1950 to 1960 Timeline

In 1950 English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist Alan Turing published Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he described the “Turing test" for determining whether a machine is “intelligent.”

In 1950 Jule Charney, Agnar Fjörtoff, and John von Neumann published “Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation,” Tellus 2 (1950) 237-254.

Charney, Fjörthoff, and von Neumann's paper reported the first weather forecast by electronic computer. It took twenty-four hours of processing time on the ENIAC to calculate a twenty-four hour forecast.

"As a committed opponent of Communism and a key member of the WWII-era national security establishment, von Neumann hoped that weather modeling might lead to weather control, which might be used as a weapon of war. Soviet harvests, for example, might be ruined by a US-induced drought.

"Under grants from the Weather Bureau, the Navy, and the Air Force, he assembled a group of theoretical meteorologists at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). If regional weather prediction proved feasible, von Neumann planned to move on to the extremely ambitious problem of simulating the entire atmosphere. This, in turn, would allow the modeling of climate. Jule Charney, an energetic and visionary meteorologist who had worked with Carl-Gustaf Rossby at the University of Chicago and with Arnt Eliassen at the University of Oslo, was invited to head the new Meteorology Group.

"The Meteorology Project ran its first computerized weather forecast on the ENIAC in 1950. The group's model, like [Lewis Fry] Richardson's, divided the atmosphere into a set of grid cells and employed finite difference methods to solve differential equations numerically. The 1950 forecasts, covering North America, used a two-dimensional grid with 270 points about 700 km apart. The time step was three hours. Results, while far from perfect, justified further work" (Paul N. Edwards [ed], Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling: A Participatory History, accessed 04-26-2009).

Engineering Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, published High-Speed Computing Devices, the first textbook on how to build an electronic digital computer. Written in the form of a “cookbook,” the book described available computer components and how they worked. It included extensive bibliographies of the American computing literature and some of the English, and contained a brief reference to Vannevar Bush's Rapid Selector information retrieval device then under development. The device was in operation by 1951.

Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill of Cambridge University issued Report on the Preparation of Programmes for the EDSAC and the Use of the Library of Subroutines. This dittoed document, published for private distribution in a very small number of copies, was the first treatise on software written for an operational stored-program computer. The book described “assemblers” and “subroutines”—segments of programs that are frequently used, so they can be kept in “libraries” and reused as needed in many software applications. The Cambridge group thus introduced the concept of reusable code, one of the principal tools for reducing software bugs and improving the productivity of programmers.

In 1951 this work was published as a conventional hard-cover book, with some changes and a new title by the American publishers Addison-Wesley, coincidentally in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, with special reference to the EDSAC and the use of a library of subroutines was the first conventionally published book on software. (See Reading 9.4.)

The Library of Congress announced plans to compile the Union List of Serials using electric punched card tabulating.

In 1950 Richard W. Hamming of Bell Labs and the City College of New York published Error Detecting and Error Codes.

11,638 new books are published in the United Kingdom.

Project Whirlwind was in limited operation at MIT as a general purpose computer. The first computer that operated in real time, with the first video display for output, the Whirlwind was the first computer that was not just an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems

According to Asa Brigg’s The History of British Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 4, p. 524, newspaper circulation in Britain as a distribution medium for news reached its peak in 1950 and 1954. Thereafter more news was distributed over radio and television than through print.

Between 1950 and 1954 IBM developed and built at Columbia University's Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, 612 West 115th Street location, the Naval Ordnance Research Computer (NORC)—for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance.

The NORC was the "first supercomputer," and "the most powerful computer on earth from 1954 to about 1963." The NORC’s multiplication unit remains the fastest ever built with vacuum tube technology.

IBM introduced the input-output channel as a feature on the NORC. This innovation synchronized the flow of data into and out of the computer while computation was in progress, relieving the central processor of that task.

After purchasing the patent for the ballpoint pen from Lázló Biró, who had been producing ballpoints in Argentina since 1943, Marcel Bich produced the very inexpensive Bic Cristal in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France.

"A Bic Cristal ballpoint pen contains enough ink to draw a continuous line up to two miles (3.2 km) long. In 2005, Bic sold its hundred billionth ballpoint pen - enough ink to draw a line to Pluto and back more than 20 times."

The Federal Records Act of 1950 expanded the definition of "record" to include "machine-readable materials."

At this time machine-readable records included primarily punched-cards.

German musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder, Special Advisor for Music for the City and University library at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, published the Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach (Thematic-systematic catalogue of musical works of Johann Sebastian Bach). The numbering system by which Schmieder organized Johann Sebastian Bach's compositions became known as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, with the numbers Schmieder assigned to each work taking on the prefix BWV.

In 1950 American draftsman, graphic artist and mathematician Benjamin (Ben) F. Laposky of Cherokee, Iowa, first used a cathode ray oscilloscope with sine wave generators and various other electrical and electronic circuits to create abstract art, which he called "electrical compositions." The electrical vibrations shown on the screen of the oscilloscope, which included Lissajous figures, he recorded by still photography. Some of Laposky's images were published in Scripta Mathematica in 1952.

In 1953 Laposky exhibited fifty images that called "Oscillons" (or oscillogram designs) at the Sanford Museum in Cherokee, Iowa. To record this exhibition and Laposky's statements of his artistic philosophy the museum published an exhibition catalogue entitled electronic abstractions. Because of this exhibition Laposky is credited as the earliest pioneer in electronic art, more specifically in the analog vector medium. In later work Laposky also incorporated motorized rotating filters of variable speed to color the patterns. He never programmed computers to create images.

A version of Laposky's electronic abstractions show was exhibited across the United States, in France at LeMons, and other places by the Cultural Relations Section of the United States from 1953 to 1961.

In later work Laposky incorporated motorized rotating filters of variable speed to color the patterns, recording the images by color photography.

Herzogenrath & Nierhoff-Wielk, Ex Machina–Frühe Computergrafik bis 1979. Ex Machina-Early Computer Graphics up to 1979 (2007) 229.

The cover by Boris Artzybasheff on the January 23, 1950 issue of TIME Magazine depicted the Harvard Mark III partly electronic and partly electromechanical computer as a Naval officer in Artzybasheff's "bizarrely anthropomorphic" style. The caption under the image read, "Mark III. Can Man Build a Superman?" The cover story of the magazine was entitled "The Thinking Machine."

The Mark III, delivered to U.S. Naval Proving Ground at the US Navy base at Dahlgren, Virginia in March 1950, operated at 250 times the speed of the Harvard Mark I (1944). 

Among its interesting elements,  the Time article included an early use of the word computer for machines rather than people. The review of Wiener's Cybernetics published in TIME in December 1948, referred to the machines as calculators.

"What Is Thinking? Do computers think? Some experts say yes, some say no. Both sides are vehement; but all agree that the answer to the question depends on what you mean by thinking.

"The human brain, some computermen explain, thinks by judging present information in the light of past experience. That is roughly what the machines do. They consider figures fed into them (just as information is fed to the human brain by the senses), and measure the figures against information that is "remembered." The machine-radicals ask: 'Isn't this thinking?'

"Their opponents retort that computers are mere tools that do only what they are told. Professor [Howard] Aiken, a leader of the conservatives, admits that the machines show, in rudimentary form at least, all the attributes of human thinking except one: imagination. Aiken cannot define imagination, but he is sure that it exists and that no machine, however clever, is likely to have any."

"Nearly all the computermen are worried about the effect the machines will have on society. But most of them are not so pessimistic as [Norbert] Wiener. Professor Aiken thinks that computers will take over intellectual drudgery as power-driven tools took over spading and reaping. Already the telephone people are installing machines of the computer type that watch the operations of dial exchanges and tot up the bills of subscribers.

"Psychotic Robots. In the larger, "biological" sense, there is room for nervous speculation. Some philosophical worriers suggest that the computers, growing superhumanly intelligent in more & more ways, will develop wills, desires and unpleasant foibles' of their own, as did the famous robots in Capek's R.U.R.

"Professor Wiener says that some computers are already "human" enough to suffer from typical psychiatric troubles. Unruly memories, he says, sometimes spread through a machine as fears and fixations spread through a psychotic human brain. Such psychoses may be cured, says Wiener, by rest (shutting down the machine), by electric shock treatment (increasing the voltage in the tubes), or by lobotomy (disconnecting part of the machine).

"Some practical computermen scoff at such picturesque talk, but others recall odd behavior in their own machines. Robert Seeber of I.B.M. says that his big computer has a very human foible: it hates to wake up in the morning. The operators turn it on, the tubes light up and reach a proper temperature, but the machine is not really awake. A problem sent through its sleepy wits does not get far. Red lights flash, indicating that the machine has made an error. The patient operators try the problem again. This time the machine thinks a little more clearly. At last, after several tries, it is fully awake and willing to think straight.

"Neurotic Exchange. Bell Laboratories' Dr. [Claude] Shannon has a similar story. During World War II, he says, one of the Manhattan dial exchanges (very similar to computers) was overloaded with work. It began to behave queerly, acting with an irrationality that disturbed the company. Flocks of engineers, sent to treat the patient, could find nothing organically wrong. After the war was over, the work load decreased. The ailing exchange recovered and is now entirely normal. Its trouble had been 'functional': like other hard-driven war workers, it had suffered a nervous breakdown" (quotations from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,858601-7,00.html, accessed 03-05-2009).

The Diners Club issued the first "general purpose" credit card, invented by Diners Club founder Frank X. McNamara. The card allowed members to charge the cost of restaurant bills only.

"The first credit card charge was made on February 8, 1950, by Frank McNamara, Ralph Schneider and Matty Simmons at Major's Cabin Grill, a restaurant adjacent to their offices in the Empire State Building" (Wikipedia article on Diners Club International, accessed 02-28-2012).

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, the world's first electronic computer company, was sold to Remington Rand.

Claude Shannon published Programming a computer for playing chess, the first technical paper on computer chess. (See Reading 11.3.)

Edmund Berkeley's "Simon," which has been called the first personal computer, developed out of his book, Giant Brains, or Machines That Think, published in November 1949, in which he wrote,

 “We shall now consider how we can design a very simple machine that will think.. Let us call it Simon, because of its predecessor, Simple Simon... Simon is so simple and so small in fact that it could be built to fill up less space than a grocery-store box; about four cubic feet. . . . It may seem that a simple model of a mechanical brain like Simon is of no great practical use. On the contrary, Simon has the same use in instruction as a set of simple chemical experiments has: to stimulate thinking and understanding, and to produce training and skill. A training course on mechanical brains could very well include the construction of a simple model mechanical brain, as an exercise."

One year later in an article published in Scientific American about “Simon,” Berkeley predicted that “some day we may even have small computers in our homes, drawing energy from electric power lines like refrigerators or radios.”

"Simon I was built by William A. Porter and two Columbia University graduate students of electrical engineering. Simon is a simple mechanical "brain" that can transfer information automatically from any one of its "registers" to any other, and it can perform reasoning operations of indefinite length. Its relays basic functions are programming, storage, computation, input, and output" (Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

"The Simon's architecture was based on relays. The programs were run from a standard paper tape with five rows of holes for data. The registers and ALU could store only 2 bit. The data entry was made through the punched paper or by five keys on the front panel of the machine. The output was provided by five lamps. The punched tape served not only for data entry, but also as a memory for the machine. The instructions were carried out in sequence, as they were read from the tape. The machine was able to perform four operations: addition, negation, greater than, and selection" (Wikipedia article on Simon (computer) accessed 10-10-2011).

In his 1956 article, "Small Robots-Report," Berkeley stated that he had spent $4000 developing Simon.  He built only one machine, preserved at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. Berkeley also marketed engineering plans for Simon, of which 400 copies were sold.

Russian mathematician and computer scientist Sergei Lebedev had MESM, the first Russian stored-program computer, operational in Feofaniya (Ukrainian: Феофанія), Theophania, a suburb of Kiev.

"Work on MESM got going properly at the end of 1948 and, considering the challenges, the rate of progress was remarkable. Ukraine was still struggling to recover from the devastation of its occupation during WWII, and many of Kyiv’s buildings lay in ruins. The monastery in Feofania was among the buildings destroyed during the war, so the MESM team had to build their working quarters from scratch—the laboratory, metalworking shop, even the power station that would provide electricity. Although small—just 20 people—the team was extraordinarily committed. They worked in shifts 24 hours a day, and many lived in rooms above the laboratory. (You can listen to a lively account of this time in programme 3 of the BBC’s ”Electronic brains” series.) 

"MESM ran its first program on November 6, 1950, and went into full-time operation in 1951. In 1952, MESM was used for top-secret calculations relating to rocketry and nuclear bombs, and continued to aid the Institute’s research right up to 1957. By then, Lebedev had moved to Moscow to lead the construction of the next generation of Soviet supercomputers, cementing his place as a giant of European computing. As for MESM, it met a more prosaic fate—broken into parts and studied by engineering students in the labs at Kyiv’s Polytechnic Institute" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/remembering-remarkable-soviet-computing.html, accessed 12-25-2011)

IBM decided to produce their first electronic computer, the 701. It was a machine for scientific applications based on the Princeton IAS design.

American inventor David Hammond Shepard, a cryptanalyst at AFSA, the forerunner of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), built "Gismo" in his spare time.

Gismo was a machine to convert printed messages into machine language for processing by computer— the first optical character recognition (OCR) system.

"IBM licensed the [OCR] machine, but never put it into production. Shepard designed the Farrington B numeric font now used on most credit cards. Recognition was more reliable on a simple and open font, to avoid the effects of smearing at gasoline station pumps. Reading credit cards was the first major industry use of OCR, although today the information is read magnetically from the back of the cards.

"In 1962 Shepard founded Cognitronics Corporation. In 1964 his patented 'Conversation Machine' was the first to provide telephone Interactive voice response access to computer stored data using speech recognition. The first words recognized were 'yes' and 'no' " (Wikipedia article on David H. Shepard, accessed 02-29-2012).

Louis N. Ridenour, Ralph R. Shaw, and Albert G. Hill published a thin volume entitled Bibliography in an Age of Science. This book included three lectures delivered at the University of Illinois the previous year. Though it was preceded by journal articles and technical reports, this may be the first separately published book to address the problems of applying new technologies to the searching and storage of printed information in libraries.

Shaw's article included illustrations on pp. 60-61 of the Rapid Selector prototype which was in operation at this time. This machine, which applied the ideas of Emanuel Goldberg and the Memex idea of Vannevar Bush, stored 72,000 frames of information on a 2,000 foot reel of film. The prototype could search through the data at the rate of 78,000 "codes per minute." "Improvement of this searching speed to 120,000 codes per minute is now in sight."

Fulton J. Sheen, Roman Catholic Bishop of Rochester, New York, and former radio broadcaster, became one of the first  televangelists.

From 1951 to 1957 Sheen hosted Life Is Worth Living first on the DuMont Television Network and later on ABC, winning an Emmy in 1952 for "Most Outstanding Personality". He later hosted The Fulton Sheen Program in syndication, with a virtually identical format, from 1961 to 1968.

Magnetic tape was used to record computer data on the Eckert-Mauchly UNIVAC I with its UNISERVO tape drive.

The UNISERVO was the first the tape drive for a commercially sold computer.

It's "recording medium was a thin metal strip of ½″ wide(12.7 mm) nickel-plated phosphor bronze. Recording density was 128 characters per inch (198 micrometre/character) on eight tracks at a linear speed of 100 in/s (2.54 m/s), yielding a data rate of 12,800 characters per second. Of the eight tracks, six were data, one was a parity track, and one was a clock, or timing track. Making allowance for the empty space between tape blocks, the actual transfer rate was around 7,200 characters per second. A small reel of mylar tape provided separation from the metal tape and the read/write head" (Wikipedia article on Univac I, accessed 04-26-2009).

American computer scientist and popular writer Edmund Berkeley  developed Squee, the Electronic Robot Squirrel.

Squee has been called, "the first of the true robots," because it was the first robot able to carry out a defined task, as opposed to just steering towards light. The task was collecting "nuts," which in the robot's case meant tennis balls. Squee was also the first robot to have a manipulator under automatic control. 

"Squee (named after 'squirrel') is an electronic robot squirrel. It contains four sense organs (two phototubes, two contact switches), three acting organs (a drive motor, a steering motor, and a motor which opens and closes the scoop or 'hands'), and a small brain of half a dozen relays. It will hunt for a 'nut'. The 'nut' is a tennis ball designated by a member of the audience who steadily holds a flashlight above the ball, pointing the light at Squee. Then Squee approaches, picks up the 'nut' in its 'hands' (the scoop), stops paying attention to the steady light, sees instead a light that goes on and off 120 times a second shining over its 'nest', takes the 'nut' to its 'nest', there leaves the nuts, and then returns to hunting more 'nuts'. When Squee is operating, it is a dramatic and exciting example of a robot. It has been exhibited in New York, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis, and has always entertained and excited the audience. The machine however is sensitive to the surrounding light level, and usually has to be shown in a room about 8 by 10 ft. with only a small amount of overhead light and black curtained walls. Data: completed; rather well finished but not professionally; 75% reliable; maintenance, difficult; our costs, about $3,000" (Berkeley, Small Robots--Report [1956]).

Berkeley constructed only one example of Squee. It is preserved at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

In 1951 American cognitive psychologist George Armitage Miller, then teaching at Harvard, published Language and Communication. Influenced by Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), this book

"used a probabilistic model imposed on a learning-by-association scheme borrowed from behaviorism, with Miller not yet attached to a pure cognitive perspective.The first part of the book reviewed information theory, the physiology and acoustics of phonetics, speech recognition and comprehension, and statistical techniques to analyze language. The focus was more on speech generation than recognition. The second part had the psychology: idiosyncratic differences across people in language use; developmental linguistics; the structure of word associations in people; use of symbolism in language; and social aspects of language use " (Wikipedia article on Goerge Armitage Miller, accessed 12-30-2012).

The Paris symposium,  Les Machines á calculer et la pensée humaine (Calculating Machines and Human Thought) took place at l'Institut Blaise Pascal.

Unlike the other early computer conferences, no demonstration of a stored-program electronic computer occurred.  Louis Couffignal demonstrated the prototype of his non-stored-program machine.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 526.

In February 1951 the first Ferranti Mark I version of the Manchester University machine was delivered to the University of Manchester in England.

With the exception of the unique BINAC delivered to Northrop Aircraft in the United States, the Ferranti Mark I was the first commercially produced electronic digital computer delivered to a customer.

In February 1951 British computer scientist Christopher Strachey finished a program for the game of draughts, or checkers. The game ran for the first time on the Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, on July 30, 1951, but completely exhausted the machine's memory.

"When Strachey heard about the Manchester Mark 1, which had a much bigger memory, he asked his former fellow-student Alan Turing for the manual and transcribed his program into the operation codes of that machine by around October 1951. The program could 'play a complete game of draughts at a reasonable speed' " (Wikipedia article on Christopher Strachey, accessed 09-12-2012).

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) approved a U.S. - Canadian Permanent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD) recommendation (51/1) for an extension of the Permanent Radar Net. 

The recommendation called for the extension and consolidation of the control and warning system of Canada and the U.S. into one operational system to meet air defense needs of both countries.

On March 10, 1951 51 the U.S. Army Antiaircraft Command assumed command for the first time of all antiaircraft forces assigned to air defense for both countries.

These developments are considered the origin of NORAD (North American Air Defense Command; now North American Aerospace Defense Command). The agency was not officially founded until May 12, 1958. 

NORAD headquarters are located at Peterson AFB, Colorado Springs, Colorado. NORAD command and control is exercised through the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, located a short distance away.

"The Operations Center itself lies along one side of a main tunnel bored almost a mile through the solid granite heart of the mountain. The tunnel is designed to route the worst of a blast's shock wave out the other end, past the two 25-ton blast doors that mark one wall. The center was designed to withstand up to a 30 megaton blast within 1-nautical-mile (1.9 km).

"The underground Combat Operations Center (COC) was originally intended to provide a 70% probability of continuing to function if a five-megaton nuclear weapon detonated three miles (5.6 km) away, but was ultimately built to withstand a multimegaton blast within 1.5 nautical miles (2.8 km; 1.7 mi). It was also designed to be self-sufficient for brief periods, have backup communications and television intercom with related commands, house personnel during an emergency, and protect staff against fallout and biological and chemical warfare.

"The main entrance to the complex is about one-third of a mile (540 m) from the North Portal via a tunnel which leads to a pair of 25-ton steel blast doors. Behind them is a steel building complex built within a 4.5 acres (18,000 m2) grid of excavated chambers and tunnels and surrounded by 2,000 feet (600 m) of granite. The main excavation consists of three chambers 45 feet (15 m) wide, 60 feet (20 m) high, and 588 feet (180 m) long, intersected by four chambers 32 feet (10 m) wide, 56 feet (17 m) high and 335 feet (100 m) long. Fifteen buildings, freestanding without contact with the rock walls or roofs and joined by flexible vestibule connections, make up the inner complex. Twelve of these buildings are three stories tall; the others are one and two stories.

"The outer shells of the buildings are made of three-eighths-inch (9.5 mm) continuously welded low carbon steel plates which are supported by structural steel frames. Metal walls and tunnels serve to attenuate electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Metal doors at each building entrance serve as fire doors to help contain fire and smoke. Emphasis on the design of the structure is predicated on the effects of nuclear weapons; however, building design also makes it possible for the complex to absorb the shock of earthquakes. During a nuclear explosion, powerful springs that support the complex can absorb much of the energy. North Portal

"Blast valves, installed in reinforced concrete bulkheads, have been placed in the exhaust and air intake supply, as well as water, fuel, and sewer lines. Sensors at the North and South Portal entrances will detect overpressure waves from a nuclear explosion, causing the valves to close and protect the complex. The buildings in the complex are mounted on 1,319 steel springs, each weighing about 1,000 pounds (450 kg). The springs allow the complex to move 12 inches (30 cm) in any one direction. To make the complex self-sufficient, adequate space in the complex is devoted to support functions. A dining facility, medical facility with dental office, pharmacy and a two-bed ward; two physical fitness centers with exercise equipment and sauna; a small base exchange and barber shop are all located within the complex.

"Electricity comes primarily from the city of Colorado Springs, with six 1,750 kilowatt diesel generators for backup. Water for the complex comes from an underground supply inside Cheyenne Mountain, deposited into four excavated reservoirs with a capacity of 1.5 million U.S. gallons (6,000 m³) of water. Three serve as industrial reservoirs and the remaining one is the complex's primary domestic water source. They are so large that workers sometimes cross them in rowboats. About 30,000 to 120,000 U.S. gallons (110 to 450 m³) are actually retained at any given time.

"Incoming air may be filtered through a system of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear filters to remove harmful pathogens and/or radioactive and chemical particles.

"The fresh air intake is mainly from the south portal access which is 17.5 feet (5.3 m) high and 15 feet (4.6 m) wide and linked to the north portal access which is 22.5 feet (7 m) high and 29 feet (9 m) wide. The entire tunnel from north to south entry portals is nine-tenths of a mile (1.5 km) long. The NORAD command center has been modernized several times over the years. The original equipment resembled Mission Control for NASA's Project Apollo in the 1960s-1970s and used similar Philco-Ford consoles and display systems. The current (2005) version, with ordinary desks and flat-screen displays, looks rather ordinary by comparison and resembles NASA's current (2000s) mission control" (Wikipedia article on Cheyenne Mountain, accessed 02-29-2012).

American musician, bandleader, talent scout, and record producer Ike Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm, recorded in Memphis, Tennessee the rhythm and blues song, "Rocket 88."

This " hymn of praise" for the first American muscle car, the Oldsmobile Rocket 88, which had been introduced in 1949, has been called "the first rocket and roll song."  However:

"Rock 'n' roll was an evolutionary process – we just looked around and it was here. . . . To name any one record as the first would make any of us look a fool.

—Billy Vera, Foreword to "What Was the First Rock'n'Roll Record", Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, 1992" (Wikipedia article on First rock and roll recording, accessed 06-01-2009).

UNIVAC I, serial 1, was signed over to the United States Census Bureau on March 31, 1951.

The official dedication of the machine at the government offices occurred on June 14, 1951. Excluding the unique BINAC, the UNIVAC I was the first electronic computer to be commercially manufactured in the United States. Its development preceded the British Ferranti Mark 1; however, the British machine was actually delivered to its first customer one month earlier than the UNIVAC I.

Though the United States Census Bureau owned UNIVAC I, serial 1, the Eckert -Mauchly division of Remington Rand retained it in Philadelphia for sales demonstration purposes, and did not actually install it at government offices until twenty-one months later.

Whirlwind I began operation at MIT.

Whirlwind I included the first primitive graphical display on its vectorscope screen. (See Reading 8.7.)

The second English electronic computer conference was held at the University of Manchester to inaugurate the first Ferranti Mark 1. There Maurice Wilkes introduced the term microprogramming, referring to the design of control circuits. The idea was not widely accepted until the following decade. (See Reading 8.8.)

Bertram V. Bowden, the first computer salesman in England, discussed “The application of calculating machines to business and commerce” at the second English electronic computer conference held at the University of Manchester. (See Reading 10.2.)

At the second English computer conference held in Manchester, computer programmer J. M. Bennett and biochemist and crystallographer John Kendrew described their use of the Cambridge EDSAC for the computation of Fourier syntheses in the calculation of structure factors of the protein molecule myoglobin.

This was the first application of an electronic computer to computational biology or structural biology. The first published account of this research appeared in the very scarce Manchester University Computer Conference Proceedings (1951). (See Reading 10.3.)

Kendrew and Bennett formally published an extended version of their paper as "The Computation of Fourier Syntheses with a Digital Electric Calculating Machine," Acta Crystallographica 5 (1952) 109-116. Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) nos. 744 & 745.

In 1962 Kendrew received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of the 3-dimensional molecular structure of myoglobin, the first protein molecule to be "solved."

During August 7 to 9, 1951 Geoff Hill, a computer programmer with perfect pitch, programmed the University of Melbourne CSIR Mk1, the first stored-program computer in Australia, to play a melody, and ran the program at the inaugural Conference of Automatic Computing Machines in Sydney. This was the first demonstration of computer music.

"The CSIR Mk1 operated in Sydney Australia from about November 1949 to June 1955. Geoff Hill was the main programmer at that time and he used the machine to play musical melodies. These melodies, mostly from popular songs, were; 'Colonel Bogey', 'Bonnie Banks', 'Girl with Flaxen Hair' and so on.

"The CSIR Mk1 was dismantled in mid 1955 and moved to The University of Melbourne, where it was renamed CSIRAC. Professor of Mathematics, Thomas Cherry, later Sir Thomas Cherry FRS, had a great interest in programming and music and he created music with CSIRAC. In Melbourne the practice of how CSIRAC was programmed for music was altered and refined somewhat. The program tapes for a couple of test scales still exist, along with the popular melodies 'So early in the Morning' and 'In Cellar Cool', which was a popular drinking song - it appears that the pursuit of computer music and social drinking have been intimately linked since the earliest years. There was also other music on the tape. In about 1957 Cherry wrote a music performance program that would allow a computer user who understood simple standard music notation to enter it easily into CSIRAC for performance, without negotiating all of the timing problems such as was normally required. The music itself may now seem very crude unless it is understood in the context of its creation. It was created by engineers who were not knowledgeable of the latest in musical composition practice and at a time when there was little thought of digital sound. The idea of using a computer, the world's most flexible machine, to create music was a leap of imagination at the time. It is a pity that composers were not invited to use CSIRAC, as they were with the Bell Labs developments, to discover how it could have solved several compositional problems."

In November 1951 the Ferranti Mark 1 performed  Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood at the University of Manchester. The program for Baa Baa Black Sheep was written by Christopher Strachey. The recording of these brief performances, from the BBC website at this link, are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer-generated music.  (Last accessed 07-2012).

LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office) ran a program to "evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week's baked output" at tea shop operator J. Lyons and Company in England.  The LEO adaptation of the EDSAC was the first stored-program electronic computer to run business programs on a routine basis. “LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer.”

The EDVAC binary, stored-program computer, planning for which had started in 1944, with development starting in 1947-48, was finally operational at the Moore School in Philadelphia. By this time it was essentially obsolete.

Manufacturers began producing vacuum tubes especially designed for use in digital circuits.

Three-dimensional magnetic-core memory replaced electrostatic memory on the Whirlwind I, leading to increased performance and reliability.

Compagnie des Machines Bull, the first French electronic computer manufacturer, produced its Gamma 3 electronic calculator. It was not a stored-program computer.

In 1952 A. S. Douglas wrote Noughts and Crosses, the first graphical computer game, on the cathode ray tube (CRT) screen of the EDSAC at Cambridge University.

Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler (A-0) for UNIVAC.

Grace Hopper published “The Education of a Computer,” in which she described fundamental principles in programming and anticipated future developments. (See Reading 9.5.)

National Educational Television (NET) was founded by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

English architect and classical scholar Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, an English linguist and classical scholar at Cambridge, deciphered Linear B, proving that this Mycenaean language is an early form of Greek.

Ventris & Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (1956), chapters 1-2.

Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (1958).

British electrical engineer Kenyon Taylor and team, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR project (a pioneering computerized battlefield information system) invented the first trackball, a precursor of the computer mouse. It used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. The DATAR system was first successfully tested on Lake Ontario in autumn 1953.

Man Bait, originally released in England by Hammer Film Productions under the title of The Last Page, was a film noir directed by Terence Fisher starring George Brent and Marguerite Chapman. It also represented the screen debut of sexy Diana Dors, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike who was actually classically trained in acting, as the femme fatale.  

In the film the married manager (Brent) of a bookstore, which sells both new and rare books, is attracted to his sexy blonde clerk (Dors). He attempts to resist temptation but finally kisses her in his office, though the romance does not proceed beyond one kiss. Dors, who had become infatuated with a man played by Peter Reynolds who she witnessed stealing a rare book in the store, blackmails the bookstore manager for kissing her (remarkably), sending a letter to the manager's wife. The manager's wife, a bed-ridden invalid, unbelievably dies as she gets out of bed to burn the letter. Dors is murdered by the ex-con, with her body stuffed into a shipping crate that was intended for a book shipment. The manager is framed for the murder. 

As unlikely as the plot is, in my opinion and the opinion of many of my colleagues Man Bait is the best bookstore mystery film, and perhaps the most interesting film set in an antiquarian bookstore. The main area in which the film deviates from authenticity in book trade practice is the seemingly enormous bookstore staff (perhaps 10 people) working in a store which appears to do relatively insignificant business.

The original title of the film, The Last Page, is much more in character with the subdued, sultry sexuality of the film, compared to the graphic elements suggested in the revised title Man Bait, and the graphic elements of the posters advertising the film under that title which strongly emphasize the busty aspect of Ms. Dors.

The first electronic computer symposium on the west coast of the United States was held at UCLA. The proceeds appeared later that year as  Proceedings of the Electronic Computer Symposium . . .  at University of California, Los Angeles.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 842.

The IAS computer was fully operational at Princeton on June 10, 1952.

At a meeting of the Medical Library Association Physician and librarian Sanford Larkey reported on advances in the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project.

This project was probably the earliest effort to apply computer methods, including punched card tabulating, in library cataloguing and information retrieval.

Heinz Billing's G1 was in full operation at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, directed by Werner Heisenberg. This was the first electronic computer in Germany. It used drum memory, but it was not a stored-program machine.

The ACM held a special meeting in Toronto in honor of the installation of the first electronic digital computer in Canada, installed at the University of Toronto. It was a Ferranti Mark I, known as the FERUT computer

Edmund Berkeley began publication of Computing Machinery Field, the first journal on electronic computing, and the ancestor of all commercially published periodical publications on computing.

The first three quarterly issues were mimeographed. By the March 1953 issue the title was changed to Computers and Automation.

The UNIVAC Short Code II was developed. This was the earliest extant version of a high-level programming language actually intended to be used on an electronic digital computer.

UNIVAC I, serial 5, used by the CBS television network in New York City, successfully predicted the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of the United States.

This was the first time that millions of people (including me, then aged 7) saw and heard about an electronic computer.

The computer, far too large and delicate to be moved, was actually in Eckert-Mauchly's corporate office in Philadelphia. What was televised by Walter Cronkite from CBS studios in New York was a dummy terminal connected by teletype to the machine in Philadelphia.

Univac 1, serial 5 was later installed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in Livermore, California.

♦ In 2010 journalist Ira Chinoy completed a dissertation on journalists' early encounters with computers as tools for news reporting, focusing on election-night forecasting in 1952. The disseration, which also explored methods journalists used to cover elections in the age of print, was entitled Battle of the Brains: Election-Night Forecasting at the Dawn of the Computer Age.

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS), a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S. government communications and information systems, officially came into existence on November 4, 1952. 

"The National Security Agency's predecessor was the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), created on May 20, 1949. This organization was originally established within the U.S. Department of Defense under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The AFSA was to direct the communications and electronic intelligence activities of the U.S. military intelligence units: the Army Security Agency, the Naval Security Group, and the Air Force Security Service. However, that agency had little power and lacked a centralized coordination mechanism. . . . As the change in the security agency's name indicated, the role of NSA was extended beyond the armed forces" (Wikipedia article on National Security Agency, accessed 01-14-2012).

IBM introduced the 701, their first stored-program electronic computer for commercial production.

Designed by Nathaniel Rochester, and based on the IAS machine at Princeton, the IBM 701 was intended for scientific use. Feeling that the word "computer" was too closely associated with UNIVAC, IBM called the 701 an “electronic data processing machine.” IBM eventually sold nineteen of these machines. (See Reading 8.9.)

English scientist and educationist Bertram V. Bowden, who for a time worked as a computer salesman for Ferranti Limited, and was later made a life peer as Baron Bowden, edited Faster than Thought, the first widely read English book on electronic digital computing.

Reflective of the slow speed of advances in computing at this time, the book remained in print without change until 1968.

Mortimer Taube proposed the Uniterm Indexing system.

Taube developed Coordinate Indexing. This he defined as “the analysis of any field of information into a set of terms and the combination of these terms in any order to achieve any desired degree of detail in either indexing or selection."

"Coordinate Indexing used 'uniterms' to make storing and retrieving information easier and faster. Uniterms 'constitute a special set of rules and requirements which makes both the analysis into terms and the combination of the terms in order to specify items of information a remarkably simple and efficient process.' Taube had split coordinate indexing into two categories, item and term indexing. It used punch cards and a machine reader to search for specific items or documents by terms or keywords. Documentation, Inc. also brought forth the IBM 9900 Special Index Analyzer, also known as COMAC. COMAC stood for 'continuous multiple access controller.' This machine handled data punch cards, used for information storage and retrieval. It made 'logical relationships among terms' " (Wikipedia article on Mortimer Taube, accessed 03-02-2012).

Charles H. Townes, while professor at Columbia University, invented the MASER (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). It was a precursor to the LASER that amplifies light.

Russian-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist and science writer George Gamow, while at George Washington University, came up with the idea of a genetic code in his paper “Possible Mathematical Relation between Deoxyribonucleic Acids and Proteins” (Det. Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab: Biologiske Meddeleiser 22, no. 3 [1954] 1-13).

In the fall of 1953 Gamov gave Crick an earlier draft of this paper entitled “Protein synthesis by DNA molecules.”

“Gamov’s scheme was decisive, Crick has often said since, because it forced him, and soon others, to begin to think hard and from a particular slant—that of the coding problem—about the next stage, now that the structure of DNA was known” (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation).

Having written the entire book on a pay typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library, Ray Bradbury published the dystopian science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, named after the temperature at which books are supposed to combust spontaneously. Besides the regular trade edition, the publisher Ballantine Books, issued a limited edition of 200 copies signed by Bradbury and bound in white boards made of "Johns-Manville Quinterra," a fire-proof asbestos material.

"The novel presents a future American society in which the masses are hedonistic, and critical thought through reading is outlawed. The central character, Guy Montag, is employed is a 'fireman' (which, in this future, means 'book burner'). The number '451' refers to the temperature (in Fahrenheit) at which the books burn when the 'Firemen' burn them 'For the good of humanity'. Written in the early years of the Cold War, the novel is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society.

Bradbury's original intention in writing Fahrenheit 451 was to show his great love for books and libraries. "He has often referred to Montag as an allusion to himself" (Wikipedia article on Fahrenheit 451).

♦ François Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard wrote a screenplay based on the novel, and Truffault directed a film, released in 1966, entitled Fahrenheit 451, starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner. The film was re-issued on DVD by Universal Studios in 2003.

♦ After publically opposing ebooks for several years, telling The New York Times in 2009 that "that the Internet is a big distraction," in November 2011, at the age of 91, Bradbury authorized an ebook edition of Fahrenheit 451, and several other of his best-selling books. By this date Fahrenheit 451 had sold more than 10 million copies in print, and had been translated into many languages. However, also by this date ebooks comprised 20% of the fiction book market in the U.S. 

William H. Sweet and Gordon L. Brownell at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, described the first positron imaging device, and and the first attempt to record three dimensional data in positron detection in their paper entitled "Localization of brain tumors with positron emitters',' Nucleonics XI (1953) 40-45. This was the beginning of positron emission tomography (PET).

"Despite the relatively crude nature of this imaging instrument, the brain images were markedly better than those obtained by other imaging devices. It also contained several features that were incorporated into future positron imaging devices. Data were obtained by translation of two opposed detectors using coincidence detection with mechanical motion in two dimensions and a printing mechanism to form a two-dimensional image of the positron source. This was our first attempt to record three-dimensional data in positron detection" (Brownell, A History of Positron Imaging [1999], accessed 12-25-2008)

English cybernetician and psychologist Gordon Pask created MusiColour, a computer-controlled aesthetic system that "drove an array of lights that adapted to a musician's performance" (Mason, a computer in the art room. the origins of british computer arts 1950-1980 [2008] 6). This was one of the earliest examples of "computer art."

Bell Laboratories engineer John Meszar published "Switching Systems as Mechanical Brains," Bell Laboratories Record XXXI (1953) 63-69.

This paper, written in the earliest days of automatic switching systems, when few electronic computers existed, and, for the most part, human telephone operators served as "highly intelligent and versatile switching systems," raised the question of whether certain aspects of human thought are computable and others are not. Meszar argued for "the necessity of divorcing certain mental operations from the concept of thinking," in order to "pave the way for ready acceptance of the viewpoint that automatic systems can accomplish many of the functions of the human brain." 

"We are faced with a basic dilemma; we are forced either to admit the possibility of mechanized thinking, or to restrict increasingly our concept of thinking. However, as is apparent from this article, many of us do not find it hard to make the choice. The choice is to reject the possibility of mechanized thinking but to admit readily the necessity for an orderly declassification of many areas of mental effort from the high level of thinking. Machines will take over such areas, whether we like it or not.

"This declassification of wide areas of mental effort should not dismay any one of us. It is not an important gain for those who are sure that even as machines have displaced muscles, they will also take over the functions of the 'brain.' Neither is it a real loss for those who feel that there is something hallowed about all functions of the human mind. What we are giving up to the machines— some of us gladly, others reluctantly— are the uninteresting flat lands of routine mental chores, tasks that have to be performed according to rigorous rules. The areas we are holding unchallenged are the dominating heights of creative mental effort, which comprise the ability to speculate, to invent, to imagine, to philosophize, the dream better ways for tomorrow than exist today. These are the mental activities for which rigorous rules cannot be formulated— they constitute real thinking, whose mechanization most of us cannot conceive" (p. 69).

"The 701 has at least 25 times the over-all speed but is less than one-quarter the size of IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, which was dismantled to make room for its speedier successor."

"During its five-year reign as one of the world's best-known "electronic brains," the SSEC solved a wide variety of scientific and engineering problems, some involving many millions of sequential calculations. Such other projects as computing the positions of the moon for several hundred years and plotting the courses of the five outer planets -- with resulting corrections in astronomical tables which had been considered standard for many years -- won such popular acclaim for the SSEC that it stimulated the imaginations of pseudo-scientific fiction writers and served as an authentic setting for such motion pictures as "Walk East on Beacon," a spy-thriller with an FBI background.

"Though the 701 occupies the same quarters as the SSEC, which it rendered obsolete, it is not "built in" to the room as was its predecessor. Instead, it is smartly housed between serrated walls of soft-finished aluminum. A balconied conference room, overlooking the calculator and, separated from it by sloping plate glass, provides a vantage point for observing operations and discussing computations. Ample space is provided for writing the complex and abstract equations that are the stock in trade of engineers and scientists in an age of atomic energy and supersonic flight.

"The 701 uses all three of the most advanced electronic storage, or "memory" devices -- cathode ray tubes, magnetic drums and magnetic tapes. The computing unit uses small versions of the familiar electronic tubes, which are able to count at millions of pulses a second. In addition, several thousand germanium diodes are used in place of vacuum tubes, with resultant savings in space and power requirements.

"The 701 was designed for scientific and research purposes, and similar components are adaptable to the requirements of accounting and record-keeping. Research on commercial, data processing machines is under way.

"The 701 is capable of performing more than 16,000 addition or subtraction operations a second, and more than 2,000 multiplication or division operations a second. In solving a typical problem, the 701 performs an average of 14,000 mathematical operations a second."

(quotations from IBM's original press release from the IBM Archives website).

At the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, James D. Watson and Francis Crick discovered the self-complimentary double-helical structure of the DNA molecule. In their paper, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids. A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171 (1953) 737-38, they stated that, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

James D. Watson and Francis Crick published “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid, ” Nature 171 (1953) 964-7.

In this paper Watson and Crick proposed DNA’s means of replication. This discovery has been called as significant, or possibly even more significant, than their discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA published in April 1953.

Richard W. Appel and other students at Harvard Business school issued Electronic Business Mchines: A New Tool for Management.

This was the first report on the application of electronic computers to business. The report was issued before any electronic computer was delivered to an American corporation. (See Reading 10.4.)

IBM announced the development of the 702, a version of the 701 designed for business rather than scientific applications.

Inge Edler and Carl Hellmuth Hertz at Lund University in Sweden obtained the first recording of the ultrasound echo from the heart. This was the beginning of echocardiography from which diagnostic sonography, or medical ultrasonography, evolved.

"The principle for echocardiography is as follows. The vibrations in a piezoelectric crystal create a beam of high frequency sound waves that are transmitted into the chest. When the waves pass an interface, such as between the heart wall and the surrounding area or the surface of a cardiac valve, some of the sound is reflected, creating an echo. The crystal is reset, enabling it to receive the echo. The longer it took for the echo to return to the crystal, the longer the distance between the crystal and the surface that was the source of the echo. The principle was the same as for sonar, used to measure the depth of water under a vessel, only in this case you measure the distance from the structure that is the source of the echo to the chest wall."

Edler, Inge & Hertz, Carl Hellmuth. The Use of the Ultrasonic Reflectoscope for Continuous Recording of the Movements of Heart Walls. K. Fysiogr. Sellsk. Lund. Foresch., 24 (1954) 1-19.

English Electric constructed a commercial version of Alan Turing’s Pilot ACE called DEUCE.

Thirty-three of the DEUCE machines were sold, the last in 1962.

Harley Tillet built the perhaps the first operating library information retrieval system on a general purpose computer (IBM 701) at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) at Inyokern, California, later called China Lake.

"Searching started with a file of about 15,000 bibliographic records, indexed only by the Uniterms, and search output was limited to report accession numbers. The task was made even more difficult by the fact that the IBM 701, a scientific calculator, did not have any built-in character representation" (Bourne).

In "Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish," Human Relations VII (1954) 39-58, in which he presented the result of nearly two years of fieldwork in Bremnes on Bømlo Island, Norway, Australian sociologist John A. Barnes coined the phrase, "Social Network."

IBM announced the 704. It was the first commercially available computer to incorporate indexing and floating point arithmetic as standard features. The 704 also featured a magnetic core memory, far more reliable than its predecessors’ cathode ray tube memories. A commercial success, IBM produced one hundred twenty-three 704s between 1955 and 1960.

UNIVAC I, serial 8, was installed at General Electric Appliance Park, Louisville, Kentucky. Serial 8 was the first electronic computer sold to a nongovernmental customer in the United States. It ran the "first successful industrial payroll application."

J. H. Laning and Neil Zierler developed an algebraic compiler for the Whirlwind I— the first high-level algebraic language for a computer.

The first pocket-sized commercial transistor radio, Regency TR-1, designed by Texas Instruments, was built and marketed by IDEA Corporation.

Development began for NORAD on the SAGE Air Defense System, using a computer built by IBM after a design based on the Whirlwind.

The system included the first light pen.

The full SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) automated control system for tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft was completed by 1963.

Probably the first widely used controlled vocabulary for searching information was the Subject Heading Authority List issued by the National Library of Medicine.

"The first official list of subject headings published by the National Library of Medicine appeared in 1954 under the title Subject Heading Authority List. It was based on the internal authority list that had been used for publication of Current List of Medical Literature which in turn had incorporated headings from the Library's Index-Catalogue and from the 1940 Quarterly Cumulative Index Medicus Subject Headings. With the inception of Index Medicus in 1960, a new and thoroughly revised Medical Subject Headings [MeSH] appeared.

"With the 1954 Subject Heading Authority List, there appeared a 'Categorical Listing' of standard subheadings. 'Abnormalities,' for instance, was listed as a standard subheading for use with terms for organs, tissues, and regions, and 'anesthesia and analgesia' was to be used under surgical procedure headings. But such subheadings could be used only for subject headings which fell within the category of headings to which they were to be applied. There were over 100 such subheadings, some of which varied only slightly according to the category of main heading with which they were used. For instance, 'therapeutic use' was used under physical agents and drugs and chemicals, and 'therapy' was used with diseases. In the 1960 Medical Subject Headings, the number of subheadings was reduced to sixty-seven. They could be used under any kind of main heading if the combination was not patently foolish or impossible. These sixty-seven subheadings were applied with more generalized meanings. For instance, the subheading "therapy" was used to mean 'therapy of,' 'therapeutic use of' or just 'therapeutic aspects.' Though this solution was simpler, many problems still remained. The use of one subheading might prevent the use of another. For instance, if a paper covered the etiology, pathology, and therapy of a disease, it might occur without further subdivision, or it might occur under the subheading which seemed most appropriate to the indexer. If 'therapy' was chosen, the article would be lost to the searcher looking for the etiology of the disease under the subheading 'etiology.' In addition, if the subheading 'diseases' had been appended to the term for an anatomic part, it would not be possible to subdivide further for the therapy or complications of such diseases. A related problem was the overlap in meaning of the subheadings themselves. It was difficult, for example, to decide whether a paper on chemical biosynthesis fit best under 'chemistry' or 'metabolism.'

"Categorized lists of terms were printed for the first time in the 1963 Medical Subject Headings and contained thirteen main categories and a total of fifty-eight separate groups in subcategories and main categories. These categorized lists made it possible for the user to find many more related terms than were in the former cross-reference structure. In 1963, the second edition of Medical Subject Headings contained 5,700 descriptors, compared with 4,400 in the 1960 edition. Of the headings used in the 1960 list, 113 were withdrawn in favor of newer terms. In contrast, the 2009 edition of MeSH contains 25,186 descriptors.

"In 1960, medical librarianship was on the cusp of a revolution. The first issue of the new Index Medicus series was published. On the horizon was a computerization project undertaken by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to store and retrieve information. The Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) would speed the publication process for bibliographies such as Index Medicus, facilitate the expansion of coverage of the literature, and permit searches for individuals upon demand. The new list of subject headings introduced in 1960 was the underpinning of the analysis and retrieval operation. MeSH was a new and thoroughly revised version of lists of subject headings compiled by NLM for its bibliographies and cataloging. Frank B. Rogers, then NLM director, announced several innovations as he introduced MeSH in 1960" (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/2009/introduction/intro_preface.html#pref_hist. accessed 05-04-2009).

Under the editorship of Albert Bruckner and Robert Marichal publication of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores by Urs Graf Verlag in Dietikon, Switzerland, began in 1954.

Intended as supplement the Codices Latini Antiquiores of E.A. Lowe, the CLA constitutes a photographic catalogue of all Latin 'literary' manuscripts rather than codices, written on papyrus or parchment, which antedate 800 CE. It was necessary to provide a codicological description of each one of them and a photograph of some lines each. The 49th and last volume in this series appeared in 1997.

The second series (ChLA2), founded by Guglielmo Cavallo and Giovanna Nicolaj,  and beginning with volume 50, intends to publish all the documents surviving from 800 to 900 CE preserved in European archives and libraries. The first phase of the project dedicated to Italy reached Volume 75. Including the Appendix it will be completed with Volume 99. Volume 100 marks the beginning of the series dedicated to St. Gall, with 13 volumes the largest collection of charters besides Italy. The publication of the charters should eventually be extended to the other European countries. 

♦ The Chartae Latinae Antiquiores database can be searched online at: http://www.urs-graf-verlag.com/index.php?funktion=chla_suche.

Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery began publication. At this time the ACM had twelve hundred members.

Developed jointly by Georgetown University and IBM, the Georgetown-IBM experiment in computational linguistics involved completely automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English.

"Conceived and performed primarily in order to attract governmental and public interest and funding by showing the possibilities of machine translation, it was by no means a fully-featured system: It had only six grammar rules and 250 items in its vocabulary. Apart from general topics, the system was specialised in the domain of organic chemistry. The translation was done using a IBM 701 mainframe computer.

"Well publicized by journalists and perceived as a success, the experiment did encourage governments to invest in computational linguistics. The authors claimed that within three or five years, machine translation would be a solved problem."

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the National Television Committee’s recommendation for a system of color television broadcasting based on the RCA Dot Sequential Color System.

RCA began manufacture of its twelve-inch model CT100 color television set, which used phosphor dots deposited on an internal glass plate.

5000 of these sets were produced and sold at the then very high retail price of $1000.

Texas Instruments manufactured the first silicon transistor, the 900-905 series.

Grace Hopper organized the first symposium strictly on software for the Office of Naval Research in Washington, D.C.

The symposium was attended by over 200 people. The published proceedings were entitled Symposium on Automatic Programming for Digital Computers (1954). (See Reading 9.6.)

Alan Turing committed suicide in Wilmslow, a town in Cheshire, England,  by eating an apple laced with cyanide.  He was only 42 years old.

"The apple itself was never tested for contamination with cyanide, but a post-mortem established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was re-enacting a scene from 'Snow White', his favourite fairy tale. Because Turing's homosexuality would have been perceived as a security risk, the possibility of assassination has also been suggested. His remains were cremated at Woking crematorium on 12 June 1954."

In the October 1954 issue of the journal Enounter (pp. 25-31) British computer scientist Christopher Strachey published "The 'Thinking' Machine."  Strachey's paper included two love letters written by the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester running a program which he had written. This represented the first use of a computer to write literary texts.

Herzogenrath & Nierhoff-Wielk, Ex Machina-Frühe Computergrafik bis 1979. . . . Ex Machina- Early Computer Graphics to 1979 (2007) 229.

Staff Members of the Institute of Meteorology, University of Stockholm published "Results of Forecasting with the Barotropic Model on an Electronic Computer (BESK)," Tellus 6 (1954): 139-149.

"The Royal Swedish Air Force Weather Service in Stockholm was first in the world to begin routine real-time numerical weather forecasting (i.e., with broadcast of forecasts in advance of weather). The Institute of Meteorology at the University of Stockholm, associated with the eminent meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby, developed the model. Forecasts for the North Atlantic region were made three times a week on the Swedish BESK computer using a barotropic model, starting in December, 1954" (P. N. Edwards, Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling: A Participatory History).

The BBC presented a television production of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, adapted for television by Nigel  Kneale.

"Kneale's script was a largely faithful adaptation of the novel as far as was practical with the limitations of the medium. The writer did, however, make some small additions of his own, the most notable being the creation of a sequence in which O'Brien observes Julia at work in PornoSec, and reads a small segment from one of the erotic novels being written by the machines there."

"When it had become clear what an important production Nineteen Eighty-Four was, it was arranged for the second performance [December 14, 1954] to be telerecorded onto 35mm film – the first performance having simply disappeared off into the ether, as it was shown live, seen only by those who were watching on the Sunday evening. At this stage, Videotape recording was still at the development stage and television images could only be preserved on film by using a special recording apparatus (known as "telerecording" in the UK and "kinescoping" in the USA), but was only used sparingly, then in Britain for historic preservation reasons and not for pre-recording. It is thus the second performance that survives in the archives, one of the earliest surviving British television dramas" (Wikipedia article on Nineteen Eight-Four (TV Programme), accessed 07-26-2009).

♦ The program is available for downloading or viewing at the Internet archive at this link.

IBM introduced the IBM 608 transistor calculator, the first all solid-state computer commercially marketed.

IBM developed magnetic core storage units, a dramatic improvement over cathode ray tube memory technology.

By successfully adapting pill-making machines for production, IBM greatly improved the manufacture of these tiny, “doughnut” shaped, iron oxide cores, making the cores reliable and cost effective enough to serve as the basic technology behind every computer’s main memory until the early 1970s.

The ENIAC was turned off for the last time at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

It was estimated that this single machine did more computation during the ten years of its operation than the entire human race had done up till the time of its invention.

Frederick Sanger sequenced the amino acids of insulin, the first of any protein.

Sanger's work “revealed that a protein has a definite constant, genetically determined sequence--and yet a sequence with no general rule for its assembly. Therefore it had to have a code” (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation, 188).

Sanger received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1958.

Compagnie des Machines Bull launched the first stored-program electronic computer produced for commercial sale in France-- the Gamma ET.

Because of failing health, John von Neumann did not finish his last book, The Computer and the Brain, in which he compared the functions of computers and the human brain.

On the completion of the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project, five authors, including Eugene Garfield, issued  the Final Report on Machine Methods for Information Searching.

On September 25, 1956 the first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT-1, became operational, carrying 36 telephone channels. It was laid between Gallanach Bay, near Oban, Scotland and Clarenville, Newfoundland between 1955 and 1956. 

Prior to this development, since 1927, very expensive radio-based transatlantic telephone service was available. However, radio-based transatlantic telephone service carried only around 2000 calls per year.

Howard "Bud" Kettler designed the monospaced, or fixed-width or non-proportional, slab serif typeface to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter.

"The design of the original Courier typeface was commissioned in the 1950s by IBM for use in typewriters, but they did not secure legal exclusivity to the typeface and it soon became a standard font used throughout the typewriter industry. As a monospaced font, it has recently found renewed use in the electronic world in situations where columns of characters must be consistently aligned. . . .

"Kettler was once quoted about how the name was chosen. The font was nearly released with the name "Messenger." After giving it some thought, Kettler said, 'A letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability' " (Wikipedia article on Courier [typeface], accessed 04-26-2009).

American cinematographer and inventor Morton Heilig described his vision of a multi-sensory theater in a 1955 paper entitled "The Cinema of the Future."

In 1962 Heilig built a prototype of his immersive, multi-sensory, mechanical multimodal theater called the Sensorama, and created five short films to be displayed in it.  On August 28, 1962 Heilig was granted U.S. Patent 3,050,870 for a "Sensorama Simulator."  This invention is considered one of the earliest functioning efforts in virtual reality.

Elmer C. Kubie and John W. Sheldon founded Computer Usage Company, the first independent company to specialize in software.  It declared bankrupcy in 1986.

In 1956 American cognitive psychologist George Armitage Miller, then teaching at Harvard, published "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," Psychological Review, Vol. 63, No. 2, 81-97. He had read the paper before the Eastern Psychological Association on April 15, 1955. 

"From the days of William James, psychologists had the idea memory consisted of short-term and long-term memory. While short-term memory was expected to be limited, its exact limits were not known. In 1956, Miller would quantify its capacity limit in the paper 'The magical number seven, plus or minus two'. He tested immediate memory via tasks such as asking a person to repeat a set of digits presented; absolute judgment by presenting a stimulus and a label, and asking them to recall the label later; and span of attention by asking them to count things in a group of more than a few items quickly. For all three cases, Miller found the average limit to be seven items. He had mixed feelings about the focus on his work on the exact number seven for quantifying short-term memory, and felt it had been misquoted often. He stated, introducing the paper on the research for the first time, that he was being persecuted by an integer. Miller also found humans remembered chunks of information, interrelating bits using some scheme, and the limit applied to chunks. Miller himself saw no relationship among the disparate tasks of immediate memory and absolute judgment, but lumped them to fill a one-hour presentation" (Wikipedia article on George Armitage Miller, accessed 12-30-2012). 

"The word ‘'chunking’' comes from a famous 1956 paper by George A. Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. At a time when information theory was beginning to be applied in psychology, Miller observed that some human cognitive tasks fit the model of a 'channel capacity,' characterized by a roughly constant capacity in bits, but short-term memory did not. A variety of studies could be summarized by saying that short-term memory had a capacity of about "seven plus-or-minus two" chunks. Miller wrote that 'With binary items the span is about nine and, although it drops to about five with monosyllabic English words, the difference is far less than the hypothesis of constant information would require (see also, memory span ). The span of immediate memory seems to be almost independent of the number of bits per chunk, at least over the range that has been examined to date.' Miller acknowledged that 'we are not very definite about what constitutes a chunk of information.' Miller noted that according to this theory, it should be possible to effectively increase short-term memory for low-information-content items by mentally recoding them into a smaller number of high-information-content items. 'A man just beginning to learn radio-telegraphic code hears each dit and dah as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. Then the letters organize themselves as words, which are still larger chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases.' Thus, a telegrapher can effectively 'remember' several dozen dits and dahs as a single phrase. Naive subjects can only remember about nine binary items, but Miller reports a 1954 experiment in which people were trained to listen to a string of binary digits and (in one case) mentally group them into groups of five, recode each group into a name (e.g. "twenty-one" for 10101), and remember the names. With sufficient drill, people found it possible to remember as many as forty binary digits. Miller wrote: 'It is a little dramatic to watch a person get 40 binary digits in a row and then repeat them back without error. However, if you think of this merely as a mnemonic trick for extending the memory span, you will miss the more important point that is implicit in nearly all such mnemonic devices. The point is that recoding is an extremely powerful weapon for increasing the amount of information that we can deal with " (Wikipedia article on Chunking (pschology), accessed 12-30-2012).

Eugene Garfield published "Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas," Science, Vol. 122, No. 3159, 108-11. This paper may be the foundation of "bibliometrics" or citation analysis.

"Eugene Garfield . . . was deeply involved in the research relating to machine generated indexes in the mid-1950's and early 1960's. One of his earliest points of involvement was a project sponsored by the Armed Forces Medical Library (predecessor to our current National Library of Medicine). The Welch Medical Library Indexing project, as it was called, was to investigate the role of automation in the organization and retrieval of medical literature. The hope was that the problems associated with subjective human judgement in selection of descriptors and indexing terms could be eliminated. By removing the human element, one might thereby increase the speed with which information was incorporated in to the indexes. It might also increase the cost-effectiveness of the indexes. Garfield grasped early on that review articles in the journal literature were heavily reliant on the bibliographic citations that referred the reader to the original published source for the notable idea or concept. By capturing those citations, Garfield believed, the researcher could immediately get a view of the approach taken by another scientist to support an idea or methodology based on the sources that the published writer had consulted and cited as pertinent in the bibliography. As retrieval terms, citations could function as well as keywords and descriptors that were thoughtfully assigned by a professional indexer."

John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon invited participants to a summer session at Dartmouth College to conduct research on what they called Artificial Intelligence (AI), thereby coining the term. (See Reading 11.5.)

Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, began the computerization of the banking industry by demonstrating a prototype electronic accounting machine using its ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) system.

ETL-Mark-2, the first full-scale programmable computer in Japan, was produced by the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Roppongi, Tokyo. It was built from 21,000 relays, and did not store a program.

The first published use of the term "software" in a computing context is often credited to American statistician John W. Tukey, who published the term in "The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics," American Mathematical Monthly, January 9, 1958. Tukey wrote:

"Today the 'software' comprising the carefully planned interpretive routines, compilers, and other aspects of automative programming are at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its 'hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like" (http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_7_31_00.html, accessed 02-02-2010).

Note that Tukey referred to computers as "calculators." Up to this time the word "computer" typically referred to people, and the use of the word computer for a machine was just coming into popular use.

However, the priority of Tukey in this context appears to be unjustified. On April 30, 2013 Paul Niquette informed me that Richard R. Carhart used the term in the  Proceedings of the Second National Symposium on Quality Control and Reliability in Electronics: Washington, D.C., January 9-10, 1956. It is, of course, possible – even likely – that others used the word in spoken, rather than printed, context before either Carhart or Tukey. Niquette states that he used the term as early as 1953.

Ray Dolby, Charles Ginsberg and Charles Anderson of Ampex in San Carlos, California, sold the first video tape recorder. It cost $50,000.

IBM introduced the 650 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) disk-storage system— a memory device based on rotating disks.

This was the first hard drive. It permitted random access to any of the million characters distributed over both sides of 50 two-foot-diameter disks. It stored about 2,000 bits of data per square inch and had a purchase price of about $10,000 per megabyte. By 1997 the cost of storing a megabyte on a hard drive dropped to around ten cents.

English psychiatrist and cybernetician W[illiam] Ross Ashby wrote of intelligence amplification by machines in his book, Introduction to Cybernetics.

Theoretical meterologist Norman A. Phillips of the National Weather Service, National Meteorological Center, published "The General Circulation of the Atmosphere: A Numerical Experiment," Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 82, no. 352 (1956) 123-164.  By 1955 Phillips completed a 2-layer, hemispheric, quasi-geostrophic computer model. "Despite its primitive nature, Phillips's model is now often regarded as the first AGCM" (P. N. Edwards, Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling: A Participatory History, accessed 06-20-2009)

"Norman Phillips was the first to show, with a simple General Circulation model, that weather prediction with numerical models was even feasible. The advent of numerical weather predictions in the 1950s also signaled the transformation of weather forecasting from a highly individualistic effort to one in which teams of experts developed complex computer programs, eventually for high-speed computers" (Franklin Institute, Franklin Laureate database, accessed 06-20-2009).

Storm Center, an American drama film directed by screenwriter Daniel Taradash, from a screenplay by Taradash and Elick Moll, and starring Bette Davis as the librarian, Alicia Hull, was first overtly anti-McCarthyism film to be produced in Hollywood during the height of the "Second Red Scare" (late 1940s through late 1950s).  During the Second Red Scare hundreds of Hollywood entertainment professionals lost their jobs as a result of the unofficial Hollywood blacklist, and thousands of people in other occupations also lost jobs.

"Alicia Hull is a widowed small town librarian dedicated to introducing children to the joy of reading. In exchange for fulfilling her request for a children's wing, the city council asks her to withdraw the book The Communist Dream from the library's collection. When she refuses to comply with their demand, she is fired and branded as a subversive. Judge Ellerbe feels she has been treated unfairly and calls a town meeting. Ambitious attorney and aspiring politician Paul Duncan, who is dating assistant librarian Martha Lockeridge, uses the meeting as an opportunity to make a name for himself by denouncing Alicia as a Communist. His forceful rhetoric turns the entire town, with the exception of young Freddie Slater, against her. The boy, increasingly upset by the mistreatment his mentor is suffering and affected by the influence of his narrow-minded father, finally turns on her himself and sets the library on fire. His action causes the residents to have a change of heart, and they ask Alicia to return and supervise the construction of a new building" (Wikipedia article on Storm Center, accessed 05-30-2009).

Raven, "Introduction: The Resonances of Loss," (Raven [ed.] Lost Libraries. The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity [2004] 31).

English director Michael Anderson directed 1984, a science fiction drama film based on the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and starring Edmond O'Brien, Jan Sterling, Michael Redgrave, and Donald Pleasance.

This was the first cinema rendition of the novel. It was released on DVD in 2004.

Inventor Henry Chamberlin of Upland, California, introduced the Chamberlin, the first sample-playback keyboard.

FUJIC, the first Japanese stored-program electronic computer, was designed and built by essentially one person—Dr. Okazaki Bunji—for the Fuji Photo Film Company in Odawara, western Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. The project began in 1949.

"Originally designed to perform calculations for lens design by Fuji, the ultimate goal of FUJIC's construction was to achieve a speed 1,000 times that of human calculation for the same purpose – amazingly, the actual performance achieved was double that number.

"Employing approximately 1,700 vacuum tubes, the computer's word length was 33 bits. It had an ultrasonic mercury delay line memory of 255 words, with an average access time of 500 microseconds. An addition or subtraction was clocked at 100 microseconds, multiplication at 1,600 microseconds, and division at 2,100 microseconds."

FUJIC is preserved in The National Museum Of Nature and Science in Tokyo.

The First International Congress on Cybernetics was held in Namur, Belgium. Few, if any, of the computer pioneers attended.  By this time the field of cybernetics was separated from those of computing and artificial intelligence to emphasize issues of control and communication in learning, automation, and biology.

At the 1956 Dartmouth summer session on artificial intelligence, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon demonstrated the first AI program, the Logic Theorist, to find the basic equations of logic as defined in Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell.

For one of the equations, the Logic Theorist surpassed its inventors’ expectations by finding a new and better proof. This was the “the first foray by artificial intelligence research into high-order intellectual processes” (Feigenbaum and Feldman, Computers and Thought [1963]).

MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Reading) was demonstrated to the Bank Management Committee of the American Bankers’ Association.

Sperry Rand agreed to cross-license patents with IBM, thereby turning over strategic technology.

American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist Noam Chomsky published "Three Models for the Description of Language" in IRE Transactions on Information Theory IT-2, 113-24.

In the paper Chomsky introduced two key concepts, the first being “Chomsky’s hierarchy” of syntactic forms, which was widely applied in the construction of artificial computer languages.

“The Chomsky hierarchy places regular (or linear) languages as a subset of the context-free languages, which in turn are embedded within the set of context-sensitive languages also finally residing in the set of unrestricted or recursively enumerable languages. By defining syntax as the set of rules that define the spatial relationships between the symbols of a language, various levels of language can be also described as one-dimensional (regular or linear), two-dimensional (context-free), three-dimensional (context sensitive) and multi-dimensional (unrestricted) relationships. From these beginnings, Chomsky might well be described as the ‘father of formal languages’ ” (Lee, Computer Pioneers [1995] 164). 

The second concept Chomsky presented here was his transformational-generative grammar theory, which attempted to define rules that can generate the infinite number of grammatical (well-formed) sentences possible in a language, and seeks to identify rules (transformations) that govern relations between parts of a sentence, on the assumption that beneath such aspects as word order a fundamental deep structure exists. As Chomsky expressed it in his abstract of the present paper,

"We investigate several conceptions of linguistic structure to determine whether or not they can provide simple and “revealing” grammars that generate all of the sentences of English and only these. We find that no finite-state Markov process [a random process whose future probabilities are determined by its most recent values] that produces symbols with transition from state to state can serve as an English grammar. We formalize the notion of “phrase structure” and show that this gives us a method for describing language which is essentially more powerful. We study the properties of a set of grammatical transformations, showing that the grammar of English is materially simplified if phrase-structure is limited to a kernel of simple sentences from which all other sentences are constructed by repeated transformation, and that this view of linguistic structure gives a certain insight into the use and understanding of language" (p. 113).

Minsky, "A Selected Descriptor-Indexed Bibliography to the Literature on Artificial Intelligence" in Feigenbaum & Feldman eds., Computers and Thought (1963) 453-523, no. 484. Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 531.

The first Italian computer conference was held in Rome.

The first Japanese conference on electronic computers was held at Waseda University, Shinjuku, Tokyo.  

IBM phased out vacuum tubes in computer design:

“It shall be the policy of IBM to use solid-state circuitry in all machine developments. Furthermore, no new commercial machines or devices shall be announced which make primary use of tube circuitry.”

EDSAC 2, the first large-scale computer with a control unit based on microprogramming, became operational at the University of Cambridge.

The first SAGE AN/FSQ-7 was operational for the SAGE Air Defense System on a limited basis. The AN/FSQ-7 computer contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 0.5 acres (2,000 m2) of of floor space, weighed 275 tons, and used up to three megawatts of power. Performance was about 75,000 instructions per second. From the standpoint of physical dimensions, the fifty-two AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built.  

"Although the machines used a large number of vacuum tubes, the failure rate of an individual tube was low due to efforts in quality control and a novel quality assurance system called marginal checking that discovered tubes that were growing weak, before they failed. Each SAGE site included two computers for redundancy, with one processor on "hot standby" at all times. In spite of the poor reliability of the tubes, this dual-processor design made for remarkably high overall system uptime. 99% availability was not unusual."

The system allowed online access, in graphical form, to data transmitted to and processed by its computers. Fully deployed by 1963, the IBM-built early warning system remained operational until 1984. With 23 direction centers situated on the northern, eastern, and western boundaries of the United States, SAGE pioneered the use of computer control over large, geographically distributed systems.

"Both MIT and IBM supported the project as contractors. IBM's role in SAGE (the design and manufacture of the AN/FSQ-7 computer, a vacuum tube computer with ferrite core memory based on the never-built Whirlwind II) was an important factor leading to IBM's domination of the computer industry, accounting for more than a half billion dollars in revenue, nearly 10% of IBM's income in the late 1950s" (Wikipedia article on Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, accessed 03-03-2012).

Hans Peter Luhn of IBM published "A Statistical Approach to Mechanized Encoding of Library Information," IBM Journal of Research and Development I (1957) no. 4, 309-317, issued by the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.

"ABSTRACT

"Written communication of ideas is carried out on the basis of statistical probability in that a writer chooses that level of subject specificity and that combination of words which he feels will convey the most meaning. Since this process varies among individuals and since similar ideas are therefore relayed at different levels of specificity and by means of different words, the problem of literature searching by machines still presents major difficulties. A statistical approach to this problem will be outlined and the various steps of a system based on this approach will be described. Steps include the statistical analysis of a collection of documents in a field of interest, the establishment of a set of “notions” and the vocabulary by which they are expressed, the compilation of a thesaurus-type dictionary and index, the automatic encoding of documents by machine with the aid of such a dictionary, the encoding of topological notations (such as branched structures), the recording of the coded information, the establishment of a searching pattern for finding pertinent information, and the programming of appropriate machines to carry out a search."

Commercial transistorized computers, including the UNIVAC Solid State 80 and the Philco TRANSAC S-2000, were introduced. These inaugurated the so-called second generation of electronic computers.

Grace Hopper wrote the first English-language data-processing compiler, B-0 (FLOW-MATIC) for the UNIVAC II.

John Backus and his team at IBM shipped FORTRAN for the IBM 704. This software was proprietary to IBM. It became the first high-level programming language to achieve high use.

Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collaborated on the first significant computer music composition, the Illiac Suite, composed on the University of Illinois ILLIAC I computer. The ILLIAC I was the first von Neumann architecture computer built and owned by an American university.

Shigeo Satomura  of the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University, demonstrated the application of the Doppler shift in the frequency of ultrasound backscattered by moving cardiac structures.

This was the beginning of doppler ultrasound for evaluating blood flow and pressure by bouncing high-frequency sound waves (ultrasound) off red blood cells.

S. Satomura, Ultrasonic Doppler Method for the Inspection of Cardiac Functions. J. Accoust. Soc. Amer. 29 (1957) 1181-85.

The romantic comedy film, Desk Set, was the first film to dramatize and satirize the role of automation in eliminating traditional jobs.

The name of the computer in the film, EMERAC, and its room-size installation, was an obvious take-off on UNIVAC, the best-known computer at the time. In the film, the computer was brought-in to replace the library of books, and its staff—an early foreshadowing of the physical information versus digital information issue.  Directed by Walter Lang and starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Gig Young, Joan Blondell, and Dina Merrill, the screenplay was written by Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron from the play by William Marchant.

The film "takes place at the "Federal Broadcasting Network" (exterior shots are of Rockefeller Center, in New York City, headquarters of NBC). Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) is in charge of its reference library, which is responsible for researching and answering questions on all manner of topics, such as the names of Santa's reindeer. She has been involved for seven years with network executive Mike Cutler (Gig Young), with no marriage in sight.

"The network is negotiating a merger with another company, but is keeping it secret. To help the employees cope with the extra work that will result, the network head has ordered two computers (called "electronic brains" in the film). Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), the inventor of EMERAC and an efficiency expert, is brought in to see how the library functions, to figure out how to ease the transition. Though extremely bright, as he gets to know Bunny, he is surprised to discover that she is every bit his match.

"When they find out the computers are coming, the employees jump to the conclusion the machines are going to replace them. Their fears seem to be confirmed when everyone on the staff receives a pink slip printed out by the new payroll computer. Fortunately, it turns out to be a mistake; the machine fired everybody in the company, including the president" Wikipedia article on Desk Set, accessed 12-23-2008).

American mathematician and researcher in artificial intelligence Ray Solomonoff published "An Inductive Inference Machine". IRE Convention Record, Section on Information Theory, Part 2,  56-62. This was the first paper written on machine learning. It emphasized the importance of training sequences, and the use of parts of previous solutions to problems in constructing trial solutions to new problems. Solomonoff presented an early version of this paper at the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence.  In March 2012 a copy of that version was available at this link.

Russell A. Kirsch and a team at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, using the SEAC computer, built the first image scanner— a drum scanner, and took the first digital photograph: 

"The first image ever scanned on this machine was a 5 cm square photograph of Kirsch's then-three-month-old son, Walden. The black and white image had a resolution of 176 pixels on a side" (Wikipedia article on Image Scanner, accessed 04-01-2009).

Swiss typographer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas type foundry) of Münchenstein, Switzerland designed the sans-serif typeface Helvetica. Its original name was Die Neue Haas Grotesk.

"The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, had no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage.

"In 1960, the typeface's name was changed by Haas' German parent company Stempel to Helvetica — derived from Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland — in order to make it more marketable internationally" (Wikipedia article on Helvetica, accessed 04-26-2009).

In 2007 Gary Hustwit produced Helvetica a "feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which recently celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives" (from the superb website for the film, accessed 04-26-2009). You can watch several clips from the film at this link.

Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures was published in S-Gravenhage (The Hague), Netherlands, by Mouton & Co. That it did not initially find an American publisher might have been reflective of the advanced nature of the contents. Through its numerous printings Syntactic Structures, a small book of 116 pages, was the vehicle through which Chomsky's innovative ideas first became more widely known.

Chomsky’s text was an expansion of the ideas first expressed in his “Three Models for the Description of Language," in particular the concept of transformational grammar. The cognitive scientist David Marr, who developed a general account of information-processing systems, described Chomsky’s theory of transformation grammar as a top-level computational theory, in the sense that it deals with the goal of a computation, why it is appropriate, and the logic of the strategy used to carry it out (Anderson and Rosenfeld, Neurocomputing: Foundations of Research [1988] 470–72). Chomsky’s work had profound influence in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. 

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 532.

". . . in 1957 there were only 40 computers on unversity campuses across the country [the United States]" (Bowles (ed.), Computers in Humanistic Research [1967] v).

The significant product of computerized indexing in the humanities in the United States was the first computerized concordance of the Bible: Nelson's Complete Concordance to the Revised Standard Version Bible edited by J. W. Ellison. The text of this 2157 page book was produced on a Remington Rand UNIVAC computer. 

The date was very early since UNIVAC 1, serial one was not delivered until 1951, and the first UNIVAC delivered to a commercial customer was serial 8 in 1954.

John von Neumann died of cancer at the age of fifty-four.

Molecular Biologist Francis Crick delivered his paper “On Protein Synthesis,” published in Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol. 12 (1958): 138-63.

In it Crick proposed two general principles:

1) The Sequence Hypothesis:

“The order of bases in a portion of DNA represents a code for the amino acid sequence of a specific protein. Each ‘word’ in the code would name a specific amino acid. From the two-dimensional genetic text, written in DNA, are forged the whole diversity of uniquely shaped three-dimensional proteins

"In this context, Crick discussed the 'coding problem'—how the ordered sequence of the four bases in DNA might constitute genes that encode and disburse information directing the manufacture of proteins. Crick hypothesized that, with four bases to DNA and twenty amino acids, the simplest code would involve "triplets"—in which sequences of three bases coded for a single amino acid" (Genome News Network, Genetics and Genomics Timeline 1957).

2) The Central Dogma:

“Information is transmitted from DNA and RNA to proteins but information cannot be transmitted from a protein to DNA.” This paper “permanently altered the logic of biology.” (Judson)

The U.S. Navy launched NAVSAT, also known as TRANSIT. 

"The TRANSIT satellite system was developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University for the U.S. Navy. Just days after the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the first man-made earth-orbiting satellite on October 4, 1957, two physicists at APL, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, found themselves in discussion about the microwave signals that would likely be emanating from the satellite. They were able to determine Sputnik's orbit by analyzing the Doppler shift of its radio signals during a single pass. Frank McClure, the chairman of APL's Research Center, suggested that if the satellite's position were known and predictable, the Doppler shift could be used to locate a receiver on Earth.

"Development of the TRANSIT system began in 1958, and a prototype satellite, Transit 1A, was launched in September 1959. That satellite failed to reach orbit. A second satellite, Transit 1B, was successfully launched April 13, 1960, by a Thor-Ablestar rocket. The first successful tests of the system were made in 1960, and the system entered Naval service in 1964" (Wikipedia article on Transit (satellite), accessed 12-26-2012).

NAVSAT was the first operational satellite navigation system. Using a constellation of five satellites, the system was primarily used to obtain accurate location information by ballistic missile submarines, and was also used as a general navigation system by the Navy, and in hydrographic and geodetic surveying. Since there was no computer small enough to fit through a submarine’s hatch, a new computer was designed, named the AN/UYK-1. It was built with rounded corners to fit through the hatch, was about five feet tall, and sealed to be water-proof.

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, during the International Geophysical Year from Site No.1/5, at the 5th Tyuratam range, in Kazakh SSR (now at the Baikonur Cosmodrome).

In 1958 and 1960 molecular biologist John Kendrew published  "A Three-Dimensional Model of the Myoglobin Molecule Obtained by X-ray Analysis" (with G. Bodo, H. M. Dintzis, R. G. Parrish, H. Wyckoff,) Nature 181 (1958) 662-666, and "Structure of Myoglobin: A Three-Dimensional Fourier synthesis at 2 Å Resolution" (with R. E. Dickerson, B. E. Strandberg, R. G. Hart, D. R. Davies, D. C. Phillips, V. C. Shore). Nature 185 (1960) 422-27.

These papers recorded the first solution of the three-dimensional molecular structure of a protein, for which Kendrew received the 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry, together with his friend and colleague Max Perutz, who solved the structure of the related and more complex protein, hemoglobin, two years after Kendrew’s achievement. 

Understanding the means of storing the genetic information in the cell nucleus, and the means of transferring the genetic information (the double helical structure of DNA, messenger RNA, the genetic code), solving the structure of proteins which construct themselves following instructions from the nucleus, and recombinant DNA and its applications in genetic engineering, remain central elements of molecular biology. Today roughly 100,000 people worldwide are involved in scientific research solving the structure of proteins, which evolved out of Kendrew’s and Perutz’s pioneering work.  

Kendrew began his investigation into the structure of myoglobin in 1949, choosing this particular protein because it was “of low molecular weight, easily prepared in quantity, readily crystallized, and not already being studied by X-ray methods elsewhere” (Kendrew, “Myoglobin and the structure of proteins. Nobel Prize Lecture [1962],” pp. 676-677). Protein molecules, which contain, at minimum, thousands of atoms, have enormously convoluted and irregular formations that are extremely difficult to elucidate. In the 1930s J. D. Bernal, Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz performed the earliest crystallographic studies of proteins at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory; however, the intricacies of three-dimensional structure of proteins were too complex for analysis by conventional X-ray crystallography, and the process of calculating the structure factors by slide-rules and electric calculators was far too slow. It was not until the late 1940s, when Kendrew joined the Cavendish Laboratory as a graduate student, that new and more sophisticated tools emerged that could be used to attack the problem. The first of these tools was the technique of isomorphous replacement, developed by Perutz during his own researches on hemoglobin, in which certain atoms in a protein molecule are replaced with heavy atoms. When these modified molecules are subjected to X-ray analysis the heavy atoms provide a frame of reference for comparing diffraction patterns. The second tool was the electronic computer, which Kendrew introduced to computational biology in 1951. The first electronic computer, the ENIAC, which became operational in Philadelphia in 1945, was 10,000 times the speed of a human performing a calculation. In 1951 Cambridge University was one of only three or four places in the world with a high-speed stored-program electronic computer, and Kendrew took full advantage of the speed of Cambridge’s EDSAC computer, and its more powerful successors, to execute the complex mathematical calculations required to solve the structure of myoglobin. Kendrew was the first to apply an electronic computer to the solution of a complex problem in biology.

Nevertheless, even with the EDSAC computer performing the calculations, the research progressed remarkably slowly. Only by the summer of 1957 did Kendrew and his team succeed in creating a three-dimensional map of myoglobin at a resolution the so-called “low resolution”of 6 angstroms; thus myoglobin became “the first protein to be solved” (Judson, p. 538).

“A cursory inspection of the map showed it to consist of a large number of rod-like segments, joined at the ends, and irregularly wandering through the structure; a single dense flattened disk in each molecule; and sundry connected regions of uniform density. These could be identified respectively with polypeptide chains, with the iron atom and its associated porphyrin ring, and with the liquid filling the interstices between neighboring molecules. From the map it was possible to ‘dissect out’ a single protein molecule . . . The most striking features of the molecule were its irregularity and its total lack of symmetry” (Kendrew, “Myoglobin,” p. 681).  

The 6-angstrom resolution was too low to show the molecule’s finer features, but by 1960 Kendrew and his team were able to obtain a map of the molecule at 2-angstrom resolution. “To achieve a resolution of 2 Å it was necessary to determine the phases of nearly 10,000 reflections, and them to compute a Fourier synthesis with the same number of terms . . . the Fourier synthesis itself (excluding preparatory computations of considerable bulk and complexity) required about 12 hours of continuous computation on a very fast machine (EDSAC II)” (Kendrew, “Myoglobin,” p. 682).

Konrad Zuse produced the Z22, the first commercial electronic digital computer in Germany. The Z22 used vacuum tubes, a relatively late date for that technology.

Zuse KG was the first independent German electronic computer company. It was eventually purchased by Siemens.

Seymour Cray of Control Data Corporation, Minneapolis, Minnesota, built the first transistorized supercomputer, the CDC 1604.

William Higinbotham, head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, invented the first video game, "Tennis for Two" run on an analog computer hooked up to an oscilloscope.

IBM announced their 1401, a relatively inexpensive computer that proved very popular with businesses, and which began to compete seriously with existing punched-card equipment.

In 1958 Hans Peter Luhn of IBM developed an automatic document indexing program for the production of literature abstracts.

"The complete text of an article in machine-readable form is scanned by an IBM 704 data-processing machine and analyzed in accordance with a standard program. Statistical information derived from word frequency and distribution is used by the machine to compute a relative measure of significance, first for individual words and then for sentences. Sentences scoring highest in significance are extracted and printed out to become the "auto-abstract."

Though modems existed for teletype since the 1940s, these transmitted at speeds of about 150 bpi. To meet demands of the U.S. military, in 1958 researchers at Bell Labs developed an improved modem (modulator-demodulator), using amplitude magnification to provide a way to convert digital signals to analog signals and back for transmission at speeds up to 1600 bpi over analog telephone lines.

MITRE Corporation was founded to manage the development and production of SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) "an automated control system for collecting, tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft."

SAGE was used by NORAD into the 1980s.

IBM began production of the the AN/FSQ-7, a military grade version of the Whirlwind.

"The AN/FSQ-7 used 55,000 vaccuum tubes, about 1/2 acre (2,000 m²) of floor space, weighed 275 tons and used up to three megawatts of power. Although the failure rate of an individual tube was low due to efforts in quality control. So many were used that the daily failure rate was in the hundreds. Each center had staff dedicated to replacing dead tubes by running up and down the racks of machinery with shopping carts filled with replacements. The AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built, and will likely hold that record in the future. Each SAGE site included two computers for redundancy, with one processor on "hot standby" at all times. In spite of the poor reliability of the tubes, this dual-processor design made for remarkably high overall system uptime. 99% availability was not unusual."

In the late 1950s it was recognized that the longevity of paper is a function of its acidity or alkalinity: the lower the acidity and higher the alkalinity, the greater the longevity of paper.

Ian Donald, Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow, and his colleagues John MacVicar, an obstetrician, and Tom Brown, an engineer, published a paper in The Lancet entitled "Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound." This article described their experience using an ultrasound scanner on 100 patients, and included 12 illustrations of various gynecologic disorders (eg, ovarian cysts, fibroids) as well as demonstration of obstetric findings such as the fetal skull at 34 weeks' gestation, "hydramnios" (polyhydramnios), and twins in breech presentation. The somewhat grainy and indistinct "Compound B-mode contact scanner" images were the first published obstetrical or gynecological sonograms.

J. M. Norman (ed),  Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed.(1991) no. 2682.

The U. S. launched its first artificial satellite, Explorer-1, officially known as Satellite 1958 Alpha. It was built at the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech, and it ceased transmission on May 23 after less than 4 months.

Explorer I is credited with the most important discovery of the International Geophysical Year— the discovery of one of the belts of radiation surrounding the earth. There were subsequently named the Van Allen Belts after James Van Allen, the scientist who identified them.

In response to the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, President Dwight Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Planning Agency of the Department of Defense (ARPA). It was renamed DARPA in 1972.

Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas, conceived of the integrated circuit in July 1958 and constructed the first integrated working prototype on September 12, 1958.

"In his patent application of February 6, 1959, Kilby described his new device as 'a body of semiconductor material . . . wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated' ” (Wikipedia article on Integrated circuit, accessed 03-03-2012).

The Burroughs “Atlas Guidance” computer was used at Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy) to control the launch of the Atlas missile. It was one of the first computers to use transistors.

". . .the first machine was installed at the Cape Canaveral missile range in June 1957. Although Atlas missile launches started in September 1957, test patterns were transmitted to the missile in place of actual guidance commands for the first four flights. The first computer-controlled launch was on July 19, 1958. The computer had separate memory areas for instructions (2048 18-bit words) and data (256 24-bit words). The instruction area was increased to 2816 words, beginning with the Model III version, which was first delivered in December 1958. The Atlas guidance computer had no facilities for developing programs, so they were written on the UDEC II, the Datatron, and the 220, using simulator software. Burroughs was still doing Atlas programming on the 220 in 1964. In all, 18 Atlas guidance computers were built at a total project cost of $37 million. The computer was very reliable, and no Atlas launch was ever aborted due to computer failure." 

Bank of America created the BankAmericard, the first credit card issued by a conventional bank.

Together with its overseas affiliates, this product eventually evolved into the Visa system.

Allan Newell, Clifford Shaw, and Herbert Simon invented “game tree pruning,” an artificial intelligence technique.

American Express launched the American Express card.

Because American Express previously had an international network of offices in place, and their traveler's' cheques had been accepted throughout the world for decades, this was the first credit card accepted internationally. 

". . . public interest had become so significant that they issued 250,000 cards prior to the official launch date. The card was launched with an annual fee of $6, $1 higher than Diners Club, to be seen as a premium product. The first cards were paper, with the account number and cardmember's name typed. It was not until 1959 that American Express began issuing embossed ISO 7810 plastic cards, an industry first" (Wikipedia article on American Express, accessed 12-27-2008).

Frank Rosenblatt invented the Perceptron, or Mark I, at Cornell University. Completed in 1960, this was the first computer that could learn new skills by trial and error, using a type of neural network that simulated human thought processes.

In November 1958 computer scientist Hans Peter Luhn of IBM published Bibliography and index: Literature on information retrieval and machine translation.  This contained titles indexed by the Key Words in Context system, or KWIC. The concept of Keyword in Context indexing had been first proposed and implemented manually by librarian Andrea Crestadoro in 1856-1864.

"The International Conference on Scientific Information (ICSI), Washington, DC, in November 1958, where Luhn introduced his new equipment and illustrated the practical results by producing the KWIC indexes for the conference program. Two new Luhn inventions, the 9900 Index Analyzer and the Universal Card Scanner, and the new Luhn Keyword-in-Context (KWIC) indexing technique were introduced. Following the conference, newspapers all over the country carried stories about the auto-abstracting and auto-indexing." (http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ssoy/organizing/l391d2c.htm, accessed 04-26-2009).

The National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, England held the first international symposium on artificial intelligence, calling it Mechanisation of Thought Processes.

At this conference John McCarthy delivered his paper Programs with Common Sense.(See Reading 11.6.)

President Eisenhower's brief Christmas greeting was transmitted from the Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment) satellite.

He said:

"This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite traveling in outer space. My message is a simple one: Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind, America's wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere."

This was the first voice transmission from the world's first communications satellite.

Based on technology originally developed at the Stanford Research Institute, General Electric delivered the first 32 ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) computing systems to the Bank of America.

The system used MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Reading.) ERMA served as the Bank’s accounting computer and check handling system until 1970.

Independently of Jack Kilby, Robert N. Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, Mountain View, California, invented a process that made it practical to manufacture integrated circuits. Based on the "planar" technology, an ealier Fairchild breakthrough, Noyce's invention consisted of a complete electronic circuit inside a small silicon chip. Noyce filed for a patent on "Semiconductor Device-and -Lead Structure" on July 30, 1959.  U.S. patent 2,981,877 was granted on April 25, 1961.

Wesley A. Clark designed and built the TX-2 computer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts. It had 320 kilobytes of fast memory, about twice the capacity of the biggest commercial machines. Other features were magnetic tape storage, an on-line typewriter, the first Xerox printer, paper tape for program input, and a nine inch CRT screen. Among its applications were development of interactive graphics and research on human-computer interaction.

"In 1957, Charles Hard Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow, then at Bell Labs, began a serious study of the infrared laser. As ideas developed, they abandoned infrared radiation to instead concentrate upon visible light. The concept originally was called an "optical maser". In 1958, Bell Labs filed a patent application for their proposed optical maser; and Schawlow and Townes submitted a manuscript of their theoretical calculations to the Physical Review, published that year in Volume 112, Issue No. 6.

"Simultaneously, at Columbia University, graduate student Gordon Gould was working on a doctoral thesis about the energy levels of excited thallium. When Gould and Townes met, they spoke of radiation emission, as a general subject; afterwards, in November 1957, Gould noted his ideas for a "laser", including using an open resonator (later an essential laser-device component). Moreover, in 1958, Prokhorov independently proposed using an open resonator, the first published appearance (the USSR) of this idea. Elsewhere, in the U.S., Schawlow and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work.

"At a conference in 1959, Gordon Gould published the term LASER in the paper The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Gould's linguistic intention was using the "-aser" word particle as a suffix – to accurately denote the spectrum of the light emitted by the LASER device; thus x-rays: xaser, ultraviolet: uvaser, et cetera; none established itself as a discrete term, although "raser" was briefly popular for denoting radio-frequency-emitting devices.

"Gould's notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959. The U.S. Patent Office denied his application, and awarded a patent to Bell Labs, in 1960. That provoked a twenty-eight-year lawsuit, featuring scientific prestige and money as the stakes. Gould won his first minor patent in 1977, yet it was not until 1987 that he won the first significant patent lawsuit victory, when a Federal judge ordered the U.S. Patent Office to issue patents to Gould for the optically pumped and the gas discharge laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians.

On May 16, 1960, Theodore H. Maiman operated the first functioning laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California, ahead of several research teams, including those of Townes, at Columbia University, Arthur Schawlow, at Bell Labs, and Gould, at the TRG (Technical Research Group) company. Maiman's functional laser used a solid-state flashlamp-pumped synthetic ruby crystal to produce red laser light, at 694 nanometres wavelength; however, the device only was capable of pulsed operation, because of its three-level pumping design scheme. Later in 1960, the Iranian physicist Ali Javan, and William R. Bennett, and Donald Herriott, constructed the first gas laser, using helium and neon that was capable of continuous operation in the infrared (U.S. Patent 3,149,290); later, Javan received the Albert Einstein Award in 1993. Basov and Javan proposed the semiconductor laser diode concept. In 1962, Robert N. Hall demonstrated the first laser diode device, made of gallium arsenide and emitted at 850 nm the near-infrared band of the spectrum. Later, in 1962, Nick Holonyak, Jr. demonstrated the first semiconductor laser with a visible emission. This first semiconductor laser could only be used in pulsed-beam operation, and when cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures (77 K). In 1970, Zhores Alferov, in the USSR, and Izuo Hayashi and Morton Panish of Bell Telephone Laboratories also independently developed room-temperature, continual-operation diode lasers, using the heterojunction structure." (Wikipedia article on Laser, accessed 04-25-2013).

Having been computed by human computers since 1767, the Nautical Almanac was finally produced by an electronic computer.

"The computation of the data for the almanacs involved a considerable amount of effort. As late as the mid-20th century, HMNAO employed a small army of human computers to carry out this work. They used the latest technology available at the time: logarithm tables, mechanical calculating machines and electro-mechanical calculating machines. In 1959 the Office obtained its own electronic computer, making it the first part of the RGO to use this emerging technology."

Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson published the first book on computer-generated music: Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer, based on work done on the University of Illinois’s ILLIAC computer.

The United States banking industry adopted MICR, (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition), which allowed computers to read the data printed on checks.

The British Museum (now the British Library) published its General Catalogue of Printed Books. Photolithographic Edition to 1955 in 263 folio volumes from 1959 to 1966. These volumes reproduced the catalogue cards of 4,350,000 items.

In 1971 and 1972 the BM issued a Ten-Year Supplement, 1956-1970 in 23 volumes. This set of nearly 300 folio volumes was the "most voluminous" printed catalogue of a single library ever published in print.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 109.

Computer scientist Hans Peter Luhn published "Auto-Encoding of Documents for Information Retrieval Systems,  M. Boaz (ed) Modern Trends in Documentation (1959) 45-58.

"Luhn believed that the growing rate of information and document production necessitated the invention of methods allowing data to be retrieved from stores of documents without expensive human intervention. This paper discusses auto-encoding based on statistical procedures performed by a machine on the original text of a document already in machine-readable form. The prevalent machine-readable form of that time was primarily punched cards or paper tape and less frequently magnetic tape. The auto-encoding method used word frequency rates, a special thesaurus, and the development of multi-dimensional patterns based on word proximity. At the time, application of the method was limited to articles of 500 to 5000 words, but Luhn was confident that the logical capabilities of electronic machines, statistical methods, and "further research into the characteristics of human behavior as manifested in writing" would lead to better information dissemination and retrieval. Earlier articles by this author discuss the automatic creation of abstracts and the development of thesauri" (http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ssoy/organizing/l391d2b.htm, accessed 04-26-2009).

"Somewhat the same problem arises in communicating with a machine entity that would arise in communicating with a person of an entirely different language background than your own. A system of logical definition and translation would have to be available. In order that meanings should not be lost, such a system of translation would also need to be precise. We are all familiar with the unhappy results of language translations which are either lacking in precision or where suitable words of equivalent meaning cannot be found. Likewise, translating into a machine language cannot be anything but an exact operation. Machines even more than people must be addressed with clarity and unambiguity, for machines cannot improvise on their own or imagine that about which they have not been specifically informed, as a human might do within reasonable limits of error. . . .

"We must now ascertain how concepts are formulated within the framework of computer language. For analogy, let us first consider the manner in which instructions are usually given to a non-mechanical entity. When we instruct, for example, a human being, we are aided by the fact that the human is usually able to fill in gaps in our instructions through acumen acquired from his own past experiences. It is seldom necessary that instructions be either detailed or literal, although we may have lost sight of this fact.

"The computer in a correlate example is a mechanical 'being' which must be instructed at each and every step. But it can be given a very long list of instructions upon which it can be expected to subsequently act with great speed and accuracy and with untiring repetition. Machine traits are: low comprehension, high retention, extreme reliability, and tremendous speed. The use of superlatives here to describe these traits is not exaggerative. Since speed becomes in practice the equivalent of number, the machine might be, and has sometimes been, equated to legions — an army, if you will — of lowgrade morons whose conceptualization is entirely literal, who remember as long as is necessary or as you desire them to, whose loyalty and subservience is complete, who require no holidays, no spurious incentives, no morale programs, pensions, not even gratitude for past service, and who seemingly never tire of doing elementary repetitive tasks such as typing, accounting, bookkeeping, arithmetic, filling in forms, and the like. In about all these respects the machine may be seen to be the exact opposite of nature's loftiest creature, the intellligent human being, who becomes bored with the petty and repetitious, who is unreliable, who wanders from the task for the most trivial reasons, who gets out of humor, who forgets, who requires constant incentives and rewards, who improvises on his own even when to do so is impertinent to the objectives being undertaken, and who in summary (let's face it) is unsuitable to most forms of industry as the latter are ideally and practically conceived in our times. It becomes apparent in retrospect that the only excuse we might ever have had for employing him to do many of civilization's more literal and repetitious tasks was the absence of something more efficient with which to replace him!

"It is not the purpose of this volume to explore further the ramifications of the above statements of fact. . . ."(Nett & Hetzler, An Introduction to Electronic Data Processing [1959] 86-88).

Randolph Quirk founded the Survey of English Usage, the first research center in Europe to carry out research in corpus linguistics.

"The original Survey Corpus predated modern computing. It was recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, transcribed on paper, filed in filing cabinets, and indexed on paper cards. Transcriptions were annotated with a detailed prosodic and paralinguistic annotation developed by Crystal and Quirk (1964) Sets of paper cards were manually annotated for grammatical structures and filed, so, for example, all noun phrases could be found in the noun phrase filing cabinet in the Survey. Naturally, corpus searches required a visit to the Survey.

"This corpus is now known more widely as the London-Lund Corpus (LLC), as it was the responsibility of co-workers in Lund, Sweden, to computerise the corpus" (Wikipedia article on Survey of English Usage, accessed 06-07-2010).

The first "large scale" use of machine methods in humanities computing in the United States was Merle Curti's study of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin: The making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (1959).

"Confronted with census material for the years 1850 through 1880–actually several censuses covering population, agriculture, and manufacturing–together with a population of over 17,000 persons by the latter date, Curti turned to punched cards and unit record equipment for the collection and analysis of his data. By this means a total of 38 separate items of information on each individual were recorded for subsequent manifpulation. Quite obviously, the comprehensive nature of this study was due in part to the employment of data processing techniques" (Bowles [ed.] Computers in Humanistic Research (1967) 57-58).

In 1959 German computer scientist Theo Lutz from Hochschule Esslingen created the first digital poetry using a text-generating program called “Stochastiche Text” written for the ZUSE Z22 computer. The program consisted of only 50 commands but could theoretically generate over 4,000,000 sentences.

Working with his teacher, Max Bense, one of the earliest theorists of computer poetry, Lutz used a random number generator to create texts where key words were randomly inserted within a set of logical constants in order to create a syntax. The programme thus demonstrated how logical structures like mathematical systems could work with language.

Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms 1959-1995 (2007).

In 1959 Philip A. Fialer and James Harvey, students in Professor Jack Herriot’s computer course, "Math 139, Theory and Operation of Computing Machines," at Stanford University, devised the "Happy Families Planning Service" as a final math class project, pairing up 49 men and 49 women. For the project Fialer and Harvey had limited access to Stanford's newly acquired IBM 650 computer.

"The notion of melding Math 139 with the Great- Date-Matching Party surfaced early in the quarter when Fialer and Harvey needed to come up with a term project. For some time, Fialer and Harvey had hosted parties in houses that they rented with several electrical engineering and KZSU buddies at 1203 and 1215 Los Trancos Woods Road in Portola Valley. Student nurses from the Veterans Administration psychiatric hospital on Willow Road in Menlo Park were often invited. The boys represented themselves to the nurses as the “SRI Junior Engineers Social Club”—which was at least partially true, since one Los Trancos housemate worked summers and part-time as a junior engineer at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). KZSU radio station parties also were held in Los Trancos, featuring the KZSU musical band marching around the Los Trancos circle loop road at midnight. (This somewhat impromptu band was the basis for the current Los Trancos Woods Community Marching Band, officially organized at a KZSU party on New Year’s Eve in 1960.)  

'Fialer and Harvey figured a KZSU-Los Trancos type party could emerge as a positive by-product of Math 139, using the computer to match “a given number of items of one class to the same number of items of another class.” The classes would be male and female subjects, and the population would be Stanford students, with a few miscellaneous Los Trancos Woods residents thrown in.  

"The pair wrote a program to measure the differences in respondents’ answers to a questionnaire. A “difference” score was then computed for each possible male-female pair.  

"The program compared one member of a “class”—one man—with all members of the other class—women—and then repeated this for all members of the first class. The couple—a member from each class—with the lowest difference score was then matched, and the process repeated for the remaining members of each class. Thus, the first couple selected was the “best” match. As fewer couples remained in the pool, the matched couples had larger and larger difference scores.

"Given the limitations of computer time available and the requirements of the course, Fialer and Harvey did not use a “best-fit” algorithm, so the last remaining pairs were indeed truly “odd” couples. Two of the women in the sample, not Stanford students, were single mothers with two or three children. One of them, age 30, ended up paired with a frosh member of the Stanford Marching Band" (Computers in Love: Stanford and the First Trials of Computer Date Matching by C. Stewart Gillmor http://www.mgb67.com/computersinlove.htm, accessed 02-14-2013).

On February 13, 2013 The New York Times published a video interview with Fialer and Harvey regarding their early experiment in computer dating. In the interview they called the project the "Marriage Planning Service." The video showed pages from the program they wrote for the matching process, as apparently their complete file for the project was preserved.

A group representing computer users, manufacturers, universities, and the government met at The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia, to plan COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), a non proprietary computer language designed for business use that can be run on all electronic computers. Its specifications were inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper, and the IBM COMTRAN language.

Peter R. Samson, Public Relations Committee of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, defined the term "hack" in the Tech Model Railroad Club Dictionary as:

"1) an article or project without constructive end

"2) a project undertaken on bad self-advice

"3) an entropy booster

"4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack(3)."

Samson defined hacker as "one who hacks, or makes them."

Much of the Tech Model Railroad Club jargon was later incorporated into early computer culture. In 2005 Samson commented:

"I saw this as a term for an unconventional or unorthodox application of technology, typically deprecated for engineering reasons. There was no specific suggestion of malicious intent (or of benevolence, either). Indeed, the era of this dictionary saw some 'good hacks:' using a room-sized computer to play music, for instance; or, some would say, writing the dictionary itself" (http://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html, accessed 06-01-2009).

The first of the Corona series of American strategic imaging reconnaissance satellites was launched. Produced and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science and Technology with assistance from the U.S. Air Force, the Corona satellites were used for photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and other areas.

"The Corona satellites used 31,500 feet (9,600 meters) of special 70 millimeter film with 24 inch (60 centimeter) focal length cameras. Initially orbiting at altitudes from 165 to 460 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, the cameras could resolve images on the ground down to 7.5 meters in diameter. The two KH-4 systems improved this resolution to 2.75 meters and 1.8 meters respectively, because they operated at lower orbital altitudes. . . .

"The first dozen or more Corona satellites and their launches were cloaked with disinformation as being part of a space technology development program called the Discoverer program. The first test launches for the Corona/Discoverer were carried out early in 1959. The first Corona launch containing a camera was carried out in June 1959 with the cover name Discoverer 4. This was a 750 kilogram satellite launched by a Thor-Agena rocket.

"The plan for the Corona program was for its satellites to return canisters of exposed film to the Earth in re-entry capsules, called by the slang term "film buckets", which were to be recovered in mid-air by a specially-equipped U.S. Air Force planes during their parachute descent. (The buckets were designed to float on the water for a short period of time for possible recovery by U.S. Navy ships, and then to sink if the recovery failed, via a water-dissolvable plug made of salt at the base of the capsule. This was for secrecy purposes.)" (Wikipedia article on Corona (satellite) accessed 11-29-2010).

"The return capsule of the Discoverer 13 mission, which launched August 10, 1960, was successfully recovered the next day. This was the first time that any object had been recovered successfully from orbit. After the mission of Discoverer 14, launch on August 18, 1960, its film bucket was successfully retrieved two days later by a C-119 Flying Boxcar transport plane. This was the first successful return of photographic film from orbit.

Arthur Lee Samuel published "Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers," IBM Journal of Research and Development 3 (1959) no. 3, 210-29. In this work Samuel demonstrated that machines can learn from past errors — one of the earliest examples of non-numerical computation.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 874.

Robert S. Ledley and Lee B. Lusted published "Reasoning Foundations of Medical Diagnosis," Science, 130, no. 3366, 9-21.

This was highly influential in the development of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) — interactive computer programs, or expert systems, designed to assist physicians and other health professionals with decision making tasks.

Haloid Xerox, Rochester, New York, introduced the Xerox 914, the first successful commercial plain paper xerographic copier, roughly the size of a desk.

". . .  commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with 'key operator' training, and its own 20-amp circuit. In an episode of Mad Men, set in 1962, the arrival of the hulking 914 helps get Peggy Olson her own office, after she tells her boss, 'It’s hard to do business and be credible when I’m sharing with a Xerox machine' " (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-mother-of-all-invention/8123/, accessed 06-11-2010).

At the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts, demonstrated the prototype of its first computer, the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1), designed by a team headed by Ben Gurley.

"The launch of the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) computer in 1959 marked a radical shift in the philosophy of computer design: it was the first commercial computer that focused on interaction with the user rather than the efficient use of computer cycles" (http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/decpdp-1/, accessed 06-25-2009).

Selling for $120,000, the PDP-1 was a commercialization of the TX-O and TX-2 computers designed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. On advice from the venture-capital firm that financed the company, DEC did not call it a “computer,” but instead called the machine a “programmed data processor.” The PDP-1 was credited as being the most important in the creation of hacker culture. Some references identified this machine as the first minicomputer; however DEC gave that designation to either the PDP-5 introduced in 1963 or the PDP-8 introduced in 1965.

Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/Digital/timeline/1959-2.htm, accessed 08-25-2009.