceive the possibility of so arranging a piece of mechanism, that upon starting it in accordance with the data of the question to be solved, it should continue its movements regularly, progressively, and undeviatingly towards the required solution, since these movements, however complex, are never imagined to be otherwise than finite and determinate. But the case is widely different with the Chess-Player. With him there is no determinate progression. No one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other. From no particular disposition of the men at one period of a game can we predicate their disposition at a different period. Let us place the first move in a game of chess, in juxta-position with the data of an algebraical question, and their great difference will be immediately perceived. From the latter — from the data — the second step of the question, dependent thereupon, inevitably follows. It is modelled by the data. It must be thus and not otherwise. But from the first move in the game of chess no especial second move follows of necessity. In the algebraical question, as it proceeds towards solution, the certainty of its operations remains altogether unimpaired. The second step having been a consequence of the data, the [column 2:] third step is equally a consequence of the second, the fourth of the third, the fifth of the fourth, and so on, and not possibly otherwise, to the end. But in proportion to the progress made in a game of chess, is the uncertainty of each ensuing move. A few moves having been made, no step is certain. Different spectators of the game would advise different moves. All is then dependent upon the variable judgment of the players. Now even granting (what should not be granted) that the movements of the Automaton Chess-Player were in themselves determinate, they would be necessarily interrupted and disarranged by the indeterminate will of his antagonist. There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind. Its original projector, however, Baron Kempelen, had no scruple in declaring it to be a "very ordinary piece of mechanism — a bagatelle whose effects appeared so marvellous only from the boldness of the conception, and the fortunate choice of the methods adopted for promoting the illusion." But it is needless to dwell upon this point. It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else. Indeed this matter is susceptible of a mathematical demonstration, a priori. The only question then is of the manner in which human agency is brought to bear. Before entering upon this subject it would be as well to give a brief history and description of the Chess-Player for the benefit of such of our readers as may never have had an opportunity of witnessing Mr. Maelzel's exhibition."

In 1839 weaver Michel-Marie Carquillat, working for the firm of Didier, Petit et Cie, in Lyon, France wove in fine silk a Portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, The image, including caption and Carquillat’s name, taking credit for the weaving, measures 55 x 34 cm.; the full piece of silk including blank margins measures 85 x 66 cm.

This image, of which only about 10 examples are known, was woven on a Jacquard loom using 24,000 Jacquard cards, each of which had over 1000 hole positions. The process of mis en carte, or converting the image details to punched cards for the Jacquard mechanism, for this exceptionally large and detailed image, would have taken several workers many months, as the woven image convincingly portrays superfine elements such as a translucent curtain over glass window panes.

Once all the “programming” was completed, the process of weaving the image with its 24,000 punched cards would have taken more than eight hours, assuming that the weaver was working at the usual Jacquard loom speed of about forty-eight picks per minute, or about 2800 per hour. More than once this woven image was mistaken for an engraved image. The image was produced only to order, most likely in an exceptionally small number of examples. In 2012 the only recorded examples were those in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Science Museum, London, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. The image was the subject of the book by James Essinger entitled, Jacquard's Web. How a Hand Loom led to the Birth of the Information Age (2004).

To Charles Babbage the incredible sophistication of the information processing involved in the mis en carte — what we call programming— of this exceptionally elaborate and beautiful image confirmed the potential of using punched cards for the input, programming, output and storage of information in his design and conception of the first general-purpose programmable computer—the Analytical Engine. The highly aesthetic result also confirmed to Babbage that machines were capable of amazingly complex and subtle processes—processes which might eventually emulate the subtlety of the human mind.

“In June 1836 Babbage opted for punched cards to control the machine [the Analytical Engine]. The principle was openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom, which used a string of punched cards to automatically control the pattern of a weave. In the loom, rods were linked to wire hooks, each of which could lift one of the longitudinal threads strung between the frame. The rods were gathered in a rectangular bundle, and the cards were pressed one at a time against the rod ends. If a hole coincided with a rod, the rod passed through the card and no action was taken. If no hole was present then the card pressed back the rod to activate a hook which lifted the associated thread, allowing the shuttle which carried the cross-thread to pass underneath. The cards were strung together with wire, ribbon or tape hinges, and fan-folded into large stacks to form long sequences. The looms were often massive and the loom operator sat inside the frame, sequencing through the cards one at a time by means of a foot pedal or hand lever. The arrangement of holes on the cards determined the pattern of the weave.

“As well as patterned textiles for ordinary use, the technique was used to produce elaborate and complex images as exhibition pieces. One well-known piece was a shaded portrait of Jacquard seated at table with a small model of his loom. The portrait was woven in fine silk by a firm in Lyon using a Jacquard punched-card loom. . . . Babbage was much taken with the portrait, which is so fine that it is difficult to tell with the naked eye that it is woven rather than engraved. He hung his own copy of the prized portrait in his drawing room and used it to explain his use of the punched cards in his Engine. The delicate shading, crafted shadows and fine resolution of the Jacquard portrait challenged existing notions that machines were incapable of subtlety. Gradations of shading were surely a matter of artistic taste rather than the province of machinery, and the portrait blurred the clear lines between industrial production and the arts. Just as the completed section of the Difference Engine played its role in reconciling science and religion through Babbage’s theory of miracles, the portrait played its part in inviting acceptance for the products of industry in a culture in which aesthetics was regarded as the rightful domain of manual craft and art” (Swade, The Cogwheel Brain. Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer [2000] 107-8).

The British government abandoned financial support for the construction of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1.

Italian mathematician and politician Luigi Federico Menabrea published "Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage" in Bibliothèque universelle de Genève, nouvelle série 41 (1842): 352–76.

This was the first published account of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and the first account of its logical design, including the first examples of computer programs ever published. As is well known, Babbage’s conception and design of his Analytical Engine—the first general purpose programmable digital computer—were so far ahead of the imagination of his mathematical and scientific colleagues that few expressed much curiosity regarding it. The only presentation that Babbage made concerning the design and operation of the Analytical Engine was to a group of Italian scientists.

In 1840 Babbage traveled to Torino (Turin) Italy to make a presentation on the Analytical Engine. Babbage’s talk, complete with charts, drawings, models, and mechanical notations, emphasized the Engine’s signal feature: its ability to guide its own operations—what we call conditional branching. In attendance at Babbage’s lecture was the young Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea (later prime minister of Italy), who prepared from his notes an account of the principles of the Analytical Engine. Reflecting a lack of urgency regarding radical innovation unimaginable to us today, Menabrea did not get around to publishing his paper until two years after Babbage made his presentation, and when he did so he published it in French in a Swiss journal. Shortly after Menabrea’s paper appeared Babbage was refused government funding for construction of the machine.

"In keeping with the more general nature and immaterial status of the Analytical Engine, Menabrea’s account dealt little with mechanical details. Instead he described the functional organization and mathematical operation of this more flexible and powerful invention. To illustrate its capabilities, he presented several charts or tables of the steps through which the machine would be directed to go in performing calculations and finding numerical solutions to algebraic equations. These steps were the instructions the engine’s operator would punch in coded form on cards to be fed into the machine; hence, the charts constituted the first computer programs [emphasis ours]. Menabrea’s charts were taken from those Babbage brought to Torino to illustrate his talks there"(Stein, Ada: A Life and Legacy, 92).

Menabrea’s 23-page paper was translated into English the following year by Lord Byron’s daughter, Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who, in collaboration with Babbage, added a series of lengthy notes enlarging on the intended design and operation of Babbage’s machine. Menabrea’s paper and Ada Lovelace’s translation represent the only detailed publications on the Analytical Engine before Babbage’s account in his autobiography (1864). Menabrea himself wrote only two other very brief articles about the Analytical Engine in 1855, primarily concerning his gratification that Countess Lovelace had translated his paper.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 60.

Per and Georg Scheutz, inspired by Dionysius Lardner’s account of Babbage’s Difference Engine, constructed the first working difference engine based on Babbage's design in Stockholm. One of the reasons the Scheutzs were able to build the engine, while Babbage could not, is that they were willing to machine the parts to lower tolerances than Babbage tolerated. Therefore the Scheutz machine was prone to errors.

In 1849 Swedish author, editor, and inventor Georg Scheutz published in Stockholm Nytt och enkelt sätt att lösa nummereqvationer af hogre och lägre grader efter Agardhska teorien: För praktiska behov [A new and simple method of solving numerical equations of higher and lower degree with the help of Agardh’s theory: For practical purposes]. and Bihang till skriften: Nytt och enkelt sätt att lösa nummereqvationer af hogre och lägre grader efter Agardhska teorien. Innehällande seriemetodens tillämpning vid bestämmandet af imaginära, lika, och nära hvarandra belägna rötter i en eqvation. Af C[arl] A[dolph] Agardh [1785-1859] . . . Utgifvet af Georg Scheutz [Appendix to the treatise: A new and simple method of solving numerical equations, using Agardh’s theory, containing the serial method used in determining imaginary, exact, and approximate roots of an equation. By C. A. Agardh, . . . edited by G. S.].

The Swedish father-and-son team of Georg and Edvard Scheutz was the first to construct a working difference engine capable of producing printed mathematical tables. The Scheutz machine, of which three examples were built, was based upon Charles Babbage’s design for his famous Difference Engine No. 1, which Babbage worked on intermittently between 1822 and 1834 before abandoning the project uncompleted (only a small working portion, about one-ninth the size of the projected Difference Engine, was ever constructed; the uncompleted machine ended up costing the British Government over £17,000).

Georg Scheutz—described by Lindgren as an “auditor, printer, journalist and editor, political commentator, spokesman for technology, translator and inventor”—first learned of Babbage’s Difference Engine circa 1830. Although his imagination was immediately fired by the possibilities of such a machine, he was unable to begin designing his own version until 1834, when Dionysius Lardner published his detailed review of Babbage’s Difference Engine in the July issue of the Edinburgh Review. Drawing on the information in Lardner’s article, Scheutz and his teenage son Edvard began working on their own design for a difference engine, which was both simpler and cheaper to produce than Babbage’s machine.

The Scheutz difference engine no. 1, a prototype model built by Edvard, was completed in 1843 and certified by members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Despite this mark of favor, the Scheutzes were initially unable to stir up any interest or official support for their machine, either at home or abroad. They did no further work on the Scheutz machine until 1850, when, in response to renewed interest in machines for printing tables, they began working on the Scheutz difference engine no. 2.

However, the Scheutz machine no. 1 did not lie entirely fallow during the seven years between 1843 and 1850, for in 1849, Georg Scheutz used it to produce and print a table of a polynomial of the third degree, which he published in Nytt och enkelt sätt att lösa nummereqvationer af hogre och lägre grader efter Agardhska teorien. This little one-column table, found on p. 74 of Scheutz’s pamphlet, is the earliest known automatically produced numerical table.

"In [Scheutz’s Nytt och enkelt sätt att lösa nummereqvationer af hogre och lägre grader efter Agardhska teorien] he gave an exposition of the method of solving equations by the method of differences, which the professor of botany, mathematician and latterly bishop Carl Adolph Agardh had presented in 1809. In an addendum he remarks that while the method is excellent, it is time consuming when used on equations of high degree. He then adds that this disadvantage could be removed if one 'could assign the laborious and time consuming figure work to some assistant, that never tired, never made an error and dealt with the numerical calculations for the higher degrees as swiftly and certainly as those for the first degree.” Georg Scheutz notes that such an assistant does in fact exist and he gives an example of a stereotyped table calculated and printed by the first engine. . . . The table shows that Scheutz still was fascinated by the machine’s capability to solve equations. But more importantly, this table is the only existing illustration [emphasis ours] of what the Scheutz prototype engine could do. It is also the oldest automatically made numerical table in the world, which has been preserved " (Lindgren, Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Müller, Charles Babbage and Georg and Edvard Scheutz [1987] 138-39).

Lindgren was the first to note the existence of this numerical table generated by the Scheutz difference engine no. 1. Prior to this, the first examples of tables produced by a Scheutz engine were thought to have been contained in the Scheutz’s Specimens of Tables, Calculated, Stereomoulded and Printed by Machinery (1857), which the Scheutzes produced in both English and French editions as a means of showcasing the Scheutz difference engine no. 2. The standard histories of computing, including Aspray’s Computing before Computers (1990), contain no reference to the table printed by the Scheutz difference engine no. 1. The original publication in Swedish is of the greatest rarity.

Merzbach, Georg Scheutz and the First Printing Calculator (1977). 

The Scheutz team in Stockholm produced their second difference engine—an improvement over the first.

About 1875 engineer Frank S. Baldwin of Philadelphia and Willgot Theophil Odhner, a Swedish engineer and entrepreneur working in St. Petersburg, Russia, independently invented calculators using a true variable-toothed gear. This was the first real advance in mechanical calculating technology since Gottfried Leibniz's stepped drum (1673). These calculators were called "pinwheel calculators."

The greater ease of use of this technology, its general reliability, and the compact size of the equipment incorporating it caused an explosion of sales in the calculator industry.

The earliest international exposition exclusively of scientific instruments was held at the South Kensington Museum, London.  As a record of the exhibition the South Kensington Museum published a Handbook to the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus 1876 (London 1876).  

The section on calculating machines on pages 23-34 was written by H. J. S. Smith and included those of Babbage, Scheutz, Thomas de Colmar, and Grohmann. None were illustrated. James Clerk Maxwell contributed two chapters in this guide, Peter Guthrie Tait wrote one, and Thomas Henry Huxley wrote one.  A French translation of this work was published in Paris also in 1876.

The South Kensington Museum was later merged into the Science Museum in London.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace 369.

Bruno Abdank-Abakanowicz, a mathematician, inventor and electrical engineer, invented the integraph, a form of integrator.

"The integraph is an elaboration and extension of the planimeter, an earlier, simpler instrument used to measure area. It is a mechanical instrument capable of deriving the integral curve corresponding to a given curve. Hence, it is capable of solving graphically a simple differential equation.

"Sets of partial differential equations are commonly encountered in mathematical physics. Most branches of physics such as aerodynamics, electricity, acoustics, plasma physics, electron-physics and nuclear energy involve complex flows, motions and rates of change which may be described mathematically by partial differential equations. A well-established example from electromagnetics is the set of partial differential equations known as Maxwell's equations.

"In practice, differential equations can be difficult to integrate, that is to solve. The integraph is capable of solving only simple differential equations. The need to handle sets of more complex non-linear differential equations, led Vannevar Bush to develop the Differential Analyzer at MIT in the early 1930s. In turn, limitations in speed, capacity and accuracy of the Bush Differential Analyzer provided the impetus for the development of the ENIAC during World War II.

"Abdank-Abakanowicz’s instrument could produce solutions to a commonly encountered class of simple differential equations of the form dy/dx = F(x) so that y = ò F(x)dx. The basic approach was to draw a graph of the function F and then use the pointer on the device to trace the contour of the function. The value of the integral could then be read from the dials. The concept of the instrument was taken up and soon put into production by such well known instrument makers as the Swiss firm of Coradi in Zurich" (From Gordon Bell's website, accessed 09-01-2010).

Abdank-Abakanowicz published a monograph entitled Les Intégraphes (Paris, 1886).

American inventor Dorr E. Felt introduced the Comptometer, a non-printing key-driven calculating machine whose chief advantages were speed, versatility, and ease of use.

"Use. For each digit a push button from 1 to 9 is selected which rotates a Pascal-type wheel with the corresponding number of increments. Numbers are subtracted by adding the complement (shown in smaller numbers). The carrying of tens is accomplished by power generated by the action of the keys and stored in a helical spring, which is automatically released at the proper instant to perform the carry.  

"Through effective marketing and training of skilled operators versed in complement arithmetic at Comptometer Schools, these machines became the workhorse of the accounting profession in the first part of the [20th] century. They never successfully advanced into the electro-mechanical era, but remained purely mechanical, two-function adding and subtracting machines" (Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

Charles Babbage’s son Henry Prevost Babbage completed and published his father’s unfinished edition of writings on the Difference Engine No. 1 and the Analytical Engine, together with a listing of his father’s unpublished plans and notebooks. These appear under the title of Babbage’s Calculating Engines.

This work was the principal source of information for the technical operation of Babbage’s Difference and Analytical engines. Toward the end of his life, Babbage began assembling his own and other’s previously published writings on his Difference and Analytical Engines with the intent of publishing a history of his work designing the machines, and descriptions of the way that the machines would operate. However, Babbage died before he could accomplish this task. He had the first 294 pages of this work typeset and printed on slightly varying qualities of paper during his lifetime. The differences in the paper used for portions of the work would suggest that sections were printed intermittently rather than all at one time. It would appear that Babbage’s purpose in producing this work was to collect the most significant published writings on his calculating engines, most of which had appeared as obscure pamphlets or in little-read journals, together with a listing of what remained unpublished, including all of Babbage’s notebooks and engineering drawings (listed on pp. 271-294), in the hope that his unfinished projects might be completed at some future date.

Almost twenty years after Babbage’s death, his youngest son, Major-General Henry Prevost Babbage, to whom Babbage had bequeathed his parts for his calculating engines, and everything else pertaining to them, completed the book, incorporating the printed sheets that Babbage had produced along with concluding material, reflecting his own frustrated efforts to effect realization of Babbage’s engines. Were it not for this volume, and for the bibliography of Babbage’s works published both here (on the last three printed pages of the book) and in Babbage’s autobiography, Babbage’s achievements might have been forgotten. Henry Babbage also completed six small demonstration pieces of the Difference Engine No. 1, and in 1910 at the age of 86, Henry Babbage also completed an experimental four-function calculator for the Mill for the Analytical Engine.  This was the only portion of the Analytical Engine that was ever produced in metal.

As it turned out Babbage’s designs were not implemented until the 20th century because in the era of human computers there was no pressing need for the machines that Babbage envisioned and designed. Yet because of these published works, Babbage’s ambitions and his ideas remained alive in the minds of people working in mechanical computation long after his technology had fallen into obsolescence. When Vannevar Bush suggested in 1936 that electromechanical technology might be the way to realize “Babbage’s large conception” of the Analytical Engine, he cited this volume among his references; and in building the electromechanical Harvard Mark I, Howard Aiken saw himself fulfilling Babbage’s ambition. However, some experts have inferred that Aiken’s knowledge of Babbage’s work may have been limited to what he read in Babbage’s autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, as Aiken did not include conditional branching in the design of the Mark I—a key idea that Babbage designed into the Analytical Engine.

Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, 254. Van Sinderen, Alfred W. "The Printed Papers of Charles Babbage" Annals of the History of Computing, 2 (April 1980) :169-185 mentions in item CB80, that Babbage listed a History of the Analytical Engine as being “in the press” in 1864.

In 1892 American inventor William Seward Burroughs of St. Louis, Missouri, founder of the American Arithmometer Company (1886; (Burroughs Adding Machine Company 1904) began commercial production of his dependable key-driven printing adding machine.

The "Millionaire" mechanical calculator, about the size of a small desk top, was introduced in Switzerland.

The "Millionaire" was the first commercially successful calculator that could perform multiplication directly, rather than by repeated addition. It was designed by Otto Steiger, a Swiss engineer and was first patented in Germany in 1892. Patents were issued in France, Switzerland, Canada and the USA in 1893. Production by Hans W. Egli of Zurich started in 1893, and continued to 1935. Most models were driven by hand-crank but some were electrified.

Roughly 4000-5000 Millionaires were sold. 

Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne published Le Calcul simplifiée par procèdes mécaniques et graphiques. This contained the first systematic classification of calculating machines.

Irish accountant Percy Ludgate working Dublin designed a new version of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, of which he published a brief description in 1909, and created engineering drawings. This would have been the first programmable computer since  Babbage's mid-19th century design. However, the machine was never constructed, and the drawings were lost. (See Reading 6.3.)

The Napier Tercentenary Celebration  marking the three hundredth anniversary of the publication of Napier's Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (1614), was held at the Royal Society of Edinburgh from July 24 to July 27, 1914 — just five days before the start of World War I. Participants in the exhibition included individuals and companies from Scotland, England, France, and Germany. The meeting was intended to include a colloquium on the mathematics of computation, but that was canceled because war was considered imminent.

A celebration of Napier's pivotal role in the history of calculation, the exhibition featured displays of many different types of calculating machines, as well as exhibits of other aids to calculation such as mathematical tables, the abacus and slide rules, planimeters and other integrating devices, and ruled papers and nomograms. These were described in the Napier Tercentenary Celebration. Handbook to the Exhibition, which contained separate sections, with chapters by various contributors, devoted to each type of calculating device. Among the notable chapters is Percy E. Ludgate's "Automatic Calculating Machines" (pp. 124-27): apart from Ludgate's "On a proposed analytical machine" (Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society 12 [1909]: 77-91), this chapter contains the only discussion of his improvements to Babbage's Analytical Engine (none of which was ever realized). Also of note is W. G. Smith's "Notes on the Special Development of Calculating Ability" (pp. 60-68), discussing human "lightning calculators" and mathematically gifted "idiot savants," such as were employed by Gauss. Prior to the advent of electronic digital computers, these human computers were often faster than their mechanical counterparts.

The most widely used tools for calculation at the time of the Napier tercentenary were mathematical tables, which are thoroughly surveyed, explained, and described in the Handbook (bibliographical descriptions of the rare mathematical tables exhibited were published the following year in the Napier Tercentenary Memorial Volume. The Handbook also contains a large illustrated section on calculating machines, which were divided into four types: (1) stepped-gear machines based on the Leibnitz wheel, such as those of Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar; (2) machines with variable-toothed gears, such as the Brunsviga; (3) key-set machines like those made by Burroughs; and (4) key-driven machines such as those made by Felt and Tarrant.

The Handbook was published in two forms: a softcover version presented to those who registered for the exhibition; and a hardcover version issued for sale under the title Modern Instruments and Methods of Calculation. Relatively few copies of the softcover version seem to have been distributed at the exhibition, partly because the exhibition took place in Edinburgh, but mainly because war broke out just after it began. Most copies were bound in cloth and sold in London.

"The events of the First World War caused no less upheaval in the world of computing than in the rest of society. A great many technical changes, such as the ever-increasing use of punched-card accounting machines, were to cause computing to assume a different character in the time between the two World Wars. Thus the Handbook should be viewed as a report on the state of the art just before these changes were to begin taking place" (Williams 1982, [x]).  

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) no. 322.

In 1930 American engineer, educator, and visionary of information management Vannevar Bush of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed the differential analyzer, a large analog computer more accurate than previous devices of this type.

Konrad Zuse, while completing his engineering degree at the Technische Universität Berlin, realized that an automatic calculator would need only a control, a memory, and an arithmetic unit.

IBM’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen (Dehomag) introduced the Dehomag D11 tabulator, the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator, incorporating internal instructions programmed with a plug board.

Kistermann, "The way to the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator: The 1935 DEHOMAG D 11 tabulator," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing XVII (1995): 33-49.

Konrad Zuse applied for a patent on his electromagnetic, program-controlled calculator, called the Z1. 

Zuse built the machine in the living room of his parents’ apartment in Berlin. It had 30,000 parts.

The Z1 was the first freely programmable, binary-based calculating machine ever built, but it did not function reliably, and it was destroyed in World War II. Zuse's patent application is the only surviving documentation of Zuse's prewar work on computers.

Between 1986 and 1989 Zuse and three associates created a replica of the Z1, which is preserved in the Deutsche Technikmuseum, Berlin.

Believing that war with Germany is inevitable, Alan Turing built in a Princeton University machine shop an experimental electromechanical cryptanalysis machine capable of binary multiplication.

George Stibitz, a research mathematician at Bell Telephone Labs in New York City, built a binary adder out of a few light bulbs, batteries, relays and metal strips cut from tin cans on his kitchen table.

This device was similar to a theoretical design described by Claude Shannon in his master's thesis. Stibitz's "Model K" (for “Kitchen”) was the first electromechanical computer built in America.

Howard H. Aiken of Harvard University drafted a proposal for an automatic calculating machine and joins with IBM to produce the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). Later known as the Harvard Mark I, the completed electromechanical calculating machine eventually weighed five tons.

John Atanasoff at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, planned the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), a special-purpose electronic computer.

Konrad Zuse completed his Z1 mechanical computer in his parents’ Berlin apartment.

Independently of Claude Shannon, Zuse developed a form of symbolic logic to assist in the design of the binary circuits. With Helmut Schreyer, he began work on the Z2.

John Atanasoff in Ames, Iowa, began work on his special-purpose ABC machine, the earliest electronic digital computer. It was never properly operational.

IBM started construction of Howard Aiken ’s Harvard Mark I electromechanical computer in Endicott, New York.

Konrad Zuse completed his Z2 machine in Berlin. It used the same kind of mechanical memory as the Z1, but used 800 relays in the arithmetic and control units. 

In 1939 George Stibitz and Samuel Williams of Bell Labs in New York City began construction of the Complex Number Calculator (later known as the Bell Labs Model I). This machine was called “the first electromechanical computer for routine use.” It used telephone relays and coded decimal numbers as groups of four binary digits (bits) each.

Konrad Zuse’s associate, Helmut Schreyer, wrote a memorandum concerning the Z2, Rechnische Rechenmachine (unpublished at the time), in which he also stated thast it would be possible to build a computer with vacuum tubes that would process “10,000 operations per second.”

In 1940, the German government began funding computer designer Konrad Zuse through the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA, Aerodynamic Research Institute, forerunner of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V, DLR). At this time Zuse built the S1 and S2 computers —special purpose machines for computing aerodynamic corrections to the wings of radio-controlled flying bombs.

"The S2 featured an integrated analog-to-digital converter under program control, making it the first process-controlled computer. These machines contributed to the Henschel Werke Hs 293 and Hs 294 guided missiles developed by the German military between 1941 and 1945, which were the precursors to the modern cruise missile. The circuit design of the S1 was the predecessor of Zuse's Z11. Zuse believed that these machines had been captured by occupying Soviet troops in 1945" (Wikipedia article on Konrad Zuse, accessed 03-03-2012).

On January 8, 1940 George Stibutz's Bell Labs Complex Number Calculator was operational in New York City.

On March 7, 1940 Vannevar Bush of MIT wrote a memorandum entitled “Arithmetical Machine.” This memorandum shows that the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project begun conceptually in 1936 was already well-advanced. However, Bush continued to focus most of his computational energy on building the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer II, a 100 ton analog machine  that included 2000 vacuum tubes and 150 electric motors.

American physicist and inventor John Atanasoff at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, wrote a thirty-five-page memorandum describing the design and principles of the what came to be known as the ABC machine.

This may be the earliest extant document describing the principles of an electronic digital computer. It remained unpublished until 1973.

In December 1940 John Mauchly met John Atanasoff at the Philadelphia meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.

After corresponding with Atanasoff about electronic calculating, Mauchly visited Atanasoff in Ames, Iowa and read the 35-page memorandum on the ABC machine that Atanasoff had written in August.

Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman at Bletchley Park designed an improved Bombe cryptanalysis machine for deciphering Enigma messages.

German inventor Helmut Schreyer, Konrad Zuse’s associate, received his doctorate in telecommunications engineering with a dissertation on the use of vacuum-tube relays in switching circuits from the Technische Universität Berlin.

Schreyer converted Zuse’s logical designs into electronic circuits, building a simple prototype of an electronic computer with 100 vacuum tubes, which achieved a switching frequency of 10,000 Hz.

With the assistance of Helmut Shreyer, Konrad Zuse, working in Berlin, completed his Z3 machine—the world’s first fully functional Turing-complete electromechanical digital computer—with twenty-four hundred relays.

The Z3 ran programs punched into rolls of discarded movie film. In 1944 it was destroyed in bombing raids.

Because no one outside of Germany had any knowledge of the Z3, Zuse's design had no influence on the development of computing in the the United States or England during or after World War II.

There is a replica of the Z3 on display in the Deutsches Museum, Munich.

J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly met at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, now part of the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, and began discussions on electronic computing.

John Atanasoff’s special-purpose ABC machine was nearly operational in Ames, Iowa, when work on it was abandoned because of World War II.

Konrad Zuse started work on the Z4 electromechanical computer in Berlin.

Vannevar Bush at MIT completed the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer II, a monstrous analog machine more accurate and faster than the first Differential Analyzer. It contained two thousand vacuum tubes and weighed about one hundred thousand pounds. For security reasons its existence was not publicized until October 1945.

At the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania John Mauchly wrote a privately circulated confidential memorandum on “The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating.”

IBM at Endicott, New York developed the Vacuum Tube Multiplier.

This experimental machine was the first complete machine to perform arithmetic electronically. By substituting vacuum tubes for electro-mechanical relays it could process information thousands of times faster than electro-mechanical calculators.

Project Whirlwind began as an analog flight simulator project at MIT.

Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation (MTAC), the world’s first computing journal, began publication in Washington, D.C.

At this time mathematical tables prepared by human computers were the primary calculating aid. The journal reported on the new electromechanical and electronic “aids to computation” as they were developed.

Howard Aiken’s electromechanical Harvard Mark I was operational at IBM Endicott Labs in New York under wartime security.

With the goal of speeding up the calculation of artillery firing tables, on April 8, 1943 Pres Eckert and John Mauchly of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania submitted a proposal to the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, near Aberdeen, Maryland. Their proposal was entitled Report on an Electronic Difference Analyzer. By calling their proposed device an electronic difference analyzer Eckert and Mauchly tried to make the distinction between the electromechanical analog differential analyzer that the United States Army was using and the new electronic digital machine that would be developed. The proposal was submitted to army ordnance in May.

When the first contracts were signed between the U. S. Army and the Moore School, the name of the machine was changed to Electronic Numerical Integrator. Because Mauchly stressed that the machine could be used for more general problems, the device was called an “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC).” Eckert was appointed laboratory supervisor and chief engineer on the project. Mauchly, along with Eckert, was put in charge of engineering and testing.

Construction of the ENIAC started at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

The actual contract between the Moore School and the army did not go into effect until July 1. For security reasons, the understandable rumor that the project was a “white elephant” was promoted rather than denied.

In September 1943 the Bell Labs Relay Interpolator (later called the Model II) was operational for the first time.

Using programs from punched tape, the Relay Interpolator, which used 440 relays, was possibly the first electromechanical computer to run programs in the United States.

Helmut Schreyer’s small prototype of an electronic computer was damaged in an air raid on Berlin. The machine was lost soon thereafter.

At the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School Pres Eckert submitted a report entitled Disclosure of Magnetic Calculating Machine, which briefly described means for storing data on magnetic disks and also the storing of programs on disks.

Eckert's report did not, however, enunciate the principles of the stored-program computer.

Howard Aiken’s Mark I (ASCC) moved from IBM Endicott Labs to Harvard University where it was officially operational. The electromechanical machine solved addition problems in less than a second, multiplication in six seconds, and division in 12 seconds. Grace Hopper wrote some of its first programs, which ran on punched tape.

In July 1944 Pres Eckert had two accumulators of the ENIAC operational at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School.

Faced with mathematical computations regarding the Atomic bomb that were too time-consuming for human computers, mathematician and physicist John von Neumann visited the ENIAC two-accumulator system for the first time, and became deeply interested in the project.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly of the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania declared that their conception of the ENIAC was complete. Eckert wrote a letter to other members of the project asking them to state written claims to inventions on the project. None was received.

The United States Army extended the ENIAC contract to cover research on the planned EDVAC stored-program computer.

Konrad Zuse completed the Z4 shortly before V-E Day. 

The Z4 was a large, electromechanical programmable computer, the construction of which began about 1943. To safeguard it against bombing, the machine was dismantled and shipped from Berlin to a village in the Bavarian Alps. In 1950 it was refurbished, modified, and installed at ETH in Zurich. For several years it was the only working electronic digital computer in continental Europe, and it remained operational in Zurich until 1955. It is preserved in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

The ENIAC, the world’s first large-scale electronic general-purpose digital computer, was completed and tested at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

With eighteen thousand vacuum tubes and weighing thirty tons, the ENIAC was about one thousand times faster than the Harvard Mark I, and 10,000 times the speed of a human computer doing a calculation. 

Programming the ENIAC was accomplished by time-consuming plugging of patch cords from buses to panels for each individual problem.

The ENIAC remained the only operational electronic digital computer in the world until the short-lived Manchester “Baby” prototype became operational in 1948.

Mathematician and physicist John von Neumann of Princeton  privately circulated copies of his First Draft on a Report on the EDVAC to twenty-four people connected with the EDVAC project. This document, written between February and June 1945, provided the first theoretical description of the basic details of a stored-program computer: what later became known as the Von Neumann architecture.

To avoid the government's security classification, and to avoid engineering problems that might detract from the logical considerations under discussion, Von Neumann avoided mentioning specific hardware. Influenced by Alan Turing and by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, von Neumann patterned the machine to some degree after human thought processes. (See Reading 8.1.)

In June 2009 I was able to download a PDF of the text of von Neumann's report at this link: http://www.virtualtravelog.net/entries/2003-08-TheFirstDraft.pdf.

Alan Turing arrived at the National Physical Laboratory,Teddington, England, to work on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE).

Project Whirlwind at MIT switches from analog to digital electronics.

Pres Eckert, John Mauchly, John Brainerd, and Herman Goldstine at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania issued the first confidential published report on the completed ENIAC, discussing how it operated and the methods by which it was programmed. (See Reading 8.2.)

The Moore School lectures on “The theory and techniques for design of electronic digital computers” occurred at the University of Pennsylvania. This series of lectures, attended by twenty-eight highly qualified experts, led to widespread adoption of the EDVAC-type design, including stored programs, for nearly all subsequent computer development.

At the Harvard Computation Laboratory Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper published A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. The instruction sequences scattered throughout this volume were among the earliest published examples of digital computer programs. (See Reading 9.1.)

At the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, Alan Turing prepared a typed proposal, “Proposed electronic calculator,” outlining the development of the ACE.

In February 2012 Turing's report could be read at the Turing Digital Archive, at this link: http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/C/32 .

John von Neumann attempted to set up an electronic stored-program computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton.

Von Neumann tried to hire Pres Eckert, but Eckert refused the job, preferring to go into the computer business with John Mauchly.

Engineer Julian Bigelow, who previously collaborated with Norbert Wiener at MIT, joined John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine at the Princeton IAS Electronic Computer Project. He was to a large extent responsible for implementing von Neumann's stored-program concepts.

At Princeton Arthur W. Burks, John von Neumann, and Herman Goldstine issued their Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, discussing ideas to be incorporated into the stored-program computer at the IAS. (See Reading 8.3.)

Mathematician Max Newman founded the computer laboratory at Manchester University via a grant from the Royal Society.

Pres Eckert lectured at University of Pennsylvania's Moore School on “A preview of a digital computing machine.”

Eckert proposed replacing  the three different kinds of memory used in the ENIAC (flip-flops in accumulators, function tables [read-only memory] and interconnecting cables with switches) with a single erasable high-speed memory— the mercury delay-line memory that he invented for this purpose. This was a key step in the development of a stored-program computer.

A contest was held in Tokyo between the Japanese soroban, used by Kiyoshi Matsuzaki, a champion operator in the Savings Bureau of the Japanese postal administration, and an electric calculator, operated by US Army Private Thomas Nathan Wood of the 240th Finance Distributing Section of General MacArthur's headquarters, who was the most experienced calculator operator in Japan at the time. The bases for scoring in the contest were speed and accuracy of results in all four basic arithmetic operations and a problem which combined all four. The soroban won 4 to 1, with the electric calculator prevailing in multiplication.

"About the event, the Nippon Times newspaper reported that "Civilization ... tottered" that day, while the Stars and Stripes newspaper described the soroban's "decisive" victory as an event in which "the machine age took a step backward. . . ."

"The breakdown of results is as follows:

"* Five additions problems for each heat, each problem consisting of 50 three- to six-digit numbers. The soroban won in two successive heats.

"* Five subtraction problems for each heat, each problem having six- to eight-digit minuends and subtrahends. The soroban won in the first and third heats; the second heat was a no contest.

"* Five multiplication problems, each problem having five- to 12-digit factors. The calculator won in the first and third heats; the soroban won on the second.

"* Five division problems, each problem having five- to 12-digit dividends and divisors. The soroban won in the first and third heats; the calculator won on the second.

"* A composite problem which the soroban answered correctly and won on this round. It consisted of:

"o An addition problem involving 30 six-digit numbers

"o Three subtraction problems, each with two six-digit numbers o Three multiplication problems, each with two figures containing a total of five to twelve digits

"o Three division problems, each with two figures containing a total of five to twelve digits" (Wikipedia article on Soroban, accessed 04-15-2009).

The ENIAC was converted into an elementary stored-program computer by the use of function tables.

EDVAC information is declassified

Mathematician Louis Couffignal and Leon Brillouin held a small conference on “large computers” in Paris, at which Couffignal discussed French work, and Brillouin summarized American accomplishments in electronic digital computing.

Having researched computing theory as early as 1942, when he delivered a lecture to the Comité National de l'Organisation Française on the future of computing, Couffignal decided against building a stored-program computer. This mistake caused France to fall behind England and America in computing technology. The government agency where Couffignal worked, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), did not obtain a stored-program computer (a British model) until 1955. Only in 1956 was the first stored-program computer manufactured in France.

Design of the Whirlwind I began at MIT.

The Curta Model 1 pocket mechanical calculator was produced by Contina Ltd in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

The most advanced small mechanical calculator ever built, the Curta was designed by Curt Hertzstark, a calculating machine manufacturer, while he was a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1943 to 1945. The Nazis operating the concentration camp encouraged Hertzstark to complete the design while he was in Buchenwald, and produced a prototype by the end of the war. The Curta calculator was manufactured until 1973.

From 1945 through 1946 the ENIAC, development of which had been provided by the U. S. Army, remained at the Moore School in Philadelphia, working out numerical solutions to problems in such fields as atomic energy and ballistic trajectories. Dismantling at the Moore School began in the winter, and the first units arrived at Aberdeen Proving Ground in January 1947. By August 1947 the ENIAC was once again operational.

In a lecture to the London Mathematical Society that remained unpublished until 1986, Alan Turing stated that “digital computing machines such as the ACE. . . are in fact practical versions of the universal machine.”

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly learned from a patent lawyer that John von Neumann’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC was a publication barring their patenting the ENIAC because it was issued more than a year before they planned to apply for a patent.

Julian Bigelow and his team at Princeton redesigned the IAS machine to include error checking and parallel processing, essential features of what became known as the von Neumann architecture.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly applied for the broad ENIAC patent, essentially a patent on the stored-program electronic digital computer. They based their description of the machine to a large extent on the government report they issued on November 30, 1945. (See Reading 8.10.)

Northrop Aircraft, Inc. of Hawthorne, California, placed the contract for the BINAC (BINary Automatic Computer) with Pres Eckert and John Mauchly’s Electronic Control Company in Philadelphia. The BINAC consisted of two identical serial computers operating in parallel, with mercury delay-line memories, and magnetic tape as secondary memories and auxiliary input devices.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly of Philadelphia applied for a U.S. patent on the mercury acoustic delay-line electronic memory system. This was the "first device to gain widespread acceptance as a reliable computer memory system." (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace [2002] 1191). The patent 2,629,827 was granted in 1953.

The first brochure advertising the UNIVAC was issued by Pres Eckert and John Mauchly’s Electronic Control Company in Philadelphia. This was the first sales brochure ever issued for an electronic digital computer. A special characteristic of this brochure was that it did not show the product, since at this time the product was not yet fully conceptualized either in design or external appearance.

IBM produced the 604 Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator (CPC). Based on vacuum-tube technology, and programmed by making wired connections on a plugboard, the mass-produced CPC 604 featured the industry’s first assemblage of digital electronics replaceable as a unit.

British electrical engineer, physicist and computer scientist Andrew D. Booth of Birkbeck College, created a magnetic drum memory, two inches long and two inches wide, and capable of holding 10 bits per square inch.

Booth offered his magnetic memory units for sale in 1952.

IBM announced its first large-scale digital calculating machine, the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC). The SSEC was the first computer that could modify a stored program. It featured 12,000 vacuum tubes and 21,000 electromechanical relays.

“IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), built at IBM's Endicott facility under the direction of Columbia Professor Wallace Eckert and his Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory staff in 1946-47, . . . was moved to the new IBM Headquarters Building at 590 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, where it occupied the periphery of a room 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. . . . [Estimates of the] dimensions of its "U" shape [were] at 60 + 40 + 80 feet, 180 feet in all, (about half a football field!)”

 "Designed, built, and placed in operation in only two years, the SSEC contained 21,400 relays and 12,500 vacuum tubes. It could operate indefinitely under control of its modifiable program. On the average, it performed 14-by-14 decimal multiplication in one-fiftieth of a second, division in one-thirtieth of a second, and addition or subtraction on nineteen-digit numbers in one-thirty-five-hundredth of second... For more than four years, the SSEC fulfilled the wish Watson had expressed at its dedication: that it would serve humanity by solving important problems of science. It enabled Wallace Eckert to publish a lunar ephemeris ... of greater accuracy than previously available... the source of data used in man's first landing on the moon". "For each position of the moon, the operations required for calculating and checking results totaled 11,000 additions and subtractions, 9,000 multiplications, and 2,000 table look-ups. Each equation to be solved required the evaluation of about 1,600 terms — altogether an impressive amount of arithmetic which the SSEC could polish off in seven minutes for the benefit of the spectators" (http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/ssec.html#sources, accessed 03-24-2010).

The SSEC remained sufficiently influential in the popular view of mainframes that it was the subject of a cartoon by Charles Addams published on the cover of The New Yorker magazine in February 11, 1961, in which the massive machine produced a Valentine's Day card for its elderly woman operator!

The Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine or  Manchester "Baby" prototype computer, ran its first program, written by Tom Kilburn.

This small pilot version of a larger computer was the first stored-program electronic digital computer. It operated for only a short time.  The machine was built at the Victoria University of Manchester in England by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill to test the Williams-Kilburn cathode ray tube (CRT) memory (Williams tube).

"The machine was not intended to be a practical computer but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory. Although considered 'small and primitive' by the standards of its time, it was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer. As soon as the SSEM had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a more usable computer, the Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer.

"The SSEM had a 32-bit word length and a memory of 32 words. As it was designed to be the simplest possible stored-program computer, the only arithmetic operations implemented in hardware were subtraction and negation; other arithmetic operations were implemented in software. The first of three programs written for the machine found the highest proper divisor of 218 (262,144), a calculation it was known would take a long time to run—and so prove the computer's reliability—by testing every integer from 218 − 1 downwards, as divisions had to be implemented by repeated subtractions of the divisor. The program consisted of 17 instructions and ran for 52 minutes before reaching the correct answer of 131,072, after the SSEM had performed 3.5 million operations (for an effective CPU speed of 1.1 kIPS)" (Wikipedia article Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine, accessed 10-09-2011).

You can watch a streaming video of a 1948 BBC newsreel about the Manchester "Baby" at this link. [You will need to scroll down the web page.]

Alan Turing wrote a report for the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, entitled Intelligent Machinery.

In the report Turing stated that a thinking machine should be given the blank mind of an infant instead of an adult mind filled with opinions and ideas. The report contained an early discussion of neural networks. Turing estimated that it would take a battery of programmers fifty years to bring this learning machine from childhood to adult mental maturity. The report was not published until 1968.

The second module of the BINAC (the first was completed in August), was completed in Philadelphia. Among its numerous innovations were germanium diodes in the logic processing hardware—probably the first application of semiconductors in computers. Until its delivery to Northrop Aircraft in September 1949, the BINAC remained in Philadelphia for use in numerous sales demonstrations.

In 1949 mathematician and actuary Edmund Berkeley issued Giant Brains or Machines that Think, the first popular book on electronic computers, published years before the public heard much about the machines. The work was published by John Wiley & Sons who were enjoying surprising commercial success with Norbert Wiener's much more technical book, Cybernetics.

Among many interesting details, Giant Brains contained a discussion about a machine called Simon, which has been called the first personal computer. 

Betty Holbertson at Eckert-Mauchly in Philadelphia developed UNIVAC Instructions Code C-10.

C-10 was the first software to allow a computer to be operated by keyboarded commands rather than dials and switches. It was also the first mnemonic code.

Under the name Project Charles, the Air Force funded a project proposed by George Valley and Jay Forrester of MIT to develop a military grade version of the Whirlwind computer.

The goal of this project was to develop an automated detection and interception system to protect the entire U.S. from incoming bombers. This  evolved into the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment or SAGE system.

Albert A. Auerbach, one of the designers of the BINAC CPU at Pres Eckert and John Mauchly's Electronic Control Company, ran a small test routine for filling memory from the A register. This was the first program run on the first stored-program electronic computer produced in the United States.

Maurice V. Wilkes’s EDSAC, fully operational at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, ran a program written by Wilkes for calculating a table of squares. It also ran a program written by David Wheeler for calculating a sequence of prime numbers. The EDSAC was the first easily used, fully functional stored-program computer to run a program.

At the University of Melbourne the first test program was run on Trevor Pearcey's and Maston Beard’s CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) Mk1, the first stored-program computer in Australia. In 1956 the machine was renamed CSIRAC.

Excluding the BINAC, which only operated for a short time, the CSIR Mk1 was one of only three stored-program computers operating in the world at this time.  CSIRAC, preserved at the Melbourne Museum, is one of only a very few first generation electronic computers that have survived, including the Zuse Z4, and one or two Ferranti Pegasus computers.

Engineering Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, published High-Speed Computing Devices, the first textbook on how to build an electronic digital computer. Written in the form of a “cookbook,” the book described available computer components and how they worked. It included extensive bibliographies of the American computing literature and some of the English, and contained a brief reference to Vannevar Bush's Rapid Selector information retrieval device then under development. The device was in operation by 1951.

Project Whirlwind was in limited operation at MIT as a general purpose computer. The first computer that operated in real time, with the first video display for output, the Whirlwind was the first computer that was not just an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems

Between 1950 and 1954 IBM developed and built at Columbia University's Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, 612 West 115th Street location, the Naval Ordnance Research Computer (NORC)—for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance.

The NORC was the "first supercomputer," and "the most powerful computer on earth from 1954 to about 1963." The NORC’s multiplication unit remains the fastest ever built with vacuum tube technology.

IBM introduced the input-output channel as a feature on the NORC. This innovation synchronized the flow of data into and out of the computer while computation was in progress, relieving the central processor of that task.

Edmund Berkeley's "Simon," which has been called the first personal computer, developed out of his book, Giant Brains, or Machines That Think, published in November 1949, in which he wrote,

 “We shall now consider how we can design a very simple machine that will think.. Let us call it Simon, because of its predecessor, Simple Simon... Simon is so simple and so small in fact that it could be built to fill up less space than a grocery-store box; about four cubic feet. . . . It may seem that a simple model of a mechanical brain like Simon is of no great practical use. On the contrary, Simon has the same use in instruction as a set of simple chemical experiments has: to stimulate thinking and understanding, and to produce training and skill. A training course on mechanical brains could very well include the construction of a simple model mechanical brain, as an exercise."

One year later in an article published in Scientific American about “Simon,” Berkeley predicted that “some day we may even have small computers in our homes, drawing energy from electric power lines like refrigerators or radios.”

"Simon I was built by William A. Porter and two Columbia University graduate students of electrical engineering. Simon is a simple mechanical "brain" that can transfer information automatically from any one of its "registers" to any other, and it can perform reasoning operations of indefinite length. Its relays basic functions are programming, storage, computation, input, and output" (Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

"The Simon's architecture was based on relays. The programs were run from a standard paper tape with five rows of holes for data. The registers and ALU could store only 2 bit. The data entry was made through the punched paper or by five keys on the front panel of the machine. The output was provided by five lamps. The punched tape served not only for data entry, but also as a memory for the machine. The instructions were carried out in sequence, as they were read from the tape. The machine was able to perform four operations: addition, negation, greater than, and selection" (Wikipedia article on Simon (computer) accessed 10-10-2011).

In his 1956 article, "Small Robots-Report," Berkeley stated that he had spent $4000 developing Simon.  He built only one machine, preserved at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. Berkeley also marketed engineering plans for Simon, of which 400 copies were sold.

Russian mathematician and computer scientist Sergei Lebedev had MESM, the first Russian stored-program computer, operational in Feofaniya (Ukrainian: Феофанія), Theophania, a suburb of Kiev.

"Work on MESM got going properly at the end of 1948 and, considering the challenges, the rate of progress was remarkable. Ukraine was still struggling to recover from the devastation of its occupation during WWII, and many of Kyiv’s buildings lay in ruins. The monastery in Feofania was among the buildings destroyed during the war, so the MESM team had to build their working quarters from scratch—the laboratory, metalworking shop, even the power station that would provide electricity. Although small—just 20 people—the team was extraordinarily committed. They worked in shifts 24 hours a day, and many lived in rooms above the laboratory. (You can listen to a lively account of this time in programme 3 of the BBC’s ”Electronic brains” series.) 

"MESM ran its first program on November 6, 1950, and went into full-time operation in 1951. In 1952, MESM was used for top-secret calculations relating to rocketry and nuclear bombs, and continued to aid the Institute’s research right up to 1957. By then, Lebedev had moved to Moscow to lead the construction of the next generation of Soviet supercomputers, cementing his place as a giant of European computing. As for MESM, it met a more prosaic fate—broken into parts and studied by engineering students in the labs at Kyiv’s Polytechnic Institute" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/remembering-remarkable-soviet-computing.html, accessed 12-25-2011)

IBM decided to produce their first electronic computer, the 701. It was a machine for scientific applications based on the Princeton IAS design.

The Paris symposium,  Les Machines á calculer et la pensée humaine (Calculating Machines and Human Thought) took place at l'Institut Blaise Pascal.

Unlike the other early computer conferences, no demonstration of a stored-program electronic computer occurred.  Louis Couffignal demonstrated the prototype of his non-stored-program machine.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 526.

In February 1951 the first Ferranti Mark I version of the Manchester University machine was delivered to the University of Manchester in England.

With the exception of the unique BINAC delivered to Northrop Aircraft in the United States, the Ferranti Mark I was the first commercially produced electronic digital computer delivered to a customer.

Whirlwind I began operation at MIT.

Whirlwind I included the first primitive graphical display on its vectorscope screen. (See Reading 8.7.)

The second English electronic computer conference was held at the University of Manchester to inaugurate the first Ferranti Mark 1. There Maurice Wilkes introduced the term microprogramming, referring to the design of control circuits. The idea was not widely accepted until the following decade. (See Reading 8.8.)

The EDVAC binary, stored-program computer, planning for which had started in 1944, with development starting in 1947-48, was finally operational at the Moore School in Philadelphia. By this time it was essentially obsolete.

Manufacturers began producing vacuum tubes especially designed for use in digital circuits.

Three-dimensional magnetic-core memory replaced electrostatic memory on the Whirlwind I, leading to increased performance and reliability.

British electrical engineer Kenyon Taylor and team, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR project (a pioneering computerized battlefield information system) invented the first trackball, a precursor of the computer mouse. It used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. The DATAR system was first successfully tested on Lake Ontario in autumn 1953.

The IAS computer was fully operational at Princeton on June 10, 1952.

Heinz Billing's G1 was in full operation at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, directed by Werner Heisenberg. This was the first electronic computer in Germany. It used drum memory, but it was not a stored-program machine.

IBM introduced the 701, their first stored-program electronic computer for commercial production.

Designed by Nathaniel Rochester, and based on the IAS machine at Princeton, the IBM 701 was intended for scientific use. Feeling that the word "computer" was too closely associated with UNIVAC, IBM called the 701 an “electronic data processing machine.” IBM eventually sold nineteen of these machines. (See Reading 8.9.)

"The 701 has at least 25 times the over-all speed but is less than one-quarter the size of IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, which was dismantled to make room for its speedier successor."

"During its five-year reign as one of the world's best-known "electronic brains," the SSEC solved a wide variety of scientific and engineering problems, some involving many millions of sequential calculations. Such other projects as computing the positions of the moon for several hundred years and plotting the courses of the five outer planets -- with resulting corrections in astronomical tables which had been considered standard for many years -- won such popular acclaim for the SSEC that it stimulated the imaginations of pseudo-scientific fiction writers and served as an authentic setting for such motion pictures as "Walk East on Beacon," a spy-thriller with an FBI background.

"Though the 701 occupies the same quarters as the SSEC, which it rendered obsolete, it is not "built in" to the room as was its predecessor. Instead, it is smartly housed between serrated walls of soft-finished aluminum. A balconied conference room, overlooking the calculator and, separated from it by sloping plate glass, provides a vantage point for observing operations and discussing computations. Ample space is provided for writing the complex and abstract equations that are the stock in trade of engineers and scientists in an age of atomic energy and supersonic flight.

"The 701 uses all three of the most advanced electronic storage, or "memory" devices -- cathode ray tubes, magnetic drums and magnetic tapes. The computing unit uses small versions of the familiar electronic tubes, which are able to count at millions of pulses a second. In addition, several thousand germanium diodes are used in place of vacuum tubes, with resultant savings in space and power requirements.

"The 701 was designed for scientific and research purposes, and similar components are adaptable to the requirements of accounting and record-keeping. Research on commercial, data processing machines is under way.

"The 701 is capable of performing more than 16,000 addition or subtraction operations a second, and more than 2,000 multiplication or division operations a second. In solving a typical problem, the 701 performs an average of 14,000 mathematical operations a second."

(quotations from IBM's original press release from the IBM Archives website).

English Electric constructed a commercial version of Alan Turing’s Pilot ACE called DEUCE.

Thirty-three of the DEUCE machines were sold, the last in 1962.

IBM announced the 704. It was the first commercially available computer to incorporate indexing and floating point arithmetic as standard features. The 704 also featured a magnetic core memory, far more reliable than its predecessors’ cathode ray tube memories. A commercial success, IBM produced one hundred twenty-three 704s between 1955 and 1960.

Development began for NORAD on the SAGE Air Defense System, using a computer built by IBM after a design based on the Whirlwind.

The system included the first light pen.

The full SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) automated control system for tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft was completed by 1963.

Texas Instruments manufactured the first silicon transistor, the 900-905 series.

IBM introduced the IBM 608 transistor calculator, the first all solid-state computer commercially marketed.

IBM developed magnetic core storage units, a dramatic improvement over cathode ray tube memory technology.

By successfully adapting pill-making machines for production, IBM greatly improved the manufacture of these tiny, “doughnut” shaped, iron oxide cores, making the cores reliable and cost effective enough to serve as the basic technology behind every computer’s main memory until the early 1970s.

The ENIAC was turned off for the last time at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

It was estimated that this single machine did more computation during the ten years of its operation than the entire human race had done up till the time of its invention.

ETL-Mark-2, the first full-scale programmable computer in Japan, was produced by the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Roppongi, Tokyo. It was built from 21,000 relays, and did not store a program.

FUJIC, the first Japanese stored-program electronic computer, was designed and built by essentially one person—Dr. Okazaki Bunji—for the Fuji Photo Film Company in Odawara, western Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. The project began in 1949.

"Originally designed to perform calculations for lens design by Fuji, the ultimate goal of FUJIC's construction was to achieve a speed 1,000 times that of human calculation for the same purpose – amazingly, the actual performance achieved was double that number.

"Employing approximately 1,700 vacuum tubes, the computer's word length was 33 bits. It had an ultrasonic mercury delay line memory of 255 words, with an average access time of 500 microseconds. An addition or subtraction was clocked at 100 microseconds, multiplication at 1,600 microseconds, and division at 2,100 microseconds."

FUJIC is preserved in The National Museum Of Nature and Science in Tokyo.

The first Japanese conference on electronic computers was held at Waseda University, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  

IBM phased out vacuum tubes in computer design:

“It shall be the policy of IBM to use solid-state circuitry in all machine developments. Furthermore, no new commercial machines or devices shall be announced which make primary use of tube circuitry.”

EDSAC 2, the first large-scale computer with a control unit based on microprogramming, became operational at the University of Cambridge.

The first SAGE AN/FSQ-7 was operational for the SAGE Air Defense System on a limited basis. The AN/FSQ-7 computer contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 0.5 acres (2,000 m2) of of floor space, weighed 275 tons, and used up to three megawatts of power. Performance was about 75,000 instructions per second. From the standpoint of physical dimensions, the fifty-two AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built.  

"Although the machines used a large number of vacuum tubes, the failure rate of an individual tube was low due to efforts in quality control and a novel quality assurance system called marginal checking that discovered tubes that were growing weak, before they failed. Each SAGE site included two computers for redundancy, with one processor on "hot standby" at all times. In spite of the poor reliability of the tubes, this dual-processor design made for remarkably high overall system uptime. 99% availability was not unusual."

The system allowed online access, in graphical form, to data transmitted to and processed by its computers. Fully deployed by 1963, the IBM-built early warning system remained operational until 1984. With 23 direction centers situated on the northern, eastern, and western boundaries of the United States, SAGE pioneered the use of computer control over large, geographically distributed systems.

"Both MIT and IBM supported the project as contractors. IBM's role in SAGE (the design and manufacture of the AN/FSQ-7 computer, a vacuum tube computer with ferrite core memory based on the never-built Whirlwind II) was an important factor leading to IBM's domination of the computer industry, accounting for more than a half billion dollars in revenue, nearly 10% of IBM's income in the late 1950s" (Wikipedia article on Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, accessed 03-03-2012).

Commercial transistorized computers, including the UNIVAC Solid State 80 and the Philco TRANSAC S-2000, were introduced. These inaugurated the so-called second generation of electronic computers.

Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collaborated on the first significant computer music composition, the Illiac Suite, composed on the University of Illinois ILLIAC I computer. The ILLIAC I was the first von Neumann architecture computer built and owned by an American university.

Konrad Zuse produced the Z22, the first commercial electronic digital computer in Germany. The Z22 used vacuum tubes, a relatively late date for that technology.

Zuse KG was the first independent German electronic computer company. It was eventually purchased by Siemens.

Seymour Cray of Control Data Corporation, Minneapolis, Minnesota, built the first transistorized supercomputer, the CDC 1604.

IBM announced their 1401, a relatively inexpensive computer that proved very popular with businesses, and which began to compete seriously with existing punched-card equipment.

IBM began production of the the AN/FSQ-7, a military grade version of the Whirlwind.

"The AN/FSQ-7 used 55,000 vaccuum tubes, about 1/2 acre (2,000 m²) of floor space, weighed 275 tons and used up to three megawatts of power. Although the failure rate of an individual tube was low due to efforts in quality control. So many were used that the daily failure rate was in the hundreds. Each center had staff dedicated to replacing dead tubes by running up and down the racks of machinery with shopping carts filled with replacements. The AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built, and will likely hold that record in the future. Each SAGE site included two computers for redundancy, with one processor on "hot standby" at all times. In spite of the poor reliability of the tubes, this dual-processor design made for remarkably high overall system uptime. 99% availability was not unusual."

The Burroughs “Atlas Guidance” computer was used at Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy) to control the launch of the Atlas missile. It was one of the first computers to use transistors.

". . .the first machine was installed at the Cape Canaveral missile range in June 1957. Although Atlas missile launches started in September 1957, test patterns were transmitted to the missile in place of actual guidance commands for the first four flights. The first computer-controlled launch was on July 19, 1958. The computer had separate memory areas for instructions (2048 18-bit words) and data (256 24-bit words). The instruction area was increased to 2816 words, beginning with the Model III version, which was first delivered in December 1958. The Atlas guidance computer had no facilities for developing programs, so they were written on the UDEC II, the Datatron, and the 220, using simulator software. Burroughs was still doing Atlas programming on the 220 in 1964. In all, 18 Atlas guidance computers were built at a total project cost of $37 million. The computer was very reliable, and no Atlas launch was ever aborted due to computer failure." 

Wesley A. Clark designed and built the TX-2 computer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts. It had 320 kilobytes of fast memory, about twice the capacity of the biggest commercial machines. Other features were magnetic tape storage, an on-line typewriter, the first Xerox printer, paper tape for program input, and a nine inch CRT screen. Among its applications were development of interactive graphics and research on human-computer interaction.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Defense Department increased funding for research on computing.

IBM introduced a transistorized version of its vacuum-tube-logic 709 computer, the 7090.

The 7090 was the first commercially available general purpose computer with transistor logic. It became the most popular large computer of the early 1960s.

In 1961 mathematician and founder of Stanford University's Computer Science department George E. Forsythe coined the term "computer science" in his paper "Engineering Students Must Learn both Computing and Mathematics", J. Eng. Educ. 52 (1961) 177-188, quotation from p. 177.

Of this Donald Knuth wrote, "In 1961 we find him using the term 'computer science' for the first time in his writing:

[Computers] are developing so rapidly that even computer scientists cannot keep up with them. It must be bewildering to most mathematicians and engineers...In spite of the diversity of the applications, the methods of attacking the difficult problems with computers show a great unity, and the name of Computer Sciences is being attached to the discipline as it emerges. It must be understood, however, that this is still a young field whose structure is still nebulous. The student will find a great many more problems than answers. 

"He [Forsythe] identified the "computer sciences" as the theory of programming, numerical analysis, data processing, and the design of computer systems, and observed that the latter three were better understood than the theory of programming, and more available in courses" (Knuth, "George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science," Communications of the ACM, 15 (1972) 722).

Wesley A. Clark, a computer scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, started building the LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer).  This machine, which some later called both the first mini-computer and a forerunner of  the personal computer, was first used in 1962. It had small table-top size, “low cost” ($43,000), keyboard and display, file system and an interactive operating system. It's design was placed in the public domain. Eventually fifty of the machines were sold by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Texas Instruments delivered the first integrated circuit computer to the U.S. Air Force.

“The advanced experimental equipment has a total volume of only 6.3 cubic inches and weighs only 10 ounces. It provides the identical electrical functions of a computer using conventional components which is 150 times its size and 48 times its weight and which also was demonstrated for purposes of comparison. It uses 587 digital circuits (Solid Circuit™ semiconductor net works) each formed within a minute bar of silicon material. The larger computer uses 8500 conventional components and has a volume of 1000 cubic inches and weight of 480 ounces.”

John W. Haanstra, Chairman, Bob O. Evans, Vice Chairman, and others at IBM issued as a confidential internal document Processor Products—Final Report of SPREAD Task Group.

In the period from 1952 through 1962, IBM produced seven families of systems—the 140, 1620, 7030 (Stretch), 7040, 7070, 7080, and 7090 groups. They were incompatible with one another, and both users and IBM staff recognized problems caused by this incompatibility. The SPREAD report, as adopted by IBM, led to the development of the IBM System/360 family of compatible computers and peripherals, and essentially reformed the company.

"IBM's public commitment to the SPREAD plan was embodied in the System/360, announced in Poughkeepsie on April 7, 1964. Six machines were announced: the 360 Model 30, 40, 50, 60, 62 and 70. Over the next few years, a number of additional systems were added to the 360 family.

"The SPREAD plan eventually allowed IBM to direct substantial resources toward the development of the full system—peripherals, programming, communications, and new applications. The success of System/360 is perhaps best measured by IBM's financial performance. In the six years from January 1, 1966 to December 31, 1971, IBM's gross income increased 2.3 times, from $3.6 billion to $8.3 billion, and net earnings after taxes increrased 2.3 times, from $477 million to $1.1 billion. In 1982 direct descendants of System/360 accounted for more than half of IBM's gross income and earnings.

"Perhaps most important, the SPREAD Report permitted IBM to focus on an excellence not possible with multiple architectures. It resulted in powerful new peripherals, programming, terminals, high-volume applications, and complementary diversifications whose future can only be imagined" (Bob O. Evans, "Introduction to SPREAD Report," Annals of the History of Computing 5 [1983] 5).  The text of the report was reprinted in the same journal issue on pp. 6-26.

Nearly all copies of this confidential report were destroyed. An original copy, donated by one of the authors, Jerome Svigals, is preserved in the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts introduced the PDP-5, DEC’s first 12 bit computer.

This was later called “the world’s first commercially produced mini computer.” The PDP-8 introduced in 1965 was also given this designation.

RCA announced the Spectra series of computers, which could run the same software as IBM’s 360 machines. The Spectra computers were also the first commercial computers to use integrated circuits.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly received U.S. patent no. 3,120,606 for the ENIAC— a general patent on the stored-program electronic computer, roughly 18 years after their application. Sperry Rand Univac, owner of the patent, charged a 1.5 percent royalty for all electronic computers sold by all companies except IBM, with which it had previously cross-licensed patents.  Since IBM manufactured the majority of computers produced at this time, the royalties on the patent were not as large as they could have been.

IBM announced the System/360 family of compatible machines.  All IBM System/360 products ran the same operating system—OS/360. Previously products developed by different divisions of IBM were incompatible.

IBM System/360 products were the first IBM computers capable of both commercial and scientific applications that were offered at what was considered a “reasonable price.” Their architecture incorporated Microprogramming.

M. R. Davis and T. O. Ellis of The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, published The RAND Tablet: A Machine Graphical Communication Device. They indicated that the device had been in use since 1963.

"The RAND table is believed to be the first such graphic device that is digital, is relatively low-cost, possesses excellent linearity, and is able to uniquely describe 10 [to the 6th power] locations in the 10" x 10" active table area. . . . the tablet has great potential no only in such applications as digitizing map information, but also as a working tool in the study of more esoteric applications of graphical languages for man-machine interaction. . . . " (p.iv)

"The RAND tablet device generates 10-bit x and 10-bit y stylus position information. It is connected to an input channel of a general-purpose computer and also to an oscilloscope display. The display control multiplexes the stylus position information with computer-generated information in such a way that the oscilloscope display contains a composite of the current pen position (represented as a dot) and the computer output. In addition, the computer may regenerate meaningful track history on the CRT, so that while the user is writing, it appears that the pen has "ink." This displayed "ink" is visualized from the oscilloscope display while hand-directing the stylus position on the tablet. users normally adjust within a few minutes to the conceptual superposition of the displayed ink and the actual off-screen pen movement. There is no apparent loss of ease or speed in writing, printing, constructing arbitrary figures, or even in penning one's signature" (pp. 2-3).

J. W. Ward, History of Pen Computing: Annotated Bibliography in On-line Character Recognition and Pen Computing: http://rwservices.no-ip.info:81/pens/biblio70.html#DavisMR64 , accessed 12-30-2009).

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts, introduced the PDP-8, the first “production model minicomputer.” “Small in physical size, selling in minimum configuration for under $20,000.”

Honeywell attempted to open the home computer market with its Kitchen Computer.

The H316 was the first under-$10,000 16-bit machine from a major computer manufacturer. It was the smallest addition to the Honeywell "Series 16" line, and was available in three versions: table-top, rack-mountable, and self-standing pedestal. The pedestal version, complete with cutting board, was marketed by Neiman Marcus as "The Kitchen Computer.” It came with some built-in recipes, two weeks' worth of programming, a cook book, and an apron.

There is no evidence that any examples were sold.

Texas Instruments filed the patent for the first hand-held electronic calculator, invented by Jack S. Kilby, Jerry Merryman, and Jim Van Tassel. The patent (Number 3,819,921) was awarded on June 25, 1974.

This miniature calculator employed a large-scale integrated semiconductor array containing the equivalent of thousands of discrete semiconductor devices.

Electrical engineer and inventor Douglas C. Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center at SRI  filed a patent for an X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System. This device eventually became known as the Mouse.

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, demonstrated at the San Francisco Convention Center an “oNLine System” (NLS), the features of which included hypertext, text editing, screen windowing, and email. To make this system operate, Engelbart used the mouse which he had invented the previous year.

In 1971 Phil Ray and Gus Roche of Computer Terminal Corporation of San Antonio, Texas, later known as Datapoint Corporation, began shipping the Datapoint 2200, a mass-produced programmable terminal, which could be used as a simple stand-alone personal computer.

"It was intended by its designers simply to be a versatile, cost-efficient terminal for connecting to a wide variety of mainframes by loading various terminal emulations from tape rather than being hardwired as most terminals were. However, enterprising users in the business sector (including Pillsbury Foods) realized that this so-called 'programmable terminal' was equipped to perform any task a simple computer could, and exploited this fact by using their 2200s as standalone computer systems. Equally significant is the fact that the terminal's multi-chip CPU (processor) became the embryo of the x86 architecture upon which the original IBM PC and its descendants are based.

"Aside from being one of the first personal computers, the Datapoint 2200 has another connection to computer history. Its original design called for a single-chip 8-bit microprocessor for the CPU, rather than a conventional processor built from discrete TTL modules. In 1969, CTC contracted two companies, Intel and Texas Instruments, to make the chip. TI was unable to make a reliable part and dropped out. Intel was unable to make CTC's deadline. Intel and CTC renegotiated their contract, ending up with CTC keeping its money and Intel keeping the eventually completed processor.

"CTC released the Datapoint 2200 using about 100 discrete TTL components (SSI/MSI chips) instead of a microprocessor, while Intel's single-chip design, eventually designated the Intel 8008, was finally released in April 1972. The 8008's seminal importance lies in its becoming the ancestor of Intel's other 8-bit CPUs, which were followed by their assembly language compatible 16-bit CPU's—the first members of the x86-family, as the instruction set was later to be known. Thus, CTC's engineers may be said to have fathered the world's most commonly used and emulated instruction set architecture from the mid-1980s to date" (Wikipedia article on Datapoint 2200, accessed 09-12-2012).

In 1970 DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) of Maynard, Massachusetts, introduced the PDP-11 minicomputer, which popularized the notion of a “bus” (i.e.“Unibus”) onto which a variety of additional circuit boards or peripheral products could be placed. DEC sold 20,000 PDP-11s by 1975.

In 1970 Xerox opened the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC became the incubator of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer, the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment, Interpress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScript), and Ethernet.

IBM announced the System/370, an upgrade for the 360, using semiconductor memory in place of magnetic cores.

Gilbert Hyatt filed a patent application entitled Single Chip Integrated Circuit Computer Architecture based on work begun in 1968.

Hyatt's patent was the first general patent on the microprocessor. Twenty years later, in 1990, the U.S. Patent Office awarded the patent to Hyatt, but was overturned in 1995.

Intel of Santa Clara, California, announced the first microprocessor: the 4004 four-bit central processor logic chip designed by Federico Faggin. 

While teaching computer science at Carnegie Mellon University C. Gordon Bell and Allen Newell of the Rand Corporation in Pittsburgh published Computer Structures: Readings and Examples, a systematized presentation of the principles governing the design of computer systems.

Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, California, introduced the HP-35, their first pocket calculator, and the first pocket scientific calculator with trigonometric and exponential functions. The unit, which fit in a shirt pocket, was priced $395.

"Before the HP-35, the only practical portable devices for performing trigonometric and exponential functions were slide rules. Existing pocket calculators at the time were only four-function, i.e., they could only do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It had been originally known simply as 'The Calculator', but Hewlett suggested that it be called the HP-35 because it had 35 keys" (Wikipedia article on HP-35, accessed 03-10-2012).

In 1973 the Alto computer system was operational at Xerox PARC. Conceptually the first personal computer system, the Alto eventually featured the first WYSYWG (What You See is What You Get) editor, a graphic user interface (GUI), networking through Ethernet, and a mouse. The system was priced $32,000.

IBM built the first prototype computer employing RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture.

Based on an invention by IBM researcher John Cocke, the RISC concept simplified the instructions given to run computers, making them faster and more powerful. It was implemented in the experimental IBM 801 minicomputer. The goal of the 801 was to execute one instruction per cycle.

In 1987 John Cocke received the A. M. Turing Award for significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC); for discovering and systematizing many fundamental transformations now used in optimizing compilers including reduction of operator strength, elimination of common subexpressions, register allocation, constant propagation, and dead code elimination.

American computer scientist Gerald J. Popek of UCLA and Robert P. Goldberg published Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures, a set of conditions sufficient to support system virtualization efficiently in computer architecure. 

"Even though the requirements are derived under simplifying assumptions, they still represent a convenient way of determining whether a computer architecture supports efficient virtualization and provide guidelines for the design of virtualized computer architectures."

Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, California, introduced the HP-65, the  first magnetic card-programmable handheld calculator, featuring nine storage registers and room for 100 keystroke instructions. It also included a magnetic card reader/writer to save and load programs. The price was $795.

"Bill Hewlett's design requirement was that the calculator should fit in his shirt pocket. That is one reason for the tapered depth of the calculator. The magnetic program cards fed in at the thick end of the calculator under the LED display. The documentation for the programs in the calculator is very complete, including algorithms for hundreds of applications, including the solutions of differential equations, stock price estimation, statistics, and so forth" (Wikipedia article on HP-65, accessed 03-10-2012).

Intel, Santa Clara, California, announced the 8080 eight-bit microprocessor.

The 8080 powered the MITS Altair 8800 designed by H. Edward Roberts, the first truly inexpensive personal computer. Within a year the 8800 was designed into hundreds of different products.

H. Edward Roberts, working in Albuquerque, New Mexico, announced the MITS (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) Altair personal computer kit in an article in Popular Electronics magazine.

The first personal computer to be offered for sale, the MITS Altair had an “open architecture.”

The basic Altair 8800 sold for $397.

The first Apple Computer, designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak, and known retrospectively as the Apple I (Apple 1) was demonstrated at the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California in July 1976. Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs had the idea of manufacturing the computer for sale. Together they founded the Apple Computer Company, and to finance the production of their first product Jobs sold his only means of transportation, a VW van, and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500. They built the Apple I in the garage of Jobs's parents' house in Palo Alto.  

"The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 at a price of US$666.66, because Wozniak liked the repeating digits and because they originally sold it to a local shop for $500 for the one-third markup. About 200 units were produced. Unlike other hobbyist computers of its day, which were sold as kits, the Apple I was a fully assembled circuit board containing about 60+ chips. However, to make a working computer, users still had to add a case, power supply transformers, power switch, ASCII keyboard, and composite video display. An optional board providing a cassette interface for storage was later released at a cost of $75" (Wikipedia article on Apple I, accessed 11-26-2011).

♦ Of the approximately 200 Apple 1s built, 43 were thought to survive in 2012.  Of those six were then thought to be in working order. In July 2012 a working example sold for $310,000 at Sotheby's, New York.  In November 2012 a working example complete with all peripherals, including monitor, tape drive and manuals, sold for amost €500,000 including premium (about $630,000) at Auction Team Breker in Cologne, Germany.

Apple introduced the Apple II, the first personal computer sold as a fully assembled product, and the first with color graphics.

Wang Laboratories, Lowell, Massachusetts, introduced its VS minicomputer system, which became, for a time, one of the most popular office systems, "inaugurating the concept of office automation."

Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor, which gave rise to the x86 architecture.

Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a low-cost version of the 8086 using an eight-bit external bus.

Xerox introduced the 8010 Star Information System, the first commercial system to incorporate a bitmapped display, a windows-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, printer servers and e-mail.

Xerox's 8010 Star was developed at Xerox's Systems Development Department (SDD) in El Segundo, California. A section of SDD ("SDD North") was located in Palo Alto, California, and included some people borrowed from Xerox's PARC. SDD's mission was to design the "Office of the Future"— a system, easy to use, that would incorporate the best features of the Xerox Alto, and could automate many office tasks.

Writer and computer entrepreneur Adam Osborne and Osborne Computer Corporation, Hayward, California, produced the first commercially successful "portable" computer, the Osborne 1. It weighed twenty-three pounds, ran the CP/M operating system, and sold for $1795, with $2000 worth of software included. Its main deficiencies were a tiny 5 inch (13 cm) display screen and use of single sided, single density floppy disk drives which could not contain sufficient data for practical business applications. Its 23 pound weight meant that the computer was more "luggable" than portable.

On August 12, 1981 IBM introduced their open architecture personal computer (PC) based on the Intel 8088 processor. The IBM PC  ran PC-DOS, the IBM-branded version of the 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS, provided by Microsoft. The machine was originally designated as the IBM 5150, putting it in the "5100" series, though its architecture was not directly descended from the IBM 5100.

On August 1, 1981 a review of the IBM PC appeared on USENET (accessed 10-16-2009).

The GRiD Compass 1100, introduced by Grid Systems Corporation, was probably the first commercial computer created in a "clamshell" laptop format, and one of the first truly portable machines.

The 1100 included a magnesium clamshell case with a screen that folded flat over the keyboard, a switching power supply, electro-luminescent display, non-volatile bubble memory, and a built-in modem.

SUN Microsystems, founded on February 24, 1982 by Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy— students at Stanford who worked on the Stanford University Network, announced its first UNIX workstation, the Sun 1. The company headquarters was in Santa Clara, California.

"The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation,  was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed as a 3M computer: 1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte and 1 Megapixel. It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced Memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses" (Wikipedia article on Sun Microsystems, accessed 06-12-2009).

In June 1982 Columbia Data Products (CDP) of Columbia, Maryland, introduced the MPC 1600 "Multi Personal Computer," an exact functional copy of the IBM PC model 5150 except for the BIOS, which was developed by a "clean room" reverse engineering process, thus avoiding copyright infringement. IBM had published the bus and BIOS specifications, wrongly assuming that this would be enough to encourage the add-on market, and prevent unlicensed copying of the design.

"As the first IBM PC clone, the MPC was actually superior to the IBM original. It came with 128 KiB RAM standard, compared to the IBM's 64 KiB maximum. The MPC had eight PC expansion slots, with one filled by its video card. Its floppy disk drive interface was built into the motherboard. The IBM PC, in contrast, had only five expansion slots, with the video card and floppy disk controller taking two of them. The MPC also included two floppy disk drives, one parallel and two serial ports, which were all optional on the original IBM PC. The MPC was followed up with a portable PC, the 32 pound (15 kg) "luggable" Columbia VP in 1983" (Wikipedia article on Columbia Data Products, accessed 01-01-2013).

Commodore International, West Chester, Pennsylvania, issued the Commodore 64 — "the first cheap home computer" at the price of $595.

The Commodore 64 looked like a bulky keyboard, but included color graphics, and excelled at playing early video games. Between 1982 and 1984 30,000,000 units were sold, making it the best-selling personal computer model of this era. Roughly 10,000 commercial programs were produced for this computer.

IBM introduced the Scanmaster 1, a mainframe computer terminal designed to scan, transmit and store images of documents electronically.

The TRS-80, Model 100, made by Kyocera, Kyoto, Japan, and marketed in the U.S. in Radio Shack stores owned by Tandy Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas, introduced the concept of a "notebook" computer.

More than 6,000,000 TRS-80s were sold; the introductory price was $1099.00.

During 1983 and the first part of 1984 Phoenix Technologies, then in Boston, Massachusetts, created the first commercially available IBM PC compatible ROM Bios. Licensability of this firmware interface, which would allow a computer to run the same operating system and the same applications as the IBM PC, enabled the rapid expansion of the IBM PC compatible computer industry. 

To defend against the inevitable copyright infringement suits expected to be brought by IBM, Phoenix engineers reverse-engineered the Bios using clean-room design, in which the software engineers had never read IBM's reference manuals: 

"Phoenix developed a 'clean room' technique that isolated the engineers who had been contaminated by reading the IBM source listings in the IBM Technical Reference Manuals. The contaminated engineers wrote specifications for the BIOS APIs and provided the specifications to 'clean' engineers who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. Those 'clean' engineers developed code from scratch to mimic the BIOS APIs. This technique provided Phoenix with a defensibly non-infringing IBM PC-compatible ROM BIOS. Because the programmers who wrote the Phoenix code had never read IBM's reference manuals, nothing they wrote could have been copied from IBM's code, no matter how closely the two matched" (Wikipedia article on Phoenix Technologies, accessed 01-01-2013).

Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, California, introduced the HP-150, one of the earliest commercially available touchscreen computers. 

"The screen is not a touch screen in the strict sense, but a 9" Sony CRT surrounded by infrared emitters and detectors which detect the position of any non-transparent object on the screen. In the original HP-150, these emitters & detectors were placed within small holes located in the inside of the monitor's bezel (which resulted in the bottom series of holes sometimes filling with dust and causing the touch screen to fail; until the dust was vacuumed from the holes)" (Wikipedia article on HP-150, accessed 12-30-2009).

IBM introduced the model M keyboard, considered by PC World to be the "greatest keyboard of all time." (http://www.pcworld.com/article/147939/inside_the_worlds_greatest_keyboard.html) The PC World article contains a remarkable series of images showing how the keyboard was engineered and its many virtues.

Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh ("Mac"), with a graphical user interface based on the Xerox Star system.

The Casio FX-7000G, the first hand-held graphing calculator, was introduced by Casio, Tokyo, Japan in October 1985. The calculator offered 82 scientific functions, which could be graphed, and was capable of manual computation for basic arithmetic problems.

GRiD Systems, a subsidiary of Tandy Corporation, Fort Worth, Texas, introduced the first commercially available tablet computer: the GRiDPad, which used an operating system based on MS-DOS.

IBM developed scalable parallel systems, joining multiple computer processors and breaking down complex, data-intensive jobs to speed their completion.

In April 1993 AT&T introduced the AT&T EO Personal Communicator, the first tablet computer with wireless connectivity via a cellular phone. The device, which provided wireless voice, email, and fax communications, was developed by GO/Eo, a subsidiary of GO Corporation, both of which were acquired by AT&T in 1993. As advanced as it was, the AT&T Personal Communicator was probably far ahead of the market. EO Inc., 52% owned by AT&T, failed to meet its revenue targets and shut down on July, 1994.

"Two models, the Communicator 440 and 880 were produced and measured about the size of a small clipboard. Both were powered by the AT&T Hobbit chip, created by AT&T specifically for running code from the C programming language. They also contained a host of I/O ports - modem, parallel, serial, VGA out and SCSI. The device came with a wireless cellular network modem, a built-in microphone with speaker and a free subscription to AT&T EasyLink Mail for both fax and e-mail messages.

"Perhaps the most interesting part was the operating system, PenPoint OS, created by GO Corporation. Widely praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the OS never gained widespread use. Also equally compelling was the tightly integrated applications suite, Perspective, licensed to EO by Pensoft" (Wikipedia article on EO Personal Communicator, accessed 02-03-2010).

Ken Maki, The AT&T EO Travel Guide. (1993).

Supercomputer ASCI Blue-Pacific SST, jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM, could perform 3.9 trillion calculations per second (15,000 times faster than the average desktop computer) and had over 2.6 trillion bytes of memory (80,000 times more than the average PC).

IBM commented that it would take a person using a calculator 63,000 years to perform as many calculations as this computer could perform in a single second.

IBM announced the start of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, Blue Gene, which was 500 times more powerful than the world’s fastest computers at the time of the announcement.

Initially Blue Gene was applied to the study of bio-molecular phenomena such as protein folding.

The ASCI White supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California became operational on June 29, 2000. An IBM system, it covered a space the size of two basketball courts and weighed 106 tons. It contained six trillion bytes (TB) of memory, almost 50,000 times greater than the average personal computer at the time, and had more than 160 TB of Serial Disk System storage capacity—enough to hold six times the information stored in the 29 million books in the Library of Congress.

Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, designed between 1847 and 1849, but never previously built, was completed and fully operational at the Science Museum, London.

Built from Babbage’s engineering drawings roughly 150 years after it was originally designed, the calculating section of the machine weighs 2.6 tons and consists of 4000 machined parts. The automatic printing and stereotyping apparatus weighs an equal amount with about the same number of parts. The machine is operated by turning hand-cranks.

The calculating section of the machine was completed in November 1991.

The NASA supercomputer, Project Columbia, a cluster of 20 computers with a total of 10,240 processors, built by Silicon Graphics and Intel at NASA’s Ames Research Center, achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second or teraflops.

“If you could do one calculation per second by hand, it would take you a million years to do what this machine does in a single second.” (NY Times).

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that the BlueGene/L supercomputer built by IBM at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories performed at 280.6 trillion operations per second (teraflops) on the Linpack benchmark, the standard by which major supercomputers were measured. This shattered the previous high mark of performing at 135.3 teraflops.

"IBM said in a statement that if every person in the world had a handheld calculator it would still take decades to perform the number of calculations Blue Gene performs every single second."

On the 60th anniversary of the public announcement of the ENIAC Computerworld published a previously unknown interview with J. Presper Eckert on the origins of the ENIAC.

IBM, the largest patent holder in the U.S., announced that it "will publish its patent filings on the Web for public review as part of a new policy that the company hopes will be a model for others."

On June 29, 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone, an internet-connected multimedia smartphone with a virtual keypad and a virtual keyboard.

At the Macworld Conference and Expo Apple introduced the Macbook Air with a tapered design just 0.16 in. thick at the front, weighing 3 lb. and with an optional solid-state drive. Apple claimed that the Macbook Air was the thinnest notebook computer.

The MacBook Air was pitched as a laptop for frequent travelers. 

Roadrunner, the first hybrid supercomputer, designed and built by scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratories from components originally designed for video game machines, became the first computer to go petascale— capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflop, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second. On May 25, 2008 Roadrunner sustained a performance of 1.026 petaflops, becoming the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system.

"To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

The Cray XT5 supercomputer, known as Jaguar, at the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laborary, in Oak Ridge,Tennessee, became the world's fastest supercomputer by operating at 1.75 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark.

Steve Jobs of Apple introduced the iPad, one-half inch thick, with a 9.7 inch, high resolution color touchscreen (multi-touch) diagonal display, powered by a 1-gigahertz Apple A4 chip and 16 to 64 gigabytes of flash storage, weighing 1.5 pounds and capable of running all iPhone applications, except presumably, the phone. The battery life was supposed to be 10 hours, and the device was supposed to hold a charge for 1 month in standby. The price started at $499.00.

"The new device will have to be far better than the laptop and smartphone at doing important things: browsing the Web, doing e-mail, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying your music collection, playing games, reading e-books. Otherwise, 'it has no reason for being.'" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/live-blogging-the-apple-product-announcement/?hp, accessed 01-27-2010).

Link to iPad on Apple website: http://www.apple.com/ipad/

An original Apple 1 personal computer in excellent condition but with a few later modifications, sold for 110,000 pounds or $174,000 hammer at a Christie's book and manuscript auction in London. (Christie's sale 7882, lot 65).

Associated Press reported that the purchaser was businessman and collector Marco Boglione of Torino, Italy, who bid by phone. His total cost came to 133,250 pounds or about $210,000 after the buyer's premium. Prior to the auction, Christie's estimated the computer would sell for between $160,000-$240,000. When it was released in 1976, the Apple I sold for $666.66.

Only about 200 Apple 1's were built, of which perhaps "30 to 50" remain in existence. The auctioned example came in its original box with a signed letter from Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who hand-built each of the Apple 1's, attended the auction, and offered to autograph the computer.  

See also: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_16695428?source=rss&nclick_check=1, accessed 11-23-2010.

Motorola Mobility, headquartered in Libertyville, Illinois, introduced the Atrix 4G smartphone powered by Nvidia's Tegra 2 dual-core  processor and Android 2.2, with a 4-inch display, 1 GB of RAM, 16 GB of on-board storage, front- and rear-facing cameras, a 1930 mAh battery and a fingerprint reader. Motorola announced that it would also sell laptop and desktop docks that run a full version of Firefox, powered entirely by the phone.

What was significant about this smartphone was that the phone could do the information processing for the laptop or even the desktop interfaces.

Energy and environmental scientist Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, and Stephen Berard, Maria Sanchez, and Henry Wong published “Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing” Annals of the History of Computing, 33, no. 3, 46-54. This historical paper was highly unusual for its enunciation of a predictive trend in computing technology labeled by the press as “Koomey’s Law.”

“Koomey’s law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. The number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling approximately every 1.57 years. This trend has been remarkably stable since the 1950s (R2 of over 98%) and has actually been somewhat faster than Moore’s law. Jon Koomey articulated the trend as follows: ‘at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half.’

Because of Koomey’s law, the amount of battery needed for a fixed computing load will fall by factor of 100 every decade. As computing devices become smaller and more mobile, this trend may be even more important than improvements in raw processing power for many applications. Furthermore, energy costs are becoming an increasingly important determinant of the economics of data centers, further increasing the importance of Koomey’s law” (Wikipedia article on Koomey's Law accessed 11-19-2011).

"IBM researchers unveiled a new generation of experimental computer chips designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers. 

"In a sharp departure from traditional concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.  

"Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be programmed the same way traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.  

"To do this, IBM is combining principles from nanoscience, neuroscience and supercomputing as part of a multi-year cognitive computing initiative. The company and its university collaborators also announced they have been awarded approximately $21 million in new funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 2 of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.

"The goal of SyNAPSE is to create a system that not only analyzes complex information from multiple sensory modalities at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment – all while rivaling the brain’s compact size and low power usage. The IBM team has already successfully completed Phases 0 and 1.  

" 'This is a major initiative to move beyond the von Neumann paradigm that has been ruling computer architecture for more than half a century,' said Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research. 'Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture. These chips are another significant step in the evolution of computers from calculators to learning systems, signaling the beginning of a new generation of computers and their applications in business, science and government.' " (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35251.wss, accessed 08-21-2011).

Steve Jobs, one of the most influential and daring innovators in the history of media, and arguably the most innovative and influential figure in the computer industry since the development of the personal computer, died at the age of 55 after a well-publicized battle with pancreatic cancer. Responsible, as inspirational leader, for building the first commercially successful personal computer (Apple II), for developing and popularizing the graphical user interface (Macintosh) which made personal computers user friendly, for developing desktop publishing, for making music truly portable (iPod, iTunes), for bringing all the elements of the personal computer to cell phones (iPhone), for causing the widespread acceptance of tablet computers (iPad), Jobs not only rescued Apple Computer from near failure and made it for a time the most valuable company in the S&P 500, but also achieved great success through his ownership of Pixar Animation Studios, which he eventually sold to The Walt Disney Company. Characteristics of Jobs' style were exceptional boldness in the conception of products, high quality and ease of use, and elegance of industrial design.

"Mr. Jobs even failed well. NeXT, a computer company he founded during his years in exile from Apple, was never a commercial success. But it was a technology pioneer. The World Wide Web was created on a NeXT computer, and NeXT software is the core of Apple’s operating systems today" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/business/steve-jobs-and-the-power-of-taking-the-big-chance.html?hp).

An article published in The New York Times on October 8, 2011 compared and contrasted the lives and achievements of Steve Jobs with that earlier great American inventor and innovator, Thomas Alva Edison.

In November 2011 The K computer, named for the Japanese word "kei" (京?), which stands for 10 quadrillion, became the first computer to top 10 petaflops.   The design of this supercomputer produced by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan is based on a distributed memory architecture, with over 80,000 compute nodes.  In December 2011 it was the world's fastest supercomputer.

"While the K computer reports the highest total power consumption of any TOP500 supercomputer (9.89 MW – the equivalent of almost 10,000 suburban homes), the computer is relatively efficient, achieving 824.6 GFlop/kWatt. This is 29.8% more efficient than China's NUDT TH MPP (ranked #2 – 2011/06), and 225.8% more efficient than Oak Ridge's Jaguar-Cray XT5-HE (ranked #3 – 2011/06). However, K's efficiency rating still falls far short of the 2097.2 GFlops/kWatt supercomputer record set by IBM's NNSA/SC Blue Gene/Q Prototype 2, which is currently the world's 109th-fastest supercomputer. For comparison, the average power consumption of a TOP 10 system is 4.3 MW, and the average efficiency is 463.7 GFlop/kW.[6] According to TOP500 compiler Jack Dongarra, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee, the K computer's performance equals "one million linked desktop computers". The computer's annual running costs are estimated at US$10 million" (Wikipedia article K Computer, accessed 12-18-2011).

On October 26, 2012 Microsoft released the Windows 8 operating system to the general public. Development of Windows 8 started in 2009 before the release of its predecessor, Windows 7, the last iteration of Windows designed primarily for desktop computers. Windows 8 introduced very significant changes primarily focused toward mobile devices, tablets and cell phones which use touch screens, and:

"to rival other mobile operating systems like Android and iOS, taking advantage of new or emerging technologies like USB 3.0, UEFI firmware, near field communications, cloud computing and the low-power ARM architecture, new security features such as malware filtering, built-in antivirus capabilities, a new installation process optimized for digital distribution, and support for secure boot (a UEFI feature which allows operating systems to be digitally signed to prevent malware from altering the boot process), the ability to synchronize certain apps and settings between multiple devices, along with other changes and performance improvements. Windows 8 also introduces a new shell and user interface based on Microsoft's "Metro" design language, featuring a new Start screen with a grid of dynamically updating tiles to represent applications, a new app platform with an emphasis on touchscreen input, and the new Windows Store to obtain and/or purchase applications to run on the operating system" (Wikipedia article on Windows 8, accessed 12-14-2012).

On December 13, 2012 MIT's technologyreview.com published an interview with Julie Larson-Green, head of product development at Microsoft, in which Larson-Green explained why Microsoft decided it was necessary to rethink and redesign in a relatively radical manner the operating system used by 1.2 billion people:

Why was it necessary to make such broad changes in Windows 8?

"When Windows was first created 25 years ago, the assumptions about the world and what computing could do and how people were going to use it were completely different. It was at a desk, with a monitor. Before Windows 8 the goal was to launch into a window, and then you put that window away and you got another one. But with Windows 8, all the different things that you might want to do are there at a glance with the Live Tiles. Instead of having to find many little rocks to look underneath, you see a kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on and everything you care about all at once. It puts you closer to what you’re trying to get done. 

Windows 8 is clearly designed with touch in mind, and many new Windows 8 PCs have touch screens. Why is touch so important? 

"It’s a very natural way to interact. If you get a laptop with a touch screen, your brain clicks in and you just start touching what makes it faster for you. You’ll use the mouse and keyboard, but even on the regular desktop you’ll find yourself reaching up doing the things that are faster than moving the mouse and moving the mouse around. It’s not like using the mouse, which is more like puppeteering than direct manipulation. 

In the future, are all PCs going to have touch screens? 

"For cost considerations there might always be some computers without touch, but I believe that the vast majority will. We’re seeing that the computers with touch are the fastest-selling right now. I can’t imagine a computer without touch anymore. Once you’ve experienced it, it’s really hard to go back.

Did you take that approach in Windows 8 as a response to the popularity of mobile devices running iOS and Android? 

"We started planning Windows 8 in June of 2009, before we shipped Windows 7, and the iPad was only a rumor at that point. I only saw the iPad after we had this design ready to go. We were excited. A lot of things they were doing about mobile and touch were similar to what we’d been thinking. We [also] had differences. We wanted not just static icons on the desktop but Live Tiles to be a dashboard for your life; we wanted you to be able to do things in context and share across apps; we believed that multitasking is important and that people can do two things at one time. 

Can touch coexist with a keyboard and mouse interface? Some people have said it doesn’t feel right to have both the newer, touch-centric elements and the old-style desktop in Windows 8. /

"It was a very definite choice to have both environments. A finger’s never going to replace the precision of a mouse. It’s always going to be easier to type on a keyboard than it is on glass. We didn’t want you to have to make a choice. Some people have said that it’s jarring, but over time we don’t hear that. It’s just getting used to something that’s different. Nothing was homogenous to start with, when you were in the browser it looked different than when you were in Excel."

On November 19, 2012 physicists Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California, San Diego and Yuriy Pershin at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, outlined an emerging form of computation called memcomputing based on the discovery of nanoscale electronic components that simultaneously store and process information, much like the human brain.

At the heart of this new form of computing are nanodevices called the memristor, memcapacitor and meminductor, fundamental electronic components that store information while respectively operating as resistors, capacitors and inductors. These devices were predicted theoretically in the 1970s but first manufactured in 2008. Because these devices consume very little energy computers using them could approach the energy efficiency of natural systems such as the human brain for the first time.  

"In present day technology, storing and processing of information occur on physically distinct regions of space. Not only does this result in space limitations; it also translates into unwanted delays in retrieving and processing of relevant information. There is, however, a class of two-terminal passive circuit elements with memory, memristive, memcapacitive and meminductive systems – collectively called memelements – that perform both information processing and storing of the initial, intermediate and final computational data on the same physical platform. Importantly, the states of these memelements adjust to input signals and provide analog capabilities unavailable in standard circuit elements, resulting in adaptive circuitry, and providing analog massively-parallel computation. All these features are tantalizingly similar to those encountered in the biological realm, thus offering new opportunities for biologically-inspired computation. Of particular importance is the fact that these memelements emerge naturally in nanoscale systems, and are therefore a consequence and a natural by-product of the continued miniaturization of electronic devices. . . ." (Di Ventra & Pershin, "Memcomputing: a computing paradigm to store and process information on the same physical platform," http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.4487v1.pdf, accessed 11-22-2012).