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Subjects | Fact sheet | Samples
Computing and the Internet: Sample chronology
Information technology
1903 The Telegraphone, the first magnetic recorder, is launched in the USA. It is initially intended for office uses such as recording telephone messages and dictation. Though limited in scope, its technology forms the basis of current telephone answering machines.
1909 US firm Corona introduces the portable typewriter.
1930 US electrical engineer Vannevar Bush builds the differential analyser. The first analogue computer, it is used to solve differential equations. It is the forerunner of modern computers.
1943 The US physicists John V Atanasoff and Clifford Berry build the Atanasoff–Berry computer; designed to solve linear equations, it uses vacuum tubes and stored programs.
1946 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator, Analyser, and Calculator), the first general purpose, fully electronic digital computer, is completed at the University of Pennsylvania for use in military research. It uses 18,000 vacuum tubes instead of mechanical relays, and can make 4,500 calculations a second. It is 24 m/80 ft long and is built by electrical engineers John Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, with input from John Atanasoff.
1946 The English computer scientist Maurice Wilkes writes the first assembly language – a mnemonic code using alphabetic symbols that translates instructions into computer machine language.
1947 The US-Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann introduces the idea of a stored-program computer, in which both instruction codes and data are stored.
1948 The US mathematician Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics, summarizing the field of information control, particularly for application in machines such as computers.
1949 EDSAC (acronym for Electronic, Delay, Storage, Automatic, and Calculator) is constructed at Cambridge University, England; one of the first stored-program computers, it uses 3,000 vacuum tubes and is nearly six times faster than other computers; data are stored in mercury delay lines.
1949 The US engineer John W Mauchly develops the Short Code, the first high-level programming language, which allows computers to recognize two-digit mathematical codes.
August 1949 BINAC (acronym for binary automatic computer) is built by US scientists John W Mauchly and John Presper Eckert. It is the first electronic stored-program computer to store data on magnetic tape.
11 November 1952 The world's first videotape machine is demonstrated by US inventors Wayne Johnson and John Multin.
1956 IBM introduce the Model 305 Business Computer. It has a memory of 20 megabytes.
1957 The first portable electric typewriters are introduced in Syracuse, New York, by the US corporation Smith Corona.
12 September 1958 US electrical engineer Jack Kilby demonstrates the first integrated circuit. It consists of transistors, resistors, and capacitors contained within a silicon substrate. It leads to the third generation of computers.
1962 The Dutch firm Philips introduces the audiocassette for recording sound on magnetic tape.
1969 The University of Utah, Stanford Research Institute, and the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles campuses of the University of California are linked by an experimental computer network.
c. 1971 A technique known as large-scale integration (LSI) is developed in the USA which makes it possible to pack thousands of transistors, diodes, and resistors on a silicon chip less than 5 mm/0.2 in square; it makes possible the development of microprocessors and microcomputers.
1971 Swiss programmer Niklaus Wirth develops the computer language Pascal. It is designed as a teaching tool for computer programming and allows errors to be discovered quickly.
1971 The US telecommunications firm AT&T introduces the 'picture-phone' in Chicago, Illinois, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – its high cost makes it a commercial failure.
January 1971 International communications satellite Intelsat 4 is launched; it can handle 3,000–9,000 telephone circuits or 12 colour television channels simultaneously.
1972 The Dutch company Philips patents the video disk. Information is contained in 45,000 grooves, all of the same width and depth but varying in length and spacing, cut in a spiral onto the plastic disc, and reproduced by a laser.
1 April 1973 A committee of grocers and manufacturers recommends the use of Universal Product Codes (UPC) (bar codes) on items sold in grocery stores. The codes will permit electronic scanning of items, reduce cashier error, and improve stock control; a few stores use it from 1974 and it comes into general use in the USA in 1980.
1979 The UK General Post Office installs the first digital telephone exchange in the UK at Glenkindle near Aberdeen, Scotland.
1979 The Xerox Corporation introduces the Ethernet, an office communications network.
1980 An experimental telephone inquiry system called 'Minitel' is introduced in France; computer terminals are placed in homes and callers are offered a large number of on-line information services.
1982 The transmission time for faxes is reduced from one minute to 20 seconds per page, making it far cheaper to send fax messages and increasing their popularity.
1982 US company Intel introduces the 16-bit 80286 microprocessor; it has 130,000 transistors and runs at speeds up to 12 MHz.
1982 US firms Columbia Data Products and Compaq produce the first 'clones' of an IBM personal computer; they use the same operating system as the IBM personal computer.
1984 The Dutch company Philips and Japanese firm Sony introduce the CD-ROM, a laser-read, read-only disk.
1985 A chip that operates on fuzzy logic is developed at AT&T Bell Labs by Masaki Togai and Hiroyuki Watanabe.
1985 The US Bell Laboratories develops an optical fibre capable of simultaneously sending 300,000 telephone conversations or 200 high-resolution television channels.
1985 US firm Cray Research introduce the Cray 2, a supercomputer with 4 processors and a 2 billion-byte memory that can perform 1 billion floating point operations per second.
1986 The Japanese company Fuji launches the disposable camera, designed so that the whole unit is handed over for processing.
1987 Digital audio tape cassettes, producing high-quality sound, go on sale.
1987 The Japanese company Citizen launches the talking watch, Voice master VX-2, which answers when asked the time.
1988 British chemist Richard Friend develops a molecular transistor constructed of polyacetylene. Its active elements are carbon based rather than the usual gallium arsenide, which make it far more efficient than classical transistors.
1988 The first glass-fibreoptic cable is laid across the Atlantic Ocean and can carry 37,800 voice channels.
August 1988 Japanese electronics manufacturer Sony launches the Video Walkman, which has a 7.5 cm/3-in colour television and an 8 mm/0.3 in VCR. It weighs 1.5 kg/3 lb in total.
29 January 1990 US scientist Alan Huang and his colleagues at Bell Laboratories demonstrate the first all-optical processor; calculations are performed optically using lasers, lenses, and fast light switches.
November 1992 The US national on-line information service Delphi becomes the first national US service to open a gateway to the Internet.
1993 Using holography, 10,000 pages (100 megabytes) of digital data are stored in an iron-doped lithium nobate crystal measuring 1 cm3.
15 September 1993 The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action is published in the USA. It proposes a framework for the creation of a national 'information highway'.
23 April 1998 The first cash machines to use 'iris recognition technology' to identify the user and dispense money, enter service in Swindon, England.
19 October 1999 The entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, with the addition of archived news updates from current media sources, is launched on the Internet, with free access.
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