Timeline of computing hardware before 1950

This article presents a detailed timeline of events in the history of computing software and hardware: from prehistory until 1949. For narratives explaining the overall developments, see History of computing.

History of computing
Hardware
Software
Computer science
Modern concepts
By country
Timeline of computing
Glossary of computer science
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Prehistory–antiquity
Date Event
c. 19,000 BC The Ishango bone, may indicate that material objects were already being used for simple arithmetical operations, and it may provide evidence of some knowledge of prime numbers (although this is disputed).[1]
c. 4000 BC Quipu - A knotted string used for counting by ancestors to the Tiwanaku people of the Andes Mountains of South America.[2]
c. 2500 BC The abacus, the first known calculator, was probably invented by the Babylonians as an aid to simple arithmetic around this time period. It laid the foundations for positional notation and later computing developments.
c. 1770 BC First known use of zero by ancient Egyptians in accounting texts.
c. 910 BC The south-pointing chariot was invented in ancient China. It was the first known geared mechanism to use a differential gear. The chariot was a two-wheeled vehicle, upon which is a pointing figure connected to the wheels by means of differential gearing. Through careful selection of wheel size, track and gear ratios, the figure atop the chariot always pointed in the same direction.
c. 500 BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini formulated the grammar of Sanskrit (in 3959 rules) known as the Ashtadhyayi which was highly systematised and technical. Pāṇini used metarules, transformations, and recursions with such sophistication that his grammar had the computing power equivalent to a Turing machine. Pāṇini's work was the forerunner to modern formal language theory, and a precursor to its use in modern computing. The Panini–Backus form used to describe most modern programming languages is also significantly similar to Pāṇini's grammar rules.
c. 200 BC Indian mathematician Pingala first described the binary number system which is now used in the design of essentially all modern computing equipment. He also conceived the notion of a binary code similar to the Morse code.[3][4]
c. 125 BC The Antikythera mechanism: A clockwork, analog computer believed to have been designed and built in the Corinthian colony of Syracuse. The mechanism contained a differential gear and was capable of tracking the relative positions of all then-known heavenly bodies.
c. 9 AD Chinese mathematicians first used negative numbers.
c. 60 Hero of Alexandria made numerous inventions, including "sequence control" in which the operator of a machine set a machine running, which then follows a series of instructions in a deterministic fashion. This was, essentially, the first program. He also made numerous innovations in the field of automata, which are important steps in the development of robotics.
190 First mention of the suanpan (Chinese abacus) which was widely used until the invention of the modern calculator, and continues to be used in some cultures today.

Medieval–1640
Date Event
c. 639 Indian mathematician Brahmagupta was the first to describe the modern place-value numeral system (Hindu numeral system).
725 Chinese inventor Liang Lingzan built the world's first fully mechanical clock; water clocks, some of them extremely accurate, had been known for centuries previous to this. This was an important technological leap forward; the earliest true computers, made a thousand years later, used technology based on that of clocks.
c. 820 Persian mathematician, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, described the rudiments of modern algebra whose name is derived from his book Al-Kitāb al-muḫtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa-l-muqābala. The word algorithm is derived from al-Khwarizmi's Latinized name Algoritmi.
c. 850 Arab mathematician, Al-Kindi (Alkindus), was a pioneer of cryptography. He gave the first known recorded explanation of cryptanalysis in A Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages. In particular, he is credited with developing the frequency analysis method whereby variations in the frequency of the occurrence of letters could be analyzed and exploited to break encryption ciphers (i.e. cryptanalysis by frequency analysis).[5] The text also covers methods of cryptanalysis, encipherments, cryptanalysis of certain encipherments, and statistical analysis of letters and letter combinations in Arabic.
850 The Banū Mūsā brothers, in their Book of Ingenious Devices, invented "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument", in this case a hydropowered organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically. This "cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century."[6] They also invented an automatic flute player which appears to have been the first programmable machine.[7]
c. 1000 Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the Planisphere, an analog computer.[8] He also invented the first mechanical lunisolar calendar which employed a gear train and eight gear-wheels.[9] This was an early example of a fixed-wired knowledge processing machine.[10]
c. 1015 Arab astronomer, Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm al-Zarqālī (Arzachel) of al-Andalus, invented the Equatorium, a mechanical analog computer device used for finding the longitudes and positions of the Moon, Sun and planets without calculation, using a geometrical model to represent the celestial body's mean and anomalistic position.[11]
c. 1150 Arab astronomer, Jabir ibn Aflah (Geber), invented the Torquetum, an observational instrument and mechanical analog computer device used to transform between spherical coordinate systems.[12] It was designed to take and convert measurements made in three sets of coordinates: horizon, equatorial, and ecliptic.
1206 Arab engineer, Al-Jazari, invented numerous automata and made numerous other technological innovations. One of these is a design for a programmable humanoid-shaped mannequin: this seems to have been the first serious, scientific (as opposed to magical) plan for a robot.[13] He also invented the "castle clock", an astronomical clock which is considered to be the earliest programmable analog computer.[14] It displayed the zodiac, the solar and lunar orbits, a crescent moon-shaped pointer travelling across a gateway causing automatic doors to open every hour,[15][16] and five robotic musicians who play music when struck by levers operated by a camshaft attached to a water wheel. The length of day and night could be re-programmed every day in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year.[14]
1235 Persian astronomer Abi Bakr of Isfahan invented a brass astrolabe with a geared calendar movement based on the design of Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī's mechanical calendar analog computer.[17] Abi Bakr's geared astrolabe uses a set of gear-wheels and is the oldest surviving complete mechanical geared machine in existence.[18][19]
1300 Ramon Llull invented the Lullian Circle: a notional machine for calculating answers to philosophical questions (in this case, to do with Christianity) via logical combinatorics. This idea was taken up by Leibniz centuries later, and is thus one of the founding elements in computing and information science.
1412 Ahmad al-Qalqashandi gives a list of ciphers in his Subh al-a'sha which include both substitution and transposition, and for the first time, a cipher with multiple substitutions for each plaintext letter. He also gives an exposition on and worked example of cryptanalysis, including the use of tables of letter frequencies and sets of letters which can not occur together in one word.
c. 1416 Jamshīd al-Kāshī invented the Plate of Conjunctions, an analog computer instrument used to determine the time of day at which planetary conjunctions will occur,[20] and for performing linear interpolation. He also invented a mechanical "planetary computer" which he called the Plate of Zones, which could graphically solve a number of planetary problems, including the prediction of the true positions in longitude of the Sun and Moon,[21] and the planets;[22] the latitudes of the Sun, Moon, and planets; and the ecliptic of the Sun. The instrument also incorporated an alhidade and ruler.[23]
c. 1450 Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in South India invented the floating-point number system.[24]
1493 Leonardo da Vinci produced drawings of a device consisting of interlocking cog wheels which can be interpreted as a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction. A working model inspired by this plan was built in 1968 but it remains controversial whether Leonardo really had a calculator in mind.[25] Da Vinci also made plans for a mechanical man: an early design for a robot.
1614 Scotsman John Napier reinvented a form of logarithms and an ingenious system of movable rods (1617, referred to as Napier's Rods or Napier's bones). These rods were based on the lattice or gelosia multiplication algorithm and allowed the operator to multiply, divide, and calculate square and cube roots by moving the rods around and placing them in specially constructed boards.
1622 William Oughtred developed slide rules based on logarithms as developed by John Napier.
1623 German polymath Wilhelm Schickard drew a device that he called a calculating clock on two letters that he sent to Johannes Kepler; one in 1623 and the other in 1624. A fire later destroyed the machine as it was being built in 1624 and he decided to abandon his project.[26] This machine became known to the world only in 1957 when the two letters were discovered. Some replicas were built in 1961.[27] This machine had no impact on the development of mechanical calculators.[28]

1641–1850
Date Place Event
1642   France French polymath Blaise Pascal invented the mechanical calculator.[29] Called machine arithmétique, Pascal's calculator and eventually Pascaline, its public introduction in 1645 started the development of mechanical calculators first in Europe and then in the rest of the world. It was the first machine to have a controlled carry mechanism.[30] Pascal built 50 prototypes before releasing his first machine (eventually twenty machines were built). The Pascaline inspired the works of Gottfried Leibniz (1671), Thomas de Colmar (1820) and Dorr E. Felt (1887).
1666 United Kingdom Sir Samuel Morland (1625–1695), of England, produced a non-decimal adding machine,[31] suitable for use with English money. Instead of a carry mechanism, it registered carries on auxiliary dials, from which the user re-entered them as addends.
1672 Germany German mathematician, Gottfried Leibniz started designing a machine which multiplied, the 'Stepped Reckoner'. It could multiply numbers of up to 5 and 12 digits to give a 16 digit result. Two machines were built, one in 1694 (it was discovered in an attic in 1879), and one in 1706.[32]
1685 Germany In an article titled "Machina arithmetica in qua non additio tantum et subtractio sed et multiplicatio nullo, diviso vero paene nullo animi labore peragantur", Gottfried Leibniz described a machine that used wheels with movable teeth which, when coupled to a Pascaline, could perform all four mathematical operations.[33] There is no evidence that Leibniz ever constructed this pinwheel machine.
1709 Italy Giovanni Poleni was the first to build a calculator that used a pinwheel design. It was made of wood and was built in the shape of a calculating clock.[34]
1726 United Kingdom Jonathan Swift described (satirically) a machine ("engine") in his Gulliver's Travels. The "engine" consisted of a wooden frame with wooden blocks containing parts of speech. When the engine's 40 levers are simultaneously turned, the machine displayed grammatical sentence fragments.
1774 Germany Philipp Matthäus Hahn, in what is now Germany, made a successful portable calculator able to perform all four mathematical operations.
1775 United Kingdom Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, of England, designed and constructed a successful multiplying calculator similar to Leibniz's.
1786 Germany J. H. Müller, an engineer in the Hessian army, first conceived of the idea of a difference engine (first written reference to the basic principles of a difference machine is dated to 1784).
1804 France Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed the Jacquard loom, an automatic loom controlled by punched cards.
1820 France Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar invented the 'Arithmometer' which after thirty more years of development became, in 1851, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. An operator could perform long multiplications and divisions quickly and effectively by using a movable accumulator for the result. This machine was based on the earlier works of Pascal and Leibniz.
1822 United Kingdom Charles Babbage designed his first mechanical computer, the first prototype of the decimal difference engine for tabulating polynomials.
1831 Italy Giovanni Plana designed a Perpetual Calendar machine, which can calculate the precise calendar for over 4000 years, accounting for leap years and variation in day length.
1832 Russia Semen Korsakov proposed the usage of punched cards for information storage and search. He designed several machines to demonstrate his ideas, including the so-called linear homeoscope.
1832 United Kingdom Babbage and Joseph Clement produced a prototype segment of his difference engine,[35] which operated on 6-digit numbers and second-order differences (i.e., it could tabulate quadratic polynomials). The complete engine, which would have been room-sized, was planned to operate both on sixth-order differences with numbers of about 20 digits, and on third-order differences with numbers of 30 digits. Each addition would have been done in two phases, the second one taking care of any carries generated in the first. The output digits were to be punched into a soft metal plate, from which a printing plate might have been made. But there were various difficulties, and no more than this prototype piece was ever finished.
c. 1833 United Kingdom Babbage conceived, and began to design, his decimal 'Analytical Engine'.[36] A program for it was to be stored on read-only memory, in the form of punched cards. Babbage continued to work on the design for years, though after about 1840 design changes seem to have been minor. The machine would have operated on 40-digit numbers; the 'mill' (CPU) would have had 2 main accumulators and some auxiliary ones for specific purposes, while the 'store' (memory) would have held a thousand 50-digit numbers. There would have been several punched card readers, for both programs and data; the cards were to be chained and the motion of each chain reversible. The machine would have performed conditional jumps. There would also have been a form of microcoding: the meaning of instructions were to depend on the positioning of metal studs in a slotted barrel, called the "control barrel". The machine envisioned would have been capable of an addition in 3 seconds and a multiplication or division in 2–4 minutes. It was to be powered by a steam engine. In the end, no more than a few parts were actually built.
1835 United States Joseph Henry invented the electromechanical relay.
1840 Italy Charles Babbage's first public exposition about his Analytical Engine at Accademia delle Scienze, Turin.[37]
1842 France Timoleon Maurel patented the Arithmaurel, a mechanical calculator with a very intuitive user interface, especially for multiplying and dividing numbers because the result was displayed as soon as the operands were entered. It received a gold medal at the French national show in Paris in 1849.[38] Unfortunately its complexity and the fragility of its design prevented it from being manufactured.[39]
1842 United Kingdom Construction of Babbage's difference engine was cancelled as an official project.[40] The cost overruns had been considerable (£17,470 was spent, which, in 2004 money, would be about £1,000,000[41]).
1843 Sweden Per Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard produced a 5-digit numbers and third-order model of the difference engine with printer; the Swedish government agreed to fund their next development in 1851.
1846 United Kingdom Babbage began to work on an improved difference engine (the Difference Engine No.2), producing a completely executed set of plans by 1849.[42] The machine would have operated on 7th-order differences and 31-digit numbers, but nobody was found to pay to have it built. In 1989–1991 a team at London's Science Museum did build one from the surviving plans. They built components using modern methods, but with tolerances no better than Clement could have provided... and, after a bit of tinkering and detail-debugging, they found that the machine works properly. In 2000, the printer was also completed.
1847 United Kingdom British Mathematician George Boole developed binary algebra (Boolean algebra)[43] which has been widely used in binary computer design and operation, beginning about a century later. See 1939.

1851–1930
Date Place Event
1851 France After 30 years of development, Thomas de Colmar launched the mechanical calculator industry by starting the manufacturing of a much simplified Arithmometer (invented in 1820). Aside from its clones, which started thirty years later,[44] it was the only calculating machine available anywhere in the world for forty years (Dorr E. Felt only sold one hundred comptometers and a few comptographs from 1887 to 1890[45]). Its simplicity made it the most reliable calculator to date. It was a big machine (a 20 digit arithmometer was long enough to occupy most of a desktop). Even though the arithmometer was only manufactured until 1915, twenty European companies manufactured improved clones of its design until the beginning of WWII; they were Burkhardt, Layton, Saxonia, Gräber, Peerless, Mercedes-Euklid, XxX, Archimedes, etc...
1853 Sweden To Babbage's delight, the Scheutzes completed the first full-scale difference engine, which they called a Tabulating Machine. It operated on 15-digit numbers and 4th-order differences, and produced printed output just as Babbage's would have. A second machine was later built in 1859 to the same design by the firm of Bryan Donkin of London.
1856 United States The first Tabulating Machine (see 1853) was bought by the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, and the second was ordered in 1857 by the British government. The Albany machine was used to produce a set of astronomical tables; but the Observatory's director was fired for this extravagant purchase, and the machine never seriously used again, eventually ending up in a museum. The second machine had a long and useful life.
c. 1859 Sweden Martin Wiberg produced a reworked difference-engine-like machine intended to prepare interest rates (first publication in 1860) and logarithmic tables (first publication in 1875).
1866 United Kingdom The first practical logic machine (logical abacus) was built by William Stanley Jevons.
1871 United Kingdom Babbage produced a prototype section of the Analytical Engine's mill and printer.[46]
1878 Spain Ramón Verea, living in New York City, invented a calculator with an internal multiplication table; this was much faster than the shifting carriage, or other digital methods of the time. He wasn't interested in putting it into production, however; it seems he just wanted to show that a Spaniard could invent as well as an American.
1878 United Kingdom A committee investigated the feasibility of completing the Analytical Engine, and concluded that it would be impossible now that Babbage was dead. The project was then largely forgotten, except by a very few; Howard Aiken was a notable exception.
1884 United States Dorr Felt, of Chicago, developed his Comptometer. This was the first calculator in which operands are entered by pressing keys rather than having to be, for example, dialled in. It was feasible because of Felt's invention of a carry mechanism fast enough to act while the keys return from being pressed. Felt and Tarrant started a partnership to manufacture the comptometer in 1887.
1886 United States First use of Herman Hollerith tabulating system in the Baltimore Department of Health.
1887 United States Herman Hollerith filed a patent application for an integrating tabulator (granted in 1890), which could add numbers encoded on punched cards. First recorded use of this device was in 1889 in the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army. In 1896 Hollerith introduced improved model.[47]
1889 United States Dorr Felt invented the first printing desk calculator.
1890 United States
Sweden
Russia		 A multiplying calculator more compact than the Arithmometer entered mass production.[48][49] The design was the independent, and more or less simultaneous, invention of Frank S. Baldwin, of the United States, and Willgodt Theophil Odhner, a Swede living in Russia. Fluted drums were replaced by a "variable-toothed gear" design: a disk with radial pegs that could be made to protrude or retract from it.
1890 United States The 1880 US census had taken 7 years to complete since all processing had been done by hand from journal sheets. The increasing population suggested that by the 1890 census, data processing would take longer than the 10 years before the next census—so a competition was held to find a better method. It was won by a Census Department employee, Herman Hollerith, who went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company, later to become IBM. He invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine. Prior uses of machine readable media had been for control (Automatons, Piano rolls, looms, ...), not data. "After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on punched cards..."[50] His machines used mechanical relays to increment mechanical counters. This method was used in the 1890 census. The net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the scheduled publications, and the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators, was to reduce the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census.[51] The inspiration for this invention was Hollerith's observation of railroad conductors during a trip in the Western United States; they encoded a crude description of the passenger (tall, bald, male) in the way they punched the ticket.
1891 United States William S. Burroughs of St. Louis invented a machine similar to Felt's (see 1884) in 1885 but unlike the comptometer it was a 'key-set' machine which only processed each number after a crank handle was pulled. The true manufacturing of this machine started in 1891 even though Burroughs had started his American Arithmometer Company in 1886 (it later became Burroughs Corporation and is now called Unisys).
1899 Japan Ryōichi Yazu began the development of a mechanical calculating machine (automatic abacus).[52] Ryoichi independently conducted research on calculating machines, and it took three years to complete his biquinary mechanical desktop calculating machine, before applying for a patent in 1902.[53] It was Japan's first successful mechanical computer.[54][53]
c. 1900 United States The Standard Adding Machine Company released the first 10-key adding machine in about 1900. The inventor, William Hopkins, filed his first patent on October 4, 1892. The 10 keys were set on a single row.
1902 United States First model of Dalton adding machine is built.[55] Remington advertised the Dalton adding machine as the first 10-key printing adding machine.[56] The 10 keys were set on two rows. Six machines had been manufactured by the end of 1906.
1905 Japan Ichitaro Kawaguchi, an engineer at the Ministry of Communications and Transportation, built the Kawaguchi Electric Tabulation Machine,[54] used to tabulate some of the results of the 1904 Demographics Statistical Study.[57]
1906 United Kingdom Henry Babbage, Charles's son, with the help of the firm of R. W. Munro, completed the 'mill' from his father's Analytical Engine, to show that it would have worked. It does. The complete machine was not produced.
1906 United States Audion (vacuum tube or thermionic valve) invented by Lee De Forest.
1906 United States Herman Hollerith introduces a tabulator with a plugboard that can be rewired to adapt the machine for different applications. Plugboards were widely used to direct machine calculations until displaced by stored programs in the 1950s.[58]
1909 Republic of Ireland Following Babbage, although unaware of his earlier work, Percy Ludgate in 1909 published the 2nd of the only two designs for mechanical analytical engines in history.[59]
1913 Spain In his work Essays on Automatics (1913), Leonardo Torres y Quevedo formulates what will be a new branch of engineering: automation and designed a Babbage type of calculating machine that used electromechanical parts which introduced the idea of floating-point arithmetic.[60]
1919 United Kingdom William Henry Eccles and F. W. Jordan published the first flip-flop circuit design.
1924 Germany Walther Bothe built an AND logic gate - the coincidence circuit, for use in physics experiments, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics 1954. Digital circuitries of all kinds make heavy use of this technique.
1928 United States IBM standardizes on punched cards with 80 columns of data and rectangular holes. Widely known as IBM Cards, they dominate the data processing industry for almost half a century.
1929 United States Westinghouse AC Calculating board. An AC network analyzer used for alternating current (AC) electrical transmission line simulations up until the 1960s.
c. 1930 United States Vannevar Bush built a partly electronic differential analyzer capable of solving differential equations.
c. 1930 United Kingdom Welsh physicist C. E. Wynn-Williams, at Cambridge, England, used a ring of thyratron tubes to construct a binary digital counter that counted emitted alpha particles.[61]

1931–1940
Date Place Event
1931 Austria Kurt Gödel of Vienna University, Austria, published a paper on a universal formal language based on arithmetic operations. He used it to encode arbitrary formal statements and proofs, and showed that formal systems such as traditional mathematics are either inconsistent in a certain sense, or contain unprovable but true statements. This result is often called the fundamental result of theoretical computer science.
1931 United States IBM introduced the IBM 601 Multiplying Punch, an electromechanical machine that could read two numbers, up to 8 digits long, from a card and punch their product onto the same card.[62]
1934 Japan,

Soviet Union,

United States

 From 1934 to 1937, NEC engineer Akira Nakashima, Claude Shannon and Viktor Shestakov published a series of papers introducing switching circuit theory.[63][64][65][66]
1934 United States Wallace Eckert of Columbia University connects an IBM 285 Tabulator, an 016 Duplicating Punch and an IBM 601 Multiplying Punch with a cam-controlled sequencer switch that he designed. The combined system was used to automate the integration of differential equations.[67]
1936 United Kingdom Alan Turing of Cambridge University, England, published a paper on 'computable numbers'[68] which reformulated Kurt Gödel's results (see related work by Alonzo Church). His paper addressed the famous 'Entscheidungsproblem' whose solution was sought in the paper by reasoning (as a mathematical device) about a simple and theoretical computer, known today as a Turing machine. In many ways, this device was more convenient than Gödel's arithmetics-based universal formal system.
1937 United States George Stibitz of the Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs), New York City, constructed a demonstration 1-bit binary adder using relays. This was one of the first binary computers, although at this stage it was only a demonstration machine; improvements continued leading to the Complex Number Calculator of January 1940.
1937 United States Claude E. Shannon published a paper on the implementation of symbolic logic using relays as his MIT Master's thesis.
1938 Germany Konrad Zuse of Berlin, completed the 'Z1', the first mechanical binary programmable computer. It was based on Boolean Algebra and had some of the basic ingredients of modern machines, using the binary system and floating-point arithmetic. Zuse's 1936 patent application (Z23139/GMD Nr. 005/021) also suggested a 'von Neumann' architecture (re-invented about 1945) with program and data modifiable in storage. Originally the machine was called the 'V1' but retroactively renamed after the war, to avoid confusion with the V-1 flying bomb. It worked with floating-point numbers (7-bit exponent, 16-bit mantissa, and sign bit). The memory used sliding metal parts to store 16 such numbers, and worked well; but the arithmetic unit was less successful, occasionally suffering from certain mechanical engineering problems. The program was read from holes punched in discarded 35 mm movie film. Data values could have been entered from a numeric keyboard, and outputs were displayed on electric lamps. The machine was not a general purpose computer (i.e., Turing complete) because it lacked loop capabilities.
1939 United States William Hewlett and David Packard established the Hewlett-Packard Company in Packard's garage in Palo Alto, California with an initial investment of $538 (equivalent to $11,185 in 2022); this was considered to be the symbolic founding of Silicon Valley. HP would grow to become one of the largest technology companies in the world today.
1939
Nov		 United States John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry of Iowa State College (now the Iowa State University), Ames, Iowa, completed a prototype 16-bit adder. This was the first machine to calculate using vacuum tubes.
1939 - 1940 Germany Helmut Schreyer completed a prototype 10-bit adder using vacuum tubes, and a prototype memory using neon lamps.
1940 United States At Bell Labs, Samuel Williams and George Stibitz completed a calculator which could operate on complex numbers, and named it the 'Complex Number Calculator'; it was later known as the 'Model I Relay Calculator'. It used telephone switching parts for logic: 450 relays and 10 crossbar switches. Numbers were represented in 'plus 3 BCD'; that is, for each decimal digit, 0 is represented by binary 0011, 1 by 0100, and so on up to 1100 for 9; this scheme requires fewer relays than straight BCD. Rather than requiring users to come to the machine to use it, the calculator was provided with three remote keyboards, at various places in the building, in the form of teletypes. Only one could be used at a time, and the output was automatically displayed on the same one. On 9 September 1940, a teletype was set up at a Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a connection to New York, and those attending the conference could use the machine remotely.
1940 Germany Konrad Zuse completed the 'Z2' (originally 'V2'), which combined the Z1's existing mechanical memory unit with a new arithmetic unit using relay logic. Like the Z1, the Z2 lacked loop capabilities. The project was interrupted for a year when Zuse was drafted in 1939, but continued after he was released.

In 1940 Zuse presented the Z2 to an audience of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt ("German Laboratory for Aviation") in Berlin-Adlershof.

1941–1949
Date Place Event
1941
May 11		 Germany Now working with limited backing from the DVL (German Aeronautical Research Institute), Konrad Zuse completed the 'Z3' (originally 'V3'): the first operational programmable computer. One major improvement over Charles Babbage's non-functional device is the use of Leibniz's binary system (Babbage and others unsuccessfully tried to build decimal programmable computers). Zuse's machine also featured floating-point numbers with a 7-bit exponent, 14-bit mantissa (with a '1' bit automatically prefixed unless the number is 0), and a sign bit. The memory held 64 of these words and therefore required over 1400 relays; there were 1200 more in the arithmetic and control units. It also featured parallel adders. The program, input, and output were implemented as described above for the Z1. Although conditional jumps were not available, it has been shown that Zuse's Z3 is, in principle, capable of functioning as a universal computer.[69][70] The machine could do 3–4 additions per second, and took 3–5 seconds for a multiplication. The Z3 was destroyed in 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin, and had no impact on computer technology in America and England.
1942
Summer		 United States Atanasoff and Berry completed a special-purpose calculator for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, later called the 'ABC' ('Atanasoff–Berry Computer'). This had 60 50-bit words of memory in the form of capacitors (with refresh circuits—the first regenerative memory) mounted on two revolving drums. The clock speed was 60 Hz, and an addition took 1 second. For secondary memory it used punched cards, moved around by the user. The holes were not actually punched in the cards, but burned. The punched card system's error rate was never reduced beyond 0.001%, and this was inadequate. Atanasoff left Iowa State after the U.S. entered the war, ending his work on digital computing machines.
1942 Germany Helmut Hölzer built an analog computer to calculate and simulate[71] V-2 rocket trajectories.[72][73][74]
1942 Germany Konrad Zuse developed the S1, the world's first process computer, used by Henschel to measure the surface of wings.
1943
Apr		 United Kingdom Max Newman, C. E. Wynn-Williams and their team at the secret Government Code and Cypher School ('Station X'), Bletchley Park, Bletchley, England, completed the 'Heath Robinson'. This was a specialized counting machine used for cipher-breaking, not a general-purpose calculator or computer, but a logic device using a combination of electronics and relay logic. It read data optically at 2000 characters per second from two closed loops of paper tape. It was significant as it was the forerunner of Colossus. Newman knew Turing from Cambridge University (Turing was a student of Newman's), and had been the first person to see a draft of Turing's 1936 paper.[68] Heath Robinson is the name of a British cartoonist known for drawings of comical machines, like the American Rube Goldberg. Two later machines in the series were named after London stores with 'Robinson' in their names.
1943
Sep		 United States Williams and Stibitz completed the 'Relay Interpolator', later called the 'Model II Relay Calculator'. This was a programmable calculator; again, the program and data were read from paper tapes. An innovative feature was that, for greater reliability (error-detecting/self-checking), numbers were represented in a biquinary format using seven relays for each digit, of which exactly two should be "on": 01 00001 for 0, 01 00010 for 1, and so on up to 10 10000 for 9. Some of the later machines in this series would use the biquinary notation for the digits of floating-point numbers.
1943
Dec		 United Kingdom The Mark 1 Colossus was completed, by Tommy Flowers at The Post Office Research Laboratories in London, to assist in the cracking of the German Lorenz SZ42 cipher at Bletchley Park. It was a binary digital machine that contained 1500 vacuum tubes (valves), and applied a programmable logical function to a stream of characters, read and re-read from a loop of punched paper tape at a rate of 5000 characters a second. It had 501 bits of memory, the program being set on switches and plug panels. Colossus was used at Bletchley Park during World War II—as a follow on from the less productive Heath Robinson machines.
1944
June		 United Kingdom The first Mark 2 Colossus was commissioned. It was a development of the Mark 1 machine and contained 2400 vacuum tubes. It had five identical parallel processors fed from a shift register that enabled processing of 25,000 characters a second. Colossus could evaluate a wide range of Boolean algebraic functions for helping to establish the rotor settings of the Lorenz SZ42 machine. Ten Mark 2 Colossi were in use at Bletchley Park by the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. All but two of the machines were then dismantled into such small parts that it was not possible to infer their use, so as to maintain the secrecy of the work. The remaining two were dismantled at GCHQ Cheltenham in the 1960s.
1944
August 7		 United States The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was turned over to Harvard University, which called it the Harvard Mark I. It was designed by Howard Aiken and his team, financed and built by IBM—it became the second program-controlled machine (after Konrad Zuse's). The whole machine was 51 feet (16 m) long, weighed 5 (short) tons (4.5 tonnes), and incorporated 750,000 parts. It used 3304 electromechanical relays as on-off switches, had 72 accumulators (each with its own arithmetic unit), as well as a mechanical register with a capacity of 23 digits plus sign. The arithmetic was fixed-point and decimal, with a control panel setting determining the number of decimal places. Input–output facilities include card readers, a card punch, paper tape readers, and typewriters. There were 60 sets of rotary switches, each of which could be used as a constant register—sort of mechanical read-only memory. The program was read from one paper tape; data could be read from the other tapes, or the card readers, or from the constant registers. Conditional jumps were not available. However, in later years, the machine was modified to support multiple paper tape readers for the program, with the transfer from one to another being conditional, rather like a conditional subroutine call. Another addition allowed the provision of plug-board wired subroutines callable from the tape. Used to create ballistics tables for the US Navy.
1945 Germany Konrad Zuse developed Plankalkül, the first higher-level programming language. He also presented the Z4 in March.
1945 United States Vannevar Bush developed the theory of the memex, a hypertext device linked to a library of books and films.
1945
 United States John von Neumann drafted a report describing the future computer eventually built as the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC includes the first published description of the design of a stored-program computer, giving rise to the term von Neumann architecture. It directly or indirectly influenced nearly all subsequent projects, especially EDSAC. The design team included John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
1946
February 14		 United States ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer): One of the first totally electronic, vacuum tube, digital, program-controlled computers was unveiled although it was shut down on 9 November 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. Development had started in 1943 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, USA, by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. It weighed 30 tonnes and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, consuming around 160 kW of electrical power. It could do 5,000 basic calculations a second. It was used for calculating ballistic trajectories and testing theories behind the hydrogen bomb.
1946
February 19		 United Kingdom ACE (Automatic Computing Engine): Alan Turing presented a detailed paper to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Executive Committee, giving the first reasonably complete design of a stored-program computer. However, because of the strict and long-lasting secrecy around his wartime work at Bletchley Park, he was prohibited (having signed the Official Secrets Act) from explaining that he knew that his ideas could be implemented in an electronic device.
1946 United Kingdom The trackball was invented as part of a radar plotting system named Comprehensive Display System (CDS) by Ralph Benjamin when working for the British Royal Navy Scientific Service.[75][76] Benjamin's project used analog computers to calculate the future position of target aircraft based on several initial input points provided by a user with a joystick. Benjamin felt that a more elegant input device was needed and invented a ball tracker[75][76] system called the roller ball[75] for this purpose in 1946.[75][76] The device was patented in 1947,[75] but only a prototype was ever built[76] and the device was kept as a secret outside military.[76]
1947
September		 United Kingdom Development of the first assembly language by Kathleen Booth at Birkbeck, University of London following work with John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine at the Institute for Advanced Study.[77][78]
1947
December 16		 United States Invention of the transistor at Bell Laboratories, USA, by William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.
1947 United States Howard Aiken completed the Harvard Mark II.
1947 United States The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), was founded as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. It remains to this day with a membership currently around 78,000. Its headquarters are in New York City.
1948
January 27		 United States IBM finished the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator). It was the first computer to modify a stored program. "About 1300 vacuum tubes were used to construct the arithmetic unit and eight very high-speed registers, while 23000 relays were used in the control structure and 150 registers of slower memory."
1948
May 12		 United Kingdom The Birkbeck ARC, the first of three machines developed at Birkbeck, University of London by Andrew Booth and Kathleen Booth, officially came online on this date. The control was entirely electromechanical and the memory was based on a rotating magnetic drum.[78] This was the first rotating drum storage device in existence.[79]
1948
June 21		 United Kingdom the Manchester Baby was built at the University of Manchester. It ran its first program on this date. It was the first computer to store both its programs and data in RAM, as modern computers do. By 1949 the 'Baby' had grown, and acquired a magnetic drum for more permanent storage, and it became the Manchester Mark 1.
1948 United States ANACOM from Westinghouse was an AC-energized electrical analog computer system used up until the early 1990s for problems in mechanical and structural design, fluidics, and various transient problems.
1948 United States IBM introduced the '604', the first machine to feature Field Replaceable Units (FRUs), which cut downtime as entire pluggable units can simply be replaced instead of troubleshot.
1948 The first Curta handheld mechanical calculator was sold. The Curta computed with 11 digits of decimal precision on input operands up to 8 decimal digits. The Curta was about the size of a handheld pepper grinder.
1949
Mar		 United States John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly construct the BINAC for Northrop.
1949
May 6		 United Kingdom This is considered the birthday of modern computing. Maurice Wilkes and a team at Cambridge University executed the first stored program on the EDSAC computer, which used paper tape input–output. Based on ideas from John von Neumann about stored program computers, the EDSAC was the first complete, fully functional von Neumann architecture computer.
1949
Oct		 United Kingdom The Manchester Mark 1 final specification is completed; this machine was notably in being the first computer to use the equivalent of base/index registers, a feature not entering common computer architecture until the second generation around 1955.
1949 Australia CSIR Mk I (later known as CSIRAC), Australia's first computer, ran its first test program. It was a vacuum-tube-based electronic general-purpose computer. Its main memory stored data as a series of acoustic pulses in 5 ft (1.5 m) long tubes filled with mercury.
1949 United Kingdom MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer) also known as the Phillips Hydraulic Computer, was created in 1949 to model the national economic processes of the United Kingdom. The MONIAC consisted of a series of transparent plastic tanks and pipes. It is thought that twelve to fourteen machines were built.

Computing timeline

Notes
  1. Rudman, Peter Strom (2007). How Mathematics Happened: The First 50,000 Years. Prometheus Books. p. 64. ISBN 978-1-59102-477-4.
  2. "400: Tiwanaku pottery depicts quipu storage device". Computer History Museum. The oldest known quipu made about 4,600 years ago at Caral on the Peruvian coast.
  3. The History of the Binomial Coefficients in India, California State University, East Bay. Archived March 16, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  4. Morse code. ActewAGL.
  5. Simon Singh. The Code Book. pp. 14–20
  6. Fowler, Charles B. (October 1967). "The Museum of Music: A History of Mechanical Instruments". Music Educators Journal. 54 (2): 45–49. doi:10.2307/3391092. JSTOR 3391092. S2CID 190524140.
  7. Koetsier, Teun (2001). "On the prehistory of programmable machines: musical automata, looms, calculators". Mechanism and Machine Theory. 36 (5): 589–603. doi:10.1016/S0094-114X(01)00005-2.
  8. G. Wiet, V. Elisseeff, P. Wolff, J. Naudu (1975). History of Mankind, Vol 3: The Great medieval Civilisations, p. 649. George Allen & Unwin Ltd, UNESCO.
  9. Hill, Donald (1985). "Al-Bīrūnī's mechanical calendar". Annals of Science. 42 (2): 139–163. doi:10.1080/00033798500200141. ISSN 0003-3790.
  10. Tuncer Oren (2001). "Advances in Computer and Information Sciences: From Abacus to Holonic Agents". Turk J Elec Engin. 9 (1): 63–70 [64].
  11. Hassan, Ahmad Y. "Transfer of Islamic Technology to the West, Part II: Transmission Of Islamic Engineering". Retrieved 2008-01-22.
  12. Lorch, R. P. (1976). "The Astronomical Instruments of Jabir ibn Aflah and the Torquetum". Centaurus. 20 (1): 11–34. Bibcode:1976Cent...20...11L. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0498.1976.tb00214.x.
  13. A 13th Century Programmable Robot Archived 2007-06-29 at the Wayback Machine, University of Sheffield
  14. "Ancient Discoveries, Episode 11: Ancient Robots". History Channel. Archived from the original on 2014-03-01. Retrieved 2008-09-06. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  15. Howard R. Turner (1997), Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction, p. 184, University of Texas Press, ISBN 0-292-78149-0
  16. Donald Routledge Hill, "Mechanical Engineering in the Medieval Near East", Scientific American, May 1991, pp. 64–9 (cf. Donald Routledge Hill, Mechanical Engineering Archived 2007-12-25 at the Wayback Machine)
  17. Bedini, Silvio A.; Maddison, Francis R. (1966). "Mechanical Universe: The Astrarium of Giovanni de' Dondi". Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. 56 (5): 1–69. doi:10.2307/1006002. JSTOR 1006002.
  18. "Astrolabe gearing". Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. 2005. Retrieved 2008-01-22.
  19. "History of the Astrolabe". Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.
  20. Kennedy, E. S. (November 1947). "Al-Kāshī's "Plate of Conjunctions"". Isis. 38 (1/2): 56–59. doi:10.1086/348036. ISSN 0021-1753. JSTOR 225450. S2CID 143993402.
  21. Kennedy, Edward S. (1950). "A Fifteenth-Century Planetary Computer: al-Kashi's "Tabaq al-Manateq" I. Motion of the Sun and Moon in Longitude". Isis. 41 (2): 180–183. doi:10.1086/349146. PMID 15436217. S2CID 43217299.
  22. Kennedy, Edward S. (1952). "A Fifteenth-Century Planetary Computer: al-Kashi's "Tabaq al-Maneteq" II: Longitudes, Distances, and Equations of the Planets". Isis. 43 (1): 42–50. doi:10.1086/349363. S2CID 123582209.
  23. Kennedy, Edward S. (1951). "An Islamic Computer for Planetary Latitudes". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 71 (1): 13–21. doi:10.2307/595221. JSTOR 595221.
  24. Sriraman, Bharath; Ernest, Paul; Greer, Brian (2009-06-01). Critical Issues in Mathematics Education. IAP. pp. 175, 200. ISBN 9781607522188.
  25. "History of Computers and Computing, Mechanical calculators, Pioneers, Leonardo da Vinci". history-computer.com. Retrieved 2017-07-06.
  26. Jean Marguin, p. 47 (1994)
  27. Jean Marguin, p. 48 (1994)
  28. René Taton, p. 81 (1969)
  29. Jean Marguin, p. 48 (1994) Citing René Taton (1963)
  30. Jean Marguin, p. 46 (1994)
  31. Babbage, Charles (2011-10-12). Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. Cambridge University Press. p. 154. ISBN 9781108037884.
  32. Jean Marguin, pp. 64–65 (1994)
  33. David Smith, pp. 173–181 (1929)
  34. Copy of Poleni's machine (it) Museo Nazionale Della Scienza E Della Tecnologia Leonardo Da Vinci. Retrieved 2010-10-04
  35. Snyder, Laura J. (2011-02-22). The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World. Crown/Archetype. p. 192. ISBN 9780307716170.
  36. Dubbey, J. M.; Dubbey, John Michael (2004-02-12). The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521524766.
  37. (it) Charles Babbage e l’Accademia delle Scienze
  38. (fr) Rapport du jury central sur les produits de l'agriculture et de l'industrie exposés en 1849, Tome II, page 542 - 548, Imprimerie Nationale, 1850 Gallica
  39. (fr) Le calcul simplifié Maurice d'Ocagne, page 269, Bibliothèque numérique du CNAM
  40. Weld, Charles Richard (1848). A History of the Royal Society: With Memoirs of the Presidents. J. W. Parker. pp. 387–390.
  41. James Essinger, Jacquard's Web, pp. 77 & 102–106, Oxford University Press, 2004
  42. Morris, Charles R. (2014-03-04). The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. PublicAffairs. p. 63. ISBN 9781610393577.
  43. Gilbert, William J.; Nicholson, W. Keith (2004-01-30). Modern Algebra with Applications. John Wiley & Sons. p. 7. ISBN 9780471469896.
  44. the first clone maker was made by Burkhardt from Germany in 1878
  45. Felt, Dorr E. (1916). Mechanical arithmetic, or The history of the counting machine. Chicago: Washington Institute. p. 4.
  46. New Scientist. Inside the world's first computers - Allan Bromley. Reed Business Information. 1983-09-15. p. 784.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  47. Hollerith Integrating Tabulator
  48. "Odhner Pictures". www.rechenmaschinen-illustrated.com. Leipälä, Timo; Turku, Finland. "The Life and Works of WT Odhner (Part II).". pp. 69–70, 72. Retrieved 2017-09-04.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  49. "Key-Driven Calculators". www.officemuseum.com. Retrieved 2017-09-05.
  50. Columbia University Computing History - Herman Hollerith
  51. Report of the Commissioner of Labor In Charge of The Eleventh Census to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1895 Washington, D.C., July 29 1895 Page 9: "You may confidently look for the rapid reduction of the force of this office after the 1st of October, and the entire cessation of clerical work during the present calendar year. ... The condition of the work of the Census Division and the condition of the final reports show clearly that the work of the Eleventh Census will be completed at least two years earlier than was the work of the Tenth Census." Carroll D. Wright Commissioner of Labor in Charge.
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  53. "Automatic Abacus】 Mechanical Calculating Machine". Mechanical Calculating Machine-Computer Museum. Retrieved 2022-07-15.
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  55. "In future will sell adding machines". Chicago Lumberman. Vol. 31. p. 34. hdl:2027/uc1.c2647428.
  56. Thomas A. Russo: Antique Office Machines: 600 Years of Calculating Devices, 2001, p. 114, Schiffer Publishing Ltd, ISBN 0-7643-1346-0
  57. "【Kawaguchi Ichitaro (Ministry of Communications and Transportation) 】Kawaguchi Electric Tabulation Machine". museum.ipsj.or.jp. Retrieved 2022-07-15.
  58. "IBM Tabulators and Accounting Machines".
  59. "Percy E. Ludgate Prize in Computer Science" (PDF). The John Gabriel Byrne Computer Science Collection. Retrieved 2020-01-15.
  60. "Percy Ludgate's Analytical Machine". fano.co.uk. From Analytical Engine to Electronic Digital Computer: The Contributions of Ludgate, Torres, and Bush by Brian Randell, 1982, Ludgate: pp. 4–5, Quevedo: pp. 6, 11–13, Bush: pp. 13, 16–17. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
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  62. The IBM 601 Multiplying Punch
  63. History of Research on Switching Theory in Japan, IEEJ Transactions on Fundamentals and Materials, vol. 124 (2004) no. 8, pp. 720–726, Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan
  64. Switching Theory/Relay Circuit Network Theory/Theory of Logical Mathematics, IPSJ Computer Museum, Information Processing Society of Japan
  65. Radomir S. Stanković (University of Niš), Jaakko T. Astola (Tampere University of Technology), Mark G. Karpovsky (Boston University), Some Historical Remarks on Switching Theory, 2007, DOI 10.1.1.66.1248
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  67. Interconnected Punched Card Equipment
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References
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  • Ginsburg, Jekuthiel (2003). Scripta Mathematica (Septembre 1932-Juin 1933). Kessinger Publishing, LLC. ISBN 978-0-7661-3835-3.
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