Digital Time

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pre 1950

450 BC

• The first abacus

1614

• John Napier, Scottish mathematician, invents logarithms.

1615

• William Oughtred, English mathematician, invents the slide rule.

1623

• Wilhelm Schickard, German polymath, invents the first mechanical calculating machine, the Calculating Clock.

1645

• Blaise Pascal, French philosopher and mathematician, produces a calculator.

1674

• Gottfried Leibniz, German philosopher and mathematician, finishes his first calculator, the Stepped Reckoner.

1801

• Joseph-Marie Jacquard, French textile manufacturer, invents a way of programming a carpet-making loom by using punched cards.

1820

• Charles Thomas de Colmar produces the first mass-produced calculator, the Arithmometer.

1822

• Charles Babbage, English mathematician, makes first prototype of his Difference Engine calculating machine.

1830s

• Charles Babbage designs his Analytical Engine, a calculating machine to be programmable by punched cards.

1889

• Nintendo Koppai, forerunner of today's Nintendo, founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi to make and sell handmade playing cards.

1890

• Herman Hollerith, American inventor, developed a punched card system for recording and processing data for the US census. (In 1924 he merged his company with two others to become IBM).

1936

• Alan Turing, English mathematician, developed a mathematical characterization of the ideal computing machine.

1938

• Conrad Zuse, German computer pioneer, constructed the first binary calculator, using Boolean algebra.

22 October

• Chester Carlson succeeds in making the first electrophotographic copy (or photocopy), in New York.

1943

• Colossus electronic code-breaker developed at Bletchley Park, England.
• The first program-controlled calculator made,the Harvard University Mark I or Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator.

1945

• The first electronic digital computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerator, Integrator, Analyser, and Computer) completed by a military-funded team at the University of Pennsylvania. It is 100' long, 10' high, 3' deep and has more than 100,000 components.
• Vannevar Bush, director of USA's Office of Scientific Research and Development writes an essay in the Atlantic called "As We May Think", envisioning future information processing uses for computers.

1948

• The first stored-program computer completed, the Manchester University Mark I, in England.

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Phil Gyford