Leonardo da Vinci left only a rudimentary sketch of his robot lion but it has been reconstructed in full-size for the first time by a French-based, Venetian-born designer of automatons, Renato Boaretto. Using contemporary accounts and the other mechanical sketches left by the great artist, the 66-year-old has built a spectacular clockwork toy over 6ft long and four feet high, which can walk and wag its tail and simulate roaring movements of its head.
Charles Babbage designed the analytical engine and Ada Lovelace wrote the first programs, it was not implemented until 2002 when it worked
The Jacquard loom was the first machine to use punched cards to control a sequence of operations. Although it did no computation based on them, it is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware. The ability to change the pattern of the loom's weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming
Ada called herself "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)," and the combination was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. It was suited for "developping [sic] and tabulating any function whatever. . . the engine [is] the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity." Her Notes anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music. The ADA programming language was named after her.
The Daguerreotype process was the first practicable method of obtaining permanent images with a camera. The man who gave his name to the process and perfected the method of producing direct positive images on a silver-coated copper plate was Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, a French artist and scenic painter.
Chris Scholes invented the QWERTY keyboard to slow down typists as the punch keys were sticking together.
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
George Carey discussed a machine that people would use in their homes to view pictures.
Eadweard Muybridge filmed the first running horse to settle a bet as to whether a horse ever took all its legs of the ground when running
The light beam, whose intensity depended on the picture element, was converted into an electrical signal by the cell. At the receiving end, there was an identical disc turning at the same speed in front of a lamp whose brightness changed according to the received signal
The Lumiere brothers invented the first projector
George Carey invented the vacuum tube. He was working towards television. The vacuum would amplify the light given off by the element.
Karl Capek wrote Robot – it explored the issue of whether worker machines could replace humans.
The first car to car radio was deployed in the Detroit Police Department
John Logie Baird invented the television
W3Xk opens in Washington
Dvorak invented a keyboard which allowed for faster typing due to less movement by the user over the keyboard. Although most computer systems still allow the Dvorak keyboard to be used. The QWERTY is still the most popular layout by far.
CBS became the first major television station.
The first calculator - the CNC (complex number calculator was invented by AT & T
The Bombe was built in Poland to decrypt Nazi communications, a forerunner of the Enigma machine
Konrad Zuse invented the Z3. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer.
John Von Neumann designed the first modern computer system, architecture which is still recognised as input process output and store
IBM Harvard Mark 1 was really a big calculator and didn’t store programs
The Colossus was built by Tommy Flowers at Bletchley. It reduced the time to decode the Lorenz messages from weeks to hours.
Grace Hopper coined the term bug when a moth stuck between the relays in a computer and stopped it working (15:45 on 9 Sept at Harvard). She went on to be a pioneer of Cobol
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) by Mauchly and Eckert was the first electronic general-purpose computer. It was Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems.
The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley (seated at Brattain's laboratory bench), John Bardeen (left) and Walter Brattain (right). This was perhaps the most important electronics event of the 20th century, as it later made possible the integrated circuit and microprocessor that are the basis of modern electronics.
The IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) was an electromechanical computer built by IBM. Its design was started in late 1944, and it operated from January 1948 to 1952. It had many of the features of a stored-program computer and was the first operational machine able to treat its instructions as data, but it was not fully electronic. Although the SSEC proved useful for several high-profile applications it soon became obsolete. As the last large electromechanical computer ever built, its greatest success was the publicity it provided for IBM.
Norbert Weiner published Cybernetics which was to become a major influence on Artificial Intelligence
Maurice Wilkes at cambridge invented the ESDAC- the first real stored program computer (it had a 1k memory)
The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the University of Manchester from the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) or "Baby" (operational in June 1948). It was also called the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, or MADM. Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operational by April 1949; a program written to search for Mersenne primes ran error-free for nine hours on the night of 16/17 June 1949.
The first colour television was introduced but was not commercially available for about a year as the sets need to also receive monochrome signals.
Simon was the name given to the first "personal computer" of history, a project developed by Edmund Berkeley and presented in a thirteen articles series issued in Radio-Electronics magazine, from October 1950. Although there were far more advanced machines at the time of its construction, the Simon represented the first experience of building an automatic simple digital computer, for educational purposes. In 1950, it was sold for US$600.
Gismo was a machine to convert printed messages into machine language for processing by computer— the first optical character recognition (OCR) system.
Lyons Tea installed the first commercial computer system (LEO) to solve the daily production and distribution of tea to its shops
Kenyon Taylor invented the trackball
IBM introduce the first computer to be mass produced the IBM 650.
Television makes its first foray into predicting a presidential election based on computer analysis of early returns. The Univac computer makes an incredibly accurate projection that the network doesn't think credible. The Univac, or Universal Automatic Computer, was the next-gen version of the pioneering Eniac built by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s. Remington Rand bought the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. in 1950 and sold the first Univac to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951.
Grace Hopper wrote an automatic programming system for the UNIVAC that stitched together pieces of code into a single program, and she called it the A-O compiler, and versions A-1 and A-2 would follow. But Hopper, who would later be a leader on the committee that oversaw the creation of COBOL, was always more a technologist, visionary, and industry stateswoman than a programming wizard. Her compiler produced programs that ran far too slowly for most commercial uses. And it was a collection of programming aids rather than software that meets the modern definition of a compiler: a program that translates instructions written in a language familiar to human beings into binary.
The first computer games was Noughts And Crosses, a Tic-Tac-Toe game programmed in 1952 by A.S. Douglas who was passing his PhD degree at the University of Cambridge. His ingenious idea wasthe use of the tank display CRT as 35 x 16 pixel screen to display his game. The game was played against the machine and the player determined who played first (EDSAC / USER). Once the game started, the player specified where he wanted to place his nought or cross using a mechanical telephone dialer. The reason why A.S. Douglas programmed this game is his PhD dissertation about Human-Computer interraction. People willing to read this dissertation will need to visit the library of the University of Cambridge in order to obtain a copy.
Kimball Tags were small cardboard tags found primarily on clothing, which were both printed with human readable information and also marked by a special pattern of holes for computer processing. Traditionally these tags would be collected at the point-of-sale and then sent off in batches to be processed at the end of the business day. Obviously this system had some distinct limitations. The batch processing of tags made real-time business analysis difficult, and required specific handling and processing facilities to be maintained. The nature of the hanging cardboard tag made it unsuitable for using in damp environments and didn't fit well on sealed packages, so its adoption really was limited to the clothing industry.
Founder of computer science, mathematician, philosopher, codebreaker, strange visionary and a gay man before his time.
The first light pen was created around 1952 as part of the Whirlwind project at MIT. During the 1960s light pens were common on graphics terminals such as the IBM 2250, and were also available for the IBM 3270 text-only terminal.
n April 1954, it all came together. Using high-purity silicon material purchased from DuPont, the team grew a silicon crystal. They cut a quarter-inch bar from the crystal and attached the electrical contacts to it on the morning of April 14. On May 10, 1954, TI announced the commercial availability of grown-junction silicon transistors.
Jean H. Felker led a Bell Labs team including engineer James R. Harris that designed and built a fully transistorized computer dubbed TRADIC (TRAnsistor DIgital Computer) for the U. S. Air Force in 1954. Involving about 700 point-contact transistors and over 10,000 diodes, the prototype operated at 1 MHz while requiring less than 100 watts of power.
William Ross Ashby wrote the book, Introduction to Cybernetics which discussed inteligence amplification
Fortran developed (formula translator) it allowed loops to create a repetitive task. The first program had to be debugged as it was missing a comma!
ALGOL (short for ALGOrithmic Language) is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid-1950s which greatly influenced many other language.
Wesley A Clark designed and built the TX-2 to study HCI
PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system developed by Donald Blitzer. It had a navigation system and by 1962 it could be used by 2 students.
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