1605 – Bacon’s Cipher – Steganographic message system using only “a” and “b” in a 5-bit code. This was later changed to “0” and “1” to create the Binary Code. (Created by Francis Bacon)
1794 – French Telegraph – The first telegraph system using optics sends a message over a distance of 15 kilometers. The system was created by using semaphores placed around 10 kilometers apart and repeating the message down the line. (Created by Claude Chappe)
1794 – Edelcrantz’s Telegraph – The second telegraph system using ten moveable shutters mounted on two posts in stations about 10 kilometers apart. The positions of the shutters formed digit combinations that could be interpreted using signal books to represent words and sentences, such as 2-4-0 meaning “general.” Twice as fast as the French Telegraph, the first message was sent on October 1st from Stockholm to Drottningholm in Sweden. (Created by Abraham Niklas Edelcrantz).
1833 – Gauss-Weber Telegraph – The world’s first electromagnetic telegraph.
1844 – Morse Telegraph – The first electric telegraph message from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland. A set of signals that could represent language was created, called Morse Code. (Developed by Samuel F.B. Morse)
1854 – The Laws of Thought – A treatise for an algebraic system based on true and false, or 1 and 0. This was the base of Binary Code and why If/Then Statements are called Boolean Expression in coding. (Written by George Boole)
1855 – Hughes’ Telegraph – No code telegraph. The operator at the sending station used a keyboard resembling a piano, with each key representing a character of the alphabet. When a key was pressed, the corresponding character was printed on a strip of paper at the receiving end. (Created by David Edward Hughes)
1858 – Transatlantic Communication – The first telegraph line was laid across the Atlantic Ocean, connecting the U.S. to Europe on August 5th. The cable stretched nearly 2,000 miles with a depth of more than two miles in the Atlantic Ocean. It stopped functioning in September due to being too weak to withstand the ocean currents. (Created by Cyrus West Field)
1866 – Transatlantic Line – The first permanent telegraph line was laid across the Atlantic Ocean. This one was active until 1965. (Created by Cyrus West Field and the Atlantic Telegraph Company)
1874 – “A fast telegraph system” – Used uniform six-time units to transmit 26 letters of Latin. (Created by Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot)
1876 – 5-Digit Code – A six-unit code can encode 64 different symbols, much more than the 26 Latin letters. A smaller character set can be more efficiently encoded with a five-unit code, allowing 32 combinations. (Created by Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot)
1928 – IBM Computer Card – IBM and its competitors redesigned punched cards, increasing their sizes and the number of holes to represent bits of data over a period of three decades. Around 1900, punched cards had 22 columns and 8 punch positions. They later evolved to 24 columns and 10 positions, and by the late 1920s, they featured 45 columns of round holes and 12 punch positions. The new IBM card had 80 columns and 10 rows for coding numbers, doubling the capacity for storage. (Created by IBM (International Business Machines Corporation))
1929 – “Double Deck” Punch Card – It had two sets of 45-column rows, for a total of 90 columns. (Designed by Remington Rand’s Powers Accounting Machines Division)
1947 – ASM (Assembly Language) – The first computer programming language to use mnemonic instructions. It started as more of a math language to run a machine compared to the modern mnemonic form used today. (Created by Kathleen Booth)
1948 – Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) – Ran the first successful program on May 6th. The first mnemonic assembly language format used by the EDSAC was developed by Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler. The ESDC featured an assembler with single-letter mnemonics, which were stored in the first 31 locations of the machine. These locations were known as ‘initial orders’. (Created by Maurice Wilkes and his team at University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory)
1949 – UNIVAC Instructions Code – The first software to allow a computer to be operated by keyboarded commands rather than dials and switches. Short Code, developed in June was the first high-level programming language for an electronic computer. (Developed by Betty Holberton)
1949 – BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer) – The first stored-program computer in the U.S., designed for the Northrop Aircraft Company and delivered in September. It was the first computer that came with a User Manual. Due to how the transport and delivery was handled, the BINAC never worked properly for Northrop, even though it had worked at the workshop that built it. (Designed by EMCC (Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation))
1952 – Program Linker (Originally called a Compiler) – Converted English terms into machine code, written for the A-0 System. (Created by Grace Hopper)
1953 – IBM 701 – The first computer in the IBM 700/7000 series of scientific computers. It used Speedcode (also known as Speedcoding, or SpeedCo), the first high-level programming language developed by John W. Backus to support computation with floating point numbers. A floating-point system can represent very large and very small numbers with a fixed number of digits, like the distance between galaxies or between particles in an atom. (Designed by Jerrier Haddad and Nathaniel Rochester)
1954 – IBM 650 RAMAC – The first mass-produced computer in the world was installed in December. Operating at a frequency of 125 kHz, the 650 could add or subtract in 1.63 milliseconds, multiply in 12.96 milliseconds, and divide in 16.90 milliseconds. Its average speed was about 27.6 milliseconds per instruction, equating to roughly 40 instructions per second. (Designed by Reynold B. Johnson)
1955 – IMB 704 – The first mass-produced computer with hardware for floating-point arithmetic and second computer in the IBM 700/7000 series of scientific computers was installed in July. This large digital mainframe computer with 36 bit memory and adapting the new technology of magnetic-core memory for random-access applications. (Designed by John Backus and Gene Amdahl)
1955 – FLOW-MATIC programming language – (Created by Grace Hopper and Remington Rand)
1956 – TAT-1 (Transatlantic No. 1) – The first transatlantic telephone cable system between Gallanach Bay and Clarenville, Newfoundland, initially carrying 36 telephone channels and later increased to 48 channels. It was upgraded in 1960, increasing the capacity to 51 channels. It was retired in 1978. (Laid by a consortium that included the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T))
1958 – IBM 709 – The first computer system installed in August and the third in the series of scientific computers. It had more magnetic-core memory than the 704 and had the first use of independent I/O channels. (Created by IBM (International Business Machines Corporation))
1959 – Automatically Programmed Tools (APT) Language – An English language to instruct tools, mainly used in computer-assisted manufacturing. (Designed by Douglas T. Ross)
1959 – Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) – Language designed for business use. (Designed by CODASYL (Conference on Data Systems Languages) Committee, including Howard Bromberg, Norman Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, and Gertrude Tierney, with indirect influence from Grace Hopper)
1959 – IMB 7090 – First installation in December of the computer and replaced the IBM 709. Transistor circuitry was used instead of vacuum tube circuits. The modern implementation of Assembly Language was created for the IMB 7090, called Generalized Assembly System (GAS) by a team including Douglas McIlroy and George Mealy. (Created by IBM)
1961 – Cambridge Programming Language, later renamed Combined Programming Language (CPL) – Language intended for a wider application than just scientific calculations. (Developed by University Mathematical Laboratory (now the Computer Laboratory), Cambridge, and the University of London Computer Unit, from an idea by Christopher Strachey and Maurice Wilkes)
1962 – Spacewar! – The first computer video game released on February 14. (Designed by Steve “Slug” Russell)
1962 – IMB 7094 – Upgraded version of the 7090. It had seven index registers, instead of three on the earlier machines. (Created by IBM)
1963 – American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) – Language for different manufacturers to exchange data. It can only represent up to 256 symbols, which is why it was predominately replaced by Unicode which was released in 1991. (Designed by an American Standards Association (ASA) Committee later known as ANSI)
1964 – Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6600 – Supercomputer that ran three times faster than it’s competitor the IBM 7030. It was only surpassed by it’s successor in 1968. 10 small computers, known as peripheral processing units, offloaded the workload from the central processor. (Designed by Seymour Cray)
1965 – 3C DDP-116 – The world’s first commercial 16-bit minicomputer. (Designed by engineer Gardner Hendrie for Computer Control Corporation (CCC))
1967 – Basic Combined Programming Language (BCPL) – Introduced features like using curly braces to delimit code blocks. (Created by Martin Richards)
1969 – Apollo Guidance Computer – Launched into outer space in the Apollo 11 mission. It used rope memory. Assembly Language was a low-level language used for direct hardware control, while the MIT Algebraic Compiler (MAC) compiler language designed by Hal Laning was a high-level language that allowed for more abstract programming, with a compiler translating it into AGC Assembly Language. (Designed by a team of engineers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, led by Charles Stark Draper)
1971 – Computer Space – One of the earliest electronic arcade games. (Designed by Nolan Bushnell)
1971 – Unix – An operating system started in the 1960s. (Created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie)
1972 – C Programming Language – Based on Basic Combined Programming Language (BCPL), and replaced the Unix code to become widespread. (Developed by Dennis M. Ritchie )
1988 – TAT-8 (Transatlantic No. 8) – The first Fiber-optic transatlantic cable system between New Jersey, U.S. on the west end and England and France on the east end.
1991 – Unicode – A project started in 1987 by Joe Becker, Lee Collins, and Mark Davis of Xerox and Apple. It is an international system for encoding characters, with the ability to represent over 100,000 symbols.
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