1763 Thomas Bayes, an English clergyman and mathematician, postumously publishes a mathematical method that could be used to calculate, given occurrences in prior trials, the likelihood of a target occurrence in future trials - the root of probabilistic logic.
1801 Joseph-Marie Jacquard, of Lyons France, invented an automatic loom using punched cards for the control of the patterns in the fabrics
1822 Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine for the purposes of computing the entries in navigation and other tables
1833 Charles Babbage designed the general purpose Analytical Engine that had the basic components of a modern computer
1842 Ada Augusta King, Countess of Lovelace, translates Menabrea's pamphlet on the Analytical Engine, adding her own notes, and becomes the first weaver of instructions on punched cards, based on a language that is compatible with the Analytical Engine - the first programmer.
1854 George Boole of Queens College, Cork describes his system for symbolic and logical reasoning that becomes later the basis for computer design.
1878 Englishman Sir William Crookes invented the 'Crookes tube', an early prototype of cathode-ray tube.
1878 Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914), an English physicist, was the first person to invent a practical and longer-lasting electric light bulb (13.5 hours). Swan used a carbon fiber filament derived from cotton. Edison was not granted a patent in 1876 because his "invention" too closely resembled Swan's development of a filament in a vacuum tube in the 1860's.
1893 German, Gottlob Frege developed an analysis of quantified statements and formalized the notion of a ‘proof’ in terms that are still accepted today, as the first predicate calculus.
1897 German, Karl Ferdinand Braun invents the cathode ray tube oscilloscope.
1926 First television (J.L. Baird)
1932 E. Wynn-Williams, at Cambridge, England, uses thyratron tubes to construct a binary digital counter for use in connection with physics experiments.
1935 Konrad Zuse, in Berlin, Germany, developed his Z-1 mechanical computer
1937 Alan Turing developed the idea of a "Universal Machine" capable of executing any describable algorithm, and forming the basis for the concept of "computability".
1938 Konrad Zuse, in Berlin, Germany, developed his Z-2 electro-mechanical computer
1941 Konrad Zuse, in Berlin, Germany, developed his Z-3 computer, based on relays, the Z3 was very sophisticated for its time; for example, it utilized the binary number system and could perform floating-point arithmetic.
1943 The earliest programmed electronic computer ran when Tommy Flowers delivered the Colossus Mark I to Bletchley Park in England - punched tape for input; 2400 Vacuum tubes for logic; translated 5000 characters a second - 10 were eventually built.
1946 Konrad Zues, in Germany, develops the worlds first programming language Plankalkül, while hiding in the Bavarian alps waiting for the war to end. Many test programs were written in it, and it includes constructs for assignment, conditionals, loops, operations of predicate logic and Boolean algebra, list operations, and data structures including arrays, records, hierarchical data structures, list of pairs.
1948 Freddy Williams, Tom Kilburn and Max Newman at the Royal Society Computing Laboratory at Manchester, on June 21 first operated “the Baby” which became the first operating stored program machine in the world
1949 Maurice Wilkes and the staff of the Mathematical Laboratory at Cambridge University developed EDSAC, the first fully functional, stored-program electronic digital computer
1950 A prototype machine based on Turing's 1945 plans for the Automatic Computing Engine, named Pilot ACE, ran its first program at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) at Teddington, England. With a clock speed of 1 MHz it remained for some time the fastest computer in the world.
1950 Assembler language first used by Maurice Wilkes, Cambridge University - On EDSAC.
1950 Jack Good having worked at Bletchley Park, GCHQ, and the UK Admiralty Research Laboratory, publishes "Probability and the Weighing of Evidence" as the first book on the computational modelling of subjective probability, providing a basis for computational neural networks.
1950 Alan Turing publishes his "Turing Test" in Computing Machinery and Intelligence to determine if a computer exhibits artificial intelligence.
1950 Floppy Disk invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo by Doctor Yoshiro Nakamats.
1951 At J. Lyons and Company, Ltd., operators of "corner tea houses" throughout Great Britain, the LEO I computer was operational and ran the world's first regular routine office computer job.
1951 Microprogramming invented by Maurice Wilkes, Cambridge University
1951 The world's first commercially available general-purpose computer, the Ferranti Mark I was delivered off the production line to Manchester University in February 1951.
1952 AUTOCODE translated symbolic statements into machine language for the Manchester Mark I computer, by Alick E. Glennie, Royal Armaments Research Establisment, England, became the first compiler
1956 The Atlas supercomputer project initiated between University of Manchester and Ferranti Ltd.
1956 Edsger Dijkstra in the Netherlands invented an efficient algorithm for shortest paths in graphs that is still widely used.
1956 MAILÜFTERL computer developed by H. Zemanek and team, University of Technology, Austria, as the first transistor based computer in Europe.
1958 Teddington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes was held in the UK and among the papers presented were John McCarthy's "Programs with Common Sense," Oliver Selfridge's "Pandemonium," and Marvin Minsky's "Some Methods of Heuristic Programming and Artificial Intelligence."
1960 While working at Elliot Brothers Ltd. in the UK, Tony Hoare develops the Quicksort sorting algorithm, to become the most widely used algorithm in computing.
1961 Margaret Masterman of the Cambridge Language Research Unit, UK creates the first semantic network. She developed a list of 100 primitive concept types, such as Folk, Stuff, Thing, Do, and Be. In terms of those primitives, her group defined a conceptual dictionary of 15,000 entries. She organized the concept types into a lattice, which permits inheritance from multiple supertypes.
1961 In October 1961, the world's first electronic desktop calculators, the Anita mark VII and 8, are released by the Bell Punch Company of Uxbridge. Bell Punch Company had previously produced mechanical accounting machines and calculators. Development of the calculator started in 1956 under Norman Kitz, who had worked on the pilot "ACE" project at the National Physical Laboratory in the late 1940s.
1962 The Atlas computer at the University of Manchester became operational; it is the first machine to use virtual memory and paging; its instruction execution was pipelined, and it contained separate fixed- and floating-point arithmetic units, capable of approximately 200 kFLOPS
1964 The Atlas computer at the Chilton, UK site became operational as the most powerful machine in the world.
1965 Donald Davies of NPL proposed a fast message-switching communication service which became the basis of the Internet packet switching protocol.
1965 1st computer art exhibition, at Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart.
1966 Cyril Cleverdon of the Cranfield College of Aeronautics (now Cranfield Institute of Technology) developed the mathematics of `recall' (fraction of relevant documents retrieved) and `precision' (fraction of retrieved documents that are relevant) as measures of Information Retrieval systems.
1966 Charles Kao and George Hockham at the Harlow, UK research laboratories of Standard Telephone and Cable (STC) publishing the first paper to propose optical fibre and laser light as a viable telecommunication technology, which lead to the invention of the optic fibre and launched the optical communication revolution.
1967 William Newman's Reaction Handler, created at Imperial College, London provided direct manipulation of graphics, and introduced "Light Handles," a form of graphical potentiometer, that was probably the first "widget."
1967 Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl of the Norwegian Computing Centre in Oslo invents the first object oriented computer language Simula.
1968 NPL local network became the first computer network in the world using a fast packet-switching communication service - running at 768kbps
1968 Bob Hopgood, Paul Black and Jon Ogborn at the Atlas Computer Laboratory in the UK produces the first commercially distributed computer animated film - an educational title describing the Second Law of Thermodynamics distributed by Penguin Books.
1968 Edsger Dijkstra, of the Eindhoven University of Technology, starts to reform programming towards the belief that mathematical logic is and must be the basis for sensible computer program construction by influencing the development of the Algol-68 programming language.
1970 Niklaus Wirth at the ETH Zurich, devised the programming language Pascal to be efficient to implement and run, allow for the development of well structured and well organized programs, and to serve as a vehicle for the teaching of the important concepts of computer programming.
1971 Keith van Rijsbergen at Cambridge University led the rise of probabilistic information retrieval by definingalgorithms to measure the frequency of words in relevant and irrelevant documents, and using term frequency measures to adjust the weight given to different words.
1971 Godfrey Hounsfield, James Ambrose and Louis Kreel installed the first clinical X-ray scanner using computerised tomography (CT) for the construction of 3D brain images at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, UK.
1973 Peter Kirstein at University College London (UCL) established the first transatlantic packet network link – Rutherford Laboratory IBM 360/195 in the UK linked through UCL and satellite link from Norway to ARPAnet. In November the RL machine is the most powerful on the ARPAnet.
1973 Clifford Cocks, a British mathematician working for GCHQ, described an asymmetric algorithm as the basis of public key cryptography commonly known as RSA.
1973 Prolog developed at the University of Luminy-Marseilles in France by Alain Colmerauer.
1975 The French mathematician, Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot published a paper called "A Theory of Fractal Sets" which becomes the basis for computer imagery to create realistic simulations of natural phenomena such as mountains, coastlines, wood grain, etc.
1976 Alan Sutcliffe of Systems Simulation Ltd. (SSL) of London using the RAL machines generated the first random CGI terrain for Ridley Scott's movie "Alien" during a scene where a computer-assisted landing sequence was required in which the terrain was viewed as a 3D wireframe on a futuristic computer.
1976 Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom sends out an email on 26 March from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern
1978 Amir Pnueli of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, introduces temporal logic into computing science for systems verification.
1978 Tony Hoare's CSP
1978 The demonstration of the first Compact Disk (CD) player to the board of Philips in the Netherlands.
1981 The ICL PERQ was the first commercial graphics workstation with a portrait monitor, 768x1024 pixels in size and a tablet input device. It was the first desktop 3M machine (megabyte, megaflop, megapixel).
1982 Robin Milner of the University of Edinburgh develops the Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS) - a general theory of concurrency.
1982 The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was released - using on the Z80 chip from Zilog, running at 3.5 MHz with an 8 colour graphics display - 16 Kb version for £125 or a 48 Kb version for £175 (the IBM PC was available for £1000+).
1983 EARN (European Academic and Research Network) established.
1984 Psion in the UK launch the Psion 1 as the first hand held computer (PDA) - 142mm x 78mm x 29.3mm, and the weighing 225 grams; Based on 8-bit technology, it came with 10K of non-volatile character storage in cartridges, two cartridge slots, a database with a search function, a utility pack with math functions, a 16-character LCD display, a clock/ calendar. The optional Science Pack turned the Psion into a genuine computer; capable of running resident scientific programs and being programmed in its own BASIC-like language, OPL.
1985 Acorn Computer Group in Cambridge, UK develops the world's first commercial RISC processor.
1986 Office Workstations Ltd (OWL) in Edinburgh extend Peter Brown’s 1982 Guide system, developed at the University of Kent, to become the first commercial multi-platform hypertext system.
1987 English mathematician Michael F. Barnsley defines the Fractal Image Compression Algorithm allowing digital images to be compressed and stored using fractal codes rather than as normal image data, allowing more efficient storage.
1988 On November 2, Robert Tappan Morris, the son of the former Chief Scientist of the U.S. National Security Agency, released the first Internet Worm (similar to a virus) which within hours had made most VAX and Sun-3 computers connected to the Internet inactive for anything but its own self replication. This was the first Internet attack, resulting in between $100,000 and $10,000,000 losses due to lost access to the Internet at infected hosts (according to the United States General Accounting Office).
1990 Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN).
1994 Linus Torvalds of University of Helsinki in Finland released version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel as a freely available operating system.
1996 Formal definition of B; VDM ISO standard.
1997 The First Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conference (RoboCup-97) was held in conjunction with IJCAI-97 at Nagoya, Japan.
1998 Nokia in Finland introduced the world's first IPv6-enabled end-to-end GPRS network.
2000 Z ISO standard
2002-2004 NEC Earth Simulator in Japan is ranked the most powerful computer in the world at 35.68Tflops with full node configuration. Nearly twice the performance of the next machine.
This page was created in 1999 to counter-balance several other computer/computing histories and timelines which suggested that all the siginificant events occured in the USA. It illustrates that credible and accurate technology histories can still present a very biased view as a result of omissions.
Michael Wilson, (m.d.wilson@w3.org)