Timeline: The 1950s

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1950

• Charney and von Neumann run the first numerical weather forecast on ENIAC. → Weather and Climate Modeling
• Hamming publishes error-correcting codes. → Richard Hamming
• Richard Hamming publishes the first error-correcting code. → Coding Theory and Error Correction
• Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” poses the imitation game. → Alan Turing and the Enigma

1951

• An Wang founds Wang Laboratories. → Dead End: Wang Labs
• David Huffman finds the optimal prefix code as a term paper. → Data Compression
• Fred Terman creates the Stanford Industrial Park. → Silicon Valley: How a Place Became a Myth
• Wilkes invents microprogramming. → Maurice Wilkes and EDSAC

1952

• Bell Labs’ Audrey recognizes spoken digits. → Speech Recognition
• Grace Hopper’s A-0, the first compiler, runs. → Grace Hopper: The Queen of Code
• Heinz Nixdorf starts building calculating machines in an Essen basement. → Heinz Nixdorf
• Hopper’s A-0 shows a machine can translate its own instructions. → The Compiler: Translating Human Intent into Machine Code
• Lotfi Zadeh and John Ragazzini publish the sampled-data paper that gives control engineering the z-transform. → Lotfi Zadeh
• Silver and Woodland patent the bullseye barcode. → Barcodes and the UPC
• Strachey’s love-letter generator on the Ferranti Mark I produces the earliest known computer-generated literature. → Christopher Strachey: The Programmer Who Made a Computer Write Love Letters
• Turing is prosecuted for gross indecency and chemically castrated. → Alan Turing and the Enigma

1953

• An IBM memo describes hashing for an assembler’s symbol table. → Hashing
• Hans Peter Luhn’s internal IBM memo describes hashing with chaining. → Hans Peter Luhn
• IBM salesman R. Blair Smith meets American Airlines president C. R. Smith on a flight, the conversation that starts SABRE. → SABRE and Airline Reservation Systems
• South Korea emerges from war poorer than Ghana; by 2000 it dominates DRAM. → South Korea’s Tech Industry: Chaebol, DRAM, and the Miracle on the Han River

1954

• Dantzig, Fulkerson, and Johnson solve a 49-city traveling salesman problem with cutting planes. → The Traveling Salesman Problem
• Sweden’s BESK is briefly the fastest computer in the world. → The Nordic Tech Industry: Nokia, Linux, Spotify, and the Open Source North
• Work on FORTRAN begins the first wave of high-level languages. → The Rise of High-Level Languages: The First Wave
• The Georgetown-IBM experiment translates sixty Russian sentences in January. → Machine Translation

1955

• Kateryna Yushchenko creates the Address language in Kyiv, with indirect addressing. → Kateryna Yushchenko and the Address Language
• The Pisa CEP computer project begins. → Italy’s Computing Industry: Pisa, Ivrea, and the Sale of 1964
• The Danish Academy of Technical Sciences founds Regnecentralen with 900,000 kroner of Marshall Plan money. → Regnecentralen and GIER: Denmark’s Computer Company

1956

• China founds its state computing institute. → China’s Tech Industry: From Follower to Frontier
• Chomsky’s first paper on formal grammars appears; the hierarchy follows in 1959. → The Chomsky Hierarchy: Grammar, Languages, and the Spine of Every Parser
• IBM ships the RAMAC 305, the first hard disk drive. → The Storage Revolution: From Magnetic Tape to Silicon
• India’s first computer arrives at the Indian Statistical Institute. → India’s IT Industry
• John McCarthy coins “artificial intelligence” for the Dartmouth workshop. → John McCarthy and LISP
• Kleene’s regular expressions and Chomsky’s grammars appear. → Automata Theory and Computability
• Minsky co-organizes the Dartmouth Conference that names AI. → Marvin Minsky and the MIT AI Lab: The Architect of Artificial Minds
• Newell and Simon’s Logic Theorist proves theorems, the first AI program. → Newell and Simon: The Thinking Machines
• Perlis’s IT compiler runs at Carnegie Tech. → Alan Perlis and the Epigrams on Programming
• Shockley founds Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View. → William Shockley
• Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain share the Nobel Prize in Physics. → The Transistor: The Invention That Made Everything Else Possible
• The Dartmouth Conference founds artificial intelligence. → The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: Dreams, Winters, and the Deep Learning Revolution

1957

• 99 companies employ 17,000 people along Route 128. → Route 128: The Region That Lost to Silicon Valley
• Arthur Rock arranges the financing of Fairchild Semiconductor. → Venture Capital and Silicon Valley: The Money That Made the Industry
• Bellman publishes Dynamic Programming. → Richard Bellman and Dynamic Programming
• Digital Equipment Corporation is founded in a Maynard woolen mill on $70,000. → DEC and the Minicomputer Era
• FORTRAN makes scientific computing programmable. → Scientific and Numerical Computing
• Fairchild Semiconductor is the first company funded by outside equity investors. → Silicon Valley: How a Place Became a Myth
• IBM releases FORTRAN, the first high-level language adopted at industrial scale. → The Evolution of Language: From Machine Code to Modern Abstraction
• IBM releases the FORTRAN compiler. → John Backus and FORTRAN
• John von Neumann dies at 53 under military guard. → John von Neumann
• Max Mathews starts computer music at Bell Labs. → Computing and Music Creation
• Noyce and the “traitorous eight” found Fairchild Semiconductor. → Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor
• Rabin and Scott invent the nondeterministic finite automaton at IBM. → Dana Scott
• Rosenblatt’s Mark I Perceptron, the first hardware learning machine, is built. → Frank Rosenblatt: The Forgotten Pioneer of Neural Networks
• Svoboda’s SAPO, the first fault-tolerant computer, runs in Prague. → Czechoslovakia’s Computing Industry: Svoboda, SAPO, and the Institute That Lost Its Founder
• The Computer Society of South Africa is founded (often misdated to 1971). → IITPSA: South Africa’s IT Professional Society
• The word Informatik is coined. → Germany’s Computing Pioneers
• The British Computer Society is founded on 14 October. → BCS: The Chartered Institute for IT

1958

• An international committee designs ALGOL 58. → ALGOL: The Language That Taught Programming How to Teach Itself
• Brusentsov’s Setun, the only series-built ternary computer, is assembled at Moscow State University. → Setun: The Ternary Computer
• China’s first computer, copied from Soviet blueprints, runs. → China’s Tech Industry: From Follower to Frontier
• Jack Kilby builds the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments. → Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit
• John Whitney’s converted anti-aircraft gun director draws the Lissajous spirals of Saul Bass’s title sequence for Hitchcock’s Vertigo. → John Whitney and Charles Csuri
• Lisp is the first practical realization of the lambda calculus. → The Rise of Functional Programming
• Luhn publishes automatic abstracting, “A Business Intelligence System”, and the KWIC index in one year. → Hans Peter Luhn
• McCarthy invents LISP. → John McCarthy and LISP
• Poland’s first electronic computer, the XYZ, is built. → Poland’s Computing Industry: Elwro, the Odra, and the Man Who Went to Breed Pigs
• The Canadian Information Processing Society is founded. → Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS)
• Zemanek’s Mailüfterl, the first fully transistorised computer on the European continent, runs in Vienna. → Heinz Zemanek and the Mailüfterl

1959

• Backus’s notation for ALGOL starts formal grammar description of languages. → The History of Parsing: From BNF to ANTLR
• COBOL is designed for business readability. → COBOL: The Language That Runs Banking
• John McCarthy invents garbage collection for LISP. → Garbage Collection: Automatic Memory Management
• Minsky and McCarthy found the MIT AI project. → Marvin Minsky and the MIT AI Lab: The Architect of Artificial Minds
• Norway’s SSI, the IFIP member society, is founded. → The Nordic Computer Societies
• Olivetti’s Elea 9003, among the first fully transistorized commercial computers, is completed under Mario Tchou. → Camillo and Adriano Olivetti
• RENFE buys an IBM 650 for its payroll, Spain’s first commercial computer. → Spain’s Computing Industry: From the Ajedrecista to the Golden Age of the Spectrum
• Ronald Coase proposes auctioning radio spectrum; an FCC commissioner asks whether it is a joke. → Spectrum Auctions
• Samuel’s checkers program learns from play. → Reinforcement Learning
• Stanford students pair 49 couples with an IBM 650, the first computer matchmaking. → The History of Online Dating
• Tony Hoare invents quicksort. → Tony Hoare and the Science of Programming
• Hungary’s first computer, the M-3, runs in Budapest on 21 January. → Hungary’s Computing Industry: The M-3, the “Analysers” of KFKI, and the Boy Who Watched the Ural
• Kilby files the integrated-circuit patent in February; TI announces it in March. → The Integrated Circuit Revolution: Shrinking the World

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