Milestones in Information Technology and Systems up to 1960

One of the biggest milestones in the history of computers is the transistor. American physicists John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor in 1947. The first transistor was created at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947. “This was perhaps the most important electronics invention of the 20th century.
Before we jump to a world of modern computers let me show you the early inventions that improved and changed the way of computing.

Abacus
Abacus was the first leap forward in computing between 1000 BC and 500 BD (we can still find it in the middle east asia countries). This apparatus used a series of moveable beads or rocks. The standard abacus can be used to perform addition, subtraction, division and multiplication; the abacus can also be used to extract square-roots and cubic roots.

Chinese Abacus

Roman Abacus

Antikythera mechanism
An ancient astronomical computer built by the Greeks around 80 BC.

Antikythera mechanism

Programmable analog computer
The "Castle clock", an astronomical clock invented by Al-Jazari in 1206, is considered to be the earliest programmable analog computer. 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, and five robotic musicians who played music when struck by levers operated by a camshaft attached to a water wheel.

Illustration from Al-Jazari's book

Watch
In 1502 Peter Henlein, a craftsman from Nuremberg Germany, creates a first portable spring-driven watch (called a watch because it was first used by watchmen).

Napier's Bones
Napier's bones, also called Napier's rods, were invented by eccentric scotsman named John Napier in 1617. Napier's bones are numbered rods which can be used to perform multiplication of any number by a number 2-9. By placing "bones" corresponding to the multiplier on the left side and the bones corresponding to the digits of the multiplicand next to the right, and product can be read off simply by adding pairs of numbers (with appropriate carries as needed) in the row determined by the multiplier.

Napier's bones

Slide Rule
Napier's invention lead directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 by clergyman William Oughtred and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

A slide rule consists of two movable rulers placed side by side. Each ruler is marked in such a way that the actual distance from the beginning of the rulers is equally proportioned to the logarithms of the numbers printed on the ruler. One can easily and quickly multiply or divide by sliding the rulers.

Slide rule

Shickard's Calculating Clock
Invented by the German professor Wilhelm Schickard in 1623. Shickard's clock is the first true mechanical calculator. It could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It operated on six-digit numbers and rang a bell to announce overflow.
Shickard's invention was lost when he and his entire family were killed by plague in the mid-1630s. In the 1950s a sketch by Schickard of his mechanism was discovered among Kepler's papers at the Pulkovo Observatory near Leningrad, Russia. Profressor Bruno Baron von Freytag Loringhoff, from the University of Tübingen, Germany, used the sketch to build a working copy of Schickard's machine. This device now resides in the Computer Museum of America.

Calculating clock

Pascaline
The Pascaline, invented by Blaise Pascal in France in 1642, was a mechanical calculator that could add and subtract directly.

8-digit version of the Pascaline

Mechanical Calculator (1672)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz managed to build a digital mechanical four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number system. Leibniz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers.

Liebniz's Stepped Reckoner

Punched Cards
Punched card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. They were used around 1725 as a more robust form of the perforated paper rolls, then in use for controlling textile looms in France. Punched cards were widely used through the 19th and 20th centuries. Early digital computers used punched cards, often prepared using keypunch machines, as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. Some voting machines used punched cards.

Jacquard's punched card used to controle textile loops

The Jacquard loom, on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, was one of the first programmable devices.

Calculator

In 1820 Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar made a machine, the 'arithmometer', based on Leibniz's design that was capable of performing four operations in a simple and reliable way. His machine was very successful. Around 1500 Thomas's machines were constructed between 1820 and 1878.

Thomas's calculator

Difference Engine 

By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculating machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine. Machine was design to calculate logarithms, but the engine proved exceedingly difficult to maintain and the project soon became the most expensive government funded project up to that point in English history. The device was never built.

Babbage's difference engine

Telegraph

A telegraph was an early invention that communicated messages at a distance over a wire using electricity. It was later replaced by the telephone. The word telegraphy comes from the Greek words tele which means faraway, and grapho which means write.

The first attempts to send signals by electricity (telegraph) had been made many times before Joseph Henry, but Joseph discovered the essential mechanics behind the electric telegraph. This discovery was made in 1831, a full year before Samuel Morse invented the telegraph.  

Analytical Machine
Charles Babbage designs the Analytical Machine (an important step in the history of computers) that follows instructions from punched-cards. It is the first general purpose computer.

Analytical Engine - First fully-automatic calculating machine

Electromechanical Relay
In 1838 Joseph Henry invented the electromechanical relay (an electric switch).


First Computer Program
In 1842-1843, Lady Ada Byron (Countess of Lovelace and daughter of  Lord Byron) translated an article about Charles Babbage's purposed Analytic Engine. In her notes, she describes an algorithm that is cited as "the first computer program", making her the first computer programmer.

Lady Ada Byron

Mechanical computer
1855 - the brothers George and Edward Scheutz  from Stockholm, built the first practical mechanical computer based on the work of Charles Babbage.




Typewriter & QWERTY Keyboard
In 1868 Christopher Sholes invented the first commercially successful typewriter in the United States utilizing the QWERTY keyboard layout in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar jams. Why this is still the default English keyboard used today is a mystery.

Sholes typewritter from 1872

Telephone
In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, two independent inventors  designed devices that could transmit speech electrically (the telephone). Both men rushed their respective designs to the patent office within hours of each other, Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone first. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell entered into a famous legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell won.

Early Bell Telephone

Punch-card tabulating machine (1888)
Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators displaying results.

Hollerith's punched card tabulator

Tabulating Machine Company
1889, a patent was issued for Hollerith tabulating machine. In 1896 Herman Hollerith started the Tabulating Machine Company, the company later became the well-known computer company IBM.

Cathode Ray Tube (CRT)
In 1897, German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun invented the Cathode-Ray Oscilloscope, also known as the Braun tube or  Cathode-Ray Tube. It was a cold-cathode diode, a modification of the Crookes tube with a phosphor-coated screen, but it won't be until 1928 (31 years later) that it is used for Television.


Television
Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier created the first demonstration of a very basic television  in Paris .


Z1
The Z1 was a mechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse from 1935-1938. It was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched tape. This computer was destroyed during the bombarding of Berlin, during Ward War II in December 1943.

The Z1 was the first in a series of computers that Zuse designed.

ENIAC
Electric Numerical Integrator And Computer, the world's first commercial electronic digital computer. The machine was built by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania.
ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8.5 by 3 by 80 feet (2.6 m × 0.9 m × 24 m), took up 680 square feet (63 m²), and consumed 150 kW of power.
ENIAC had an inflexible architecture which essentially required rewiring to change its programming.