1960 to 1970 Timeline

Reflecting the obsolescence of mathematical tables as a result of the development of electronic computing, in 1960 Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation (MTAC), the first computing journal or periodical, published by the American Mathematical Society, changed its name to Mathematics of Computation.

In 1960 John Horty at the Health Law Center, University of Pittsburgh, pioneered computer-assisted legal research by having the texts of relevant statutes keyed into punched cards and then transferred to computer tapes where they could be searched and retrieved by “key words in combination” (KWIC).

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Defense Department increased funding for research on computing.

IBM introduced a transistorized version of its vacuum-tube-logic 709 computer, the 7090.

The 7090 was the first commercially available general purpose computer with transistor logic. It became the most popular large computer of the early 1960s.

In 1960 the Lanston Monotype Machine Company of Washington, D.C. introduced the Monomatic composing machine, a typesetting system perpetuating the concept of a separate keyboard and caster interfaced by a 31-channel punched paper tape.

“The keyboard consisted of a two-alphabet layout (instead of the customary five or seven) augmented by four shift keys. In the caster, the matrix-case contained 324 characters arranged in 18 ¥ 18 rows. There were no restrictions on unit values within the rows.”

This was, presumably, the final evolution of the Monotype hot metal typesetting system.

In 1960 about six thousand computers were operational in the United States, and perhaps ten thousand were operational worldwide.

Electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch and Drs. William Chardack and Andrew Gage of the University at Buffalo reported the success of the first successful long-term implant in a human patient of a self-contained, internally powered artificial pacemaker in their paper entitled A Transistorized, Self-contained, Implantable Pacemaker for the Long-term Correction of Complete Heart Block. (U. S. patent no. 3,057,356).

John McCarthy of Stanford University introduced LISP (LISt Processor), the language of choice for artificial intelligence (AI) programming.

PLATO I (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), the first electronic learning system, developed by Donald Bitzer, operated on the ILLIAC 1 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Plato I included a television for a display and a special system to navigate the system's menu. It serviced a single user. In 1961 PLATO II allowed two students to operate the system at one time.

Widely considered the first software patent, "Prater-Wei" was about calculating temperatures for petroleum fractionation.  This patent, originally filed by Mobil Oil Corporation in 1960, addressed computerized spectographic analysis. It had many method and apparatus claims that could be performed either on an analog or digital computer, or with pencil and paper. At the time, software was not patentable, so the authors described a non-computer method of choosing the temperatures, using matrix inversion.  However, the description in the patent application used linear algebra notation similar to that of textbooks published late in the 19^th century to disguise the more obvious matrix notation that was invented much later. (adapted from Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 4.2, and Digital Document Quarterly 7.3, accessed 01-01-2009).

"A Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) decision is famous because the question "whether computer programs could contain patentable subject matter" was also before the CCPA.  See Application of Charles D. Prater and James Wei, U.S. CCPA, 415 F.2d 1378, November 20, 1968." (Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 7,3, accessed 01-01-2009).

In 1960 American physicist Theodore Maiman, head of the Quantum Electronics Section at Hughes Aircraft Company in Malibu, California, created the first working laser.  

"Maiman initially sent a description of his device to Physical Review Letters. But it was rejected because so many manuscripts on masers had been submitted to the journal that its editors made the unusual decision to accept no more papers in the field. So Maiman sent it to Nature, where is now famous paper, "Stimulated optical radiation in ruby", appeared on 6 August 1960 (T. H. Maiman Nature 187, 493-94; 1960). It was very brief, and I have previously commented that this article was probably more important per word than any of the papers published by Nature over the past century" (Charles H. Townes, "Obituary Theodore H. Maiman [1927-2007]. Maker of the first laser," Nature Vol. 447, June 7, 2007, p. 654).

"When lasers were invented in 1960, they were called 'a solution looking for a problem'. Since then, they have become ubiquitous, finding utility in thousands of highly varied applications in every section of modern society, including consumer electronics, information technology, science, medicine, industry, law enforcement, entertainment, and the military.

"The first use of lasers in the daily lives of the general population was the supermarket barcode scanner, introduced in 1974. The laserdisc player, introduced in 1978, was the first successful consumer product to include a laser but the compact disc player was the first laser-equipped device to become common, beginning in 1982 followed shortly by laser printers. Some other uses are:

"Medicine: Bloodless surgery, laser healing, surgical treatment, kidney stone treatment, eye treatment, dentistry

"Industry: Cutting, welding, material heat treatment, marking parts, non-contact measurement of parts

"Military: Marking targets, guiding munitions, missile defence, electro-optical countermeasures (EOCM), alternative to radar, blinding troops.

"Law enforcement: used for latent fingerprint detection in the forensic identification field

"Research: Spectroscopy, laser ablation, laser annealing, laser scattering, laser interferometry, LIDAR, laser capture microdissection, fluorescence microscopy

"Product development/commercial: laser printers, optical discs (e.g. CDs and the like), barcode scanners, thermometers, laser pointers, holograms, bubblegrams. Laser lighting displays: Laser light shows

"Cosmetic skin treatments: acne treatment, cellulite and striae reduction, and hair removal" (Wikipedia article on laser, accessed 11-04-2012).

Maiman published a detailed account of his research as The Laser Odyssey (Blaine, WA: The Laser Press, 2000).

Computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider of Bolt, Baranek and Newman published "Man-Computer Symbiosis," IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1 (March 1960) 4-11, postulating that the computer should become an intimate symbiotic partner in human activity, including communication. (See Reading 10.5.)

Initial Specifications for a COmmon Business-Oriented Language  (COBOL) was published in Washington, D.C. in April 1960.  COBOL had its origin in a meeting held at the Pentagon in May 1959, attended by a group representing computer users, manufacturers, universities and the government. This meeting was convened to discuss the possibility of developing a common business-oriented computer language, using English words instead of mathematical codes, which could be used on all computers independent of make and model.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 543.

The first symposium on bionics (biological electronics) took place at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. (See Reading 11.7.)

In November 1960 C. Breen and D. A. Dahlbaum of Bell Labs in New York published "Signaling Systems for the Control of Telephone Switching," Bell System Technical Journal, 39 (1960) 1381-1444.

"Telephone signaling is basically a matter of transferring information between machines, and between humans and machines. The techniques developed to accomplish this have evolved over the years in step with advances in the total telephone art. The history of this evolution is traced, starting from the early simple manual switchboard days to the present Direct Distance Dialing era. The effect of the increasing sophistication in automatic switching and transmission systems and their influence on signaling principles are discussed. Emphasis is given to the signaling systems used between central offices of the nationwide telephone network and the influence on such systems of the characteristics of switching systems and their information requirements, the transmission media and the compatibility problem. A review is made of the forms and characteristics of some of the interoffice signaling systems presently in use. In addition, the problem of signaling between Bell System and overseas telephone systems is reviewed with reference to delivering information requirements, signaling techniques and new transmission media. Finally, some speculation is made on the future trends of telephone signaling systems" (abstract of the paper).

According to http://www.historyofphonephreaking.org/docs.php, the Breen and Dahlbaum paper is

"often cited as the article that gave away the keys to the kingdom," leading to the development of the underground "phreaker" culture.  Other papers that included the in-band trunk signaling tones which provided the technical information needed to build Blue Boxes are cited at http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/bstj.html, accessed 09-17-2009).

My thanks to Jeffrey Odel for this reference.

Colossal Typewriter, a program written by John McCarthy and Roland Silver running on the DEC PDP-1 at Bolt Beranek and Newman, was one of the earliest computer text editors. 

On December 6 and 7, 1960  essentially the same COBOL program was run on two different makes of computers— an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer— demonstrating for the first time that compatibility between computers produced by different manufacturers could be achieved.

In 1961 British science fiction writer, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke of Sri Lanka published a short story entitled "Dial F for Frankenstein."

". . . it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems" (John Markoff, "The Coming Superbrain," New York Times, May 24, 2009).

"The father of the internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credits Clarke's short story, Dial F for Frankenstein, as an inspiration" (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/arthur-c-clarke-science-fiction-turns-to-fact-799519.html, accessed 05-24-2009).

QUOTRON, a computerized stock-quotation system using a Control Data Corporation computer, was introduced.

Quotron became popular with stockbrokers, signaling the end of traditional ticker tape.

At Cambridge Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner and colleagues proposed that DNA code is written in “words” called codons formed of three DNA bases. DNA sequence is built from four different bases, so a total of 64 (4 x 4 x 4) possible codons can be produced.

They also proposed that a particular set of RNA molecules subsequently called transfer RNAs (tRNAs) act to “decode” the DNA.

Francis Crick, L. Barnett, Sydney. Brenner and R. J. Watts-Tobin, “General Nature of the Genetic code for Proteins,” Nature 192 (1961): 122732.

“There was an unfortunate thing at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium that year. I said, ‘We call this messenger RNA’ Because Mercury was the messenger of the gods, you know. And Erwin Chargaff very quickly stood up in the audience and said he wished to point out that Mercury may have been the messenger of the gods, but he was also the god of thieves. Which said a lot for Chargaff at the time! But I don’t think that we stole anything from anybody--except from nature. I think it’s right to steal from nature, however” (Brenner, My Life, 85).

In 1961 Edward E. Zajac at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey, produced the first computer-animated film, entitled Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient Attitude Control System. This simulated the motion and autorotation of a communication satellite as a succession of single phases.

In 1966 Zajac published, "Film Animation by Computer," New Scientist XXIX (1966) 346-49, which described the making of Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient Attitude Control System. This article also incorporated illustrations from Kenneth C. Knowlton's "A Computer technique for Producing Animated Movies," AFIPS '64 (Spring) Proceedings of the April 21-23, 1964 Spring Joint Computer Conference, 67-87.  My copy of Zajac's article was reprinted as Bell Telephone System Techical Publications Monograph 5150 (April, 1966).

Franke, Computer Graphics, Computer Art (1971) 93.

in 1961 over seven thousand people belonged to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

Engineers at Compugraphic in Brookline, Massachusetts recognized that a computer could be programmed to handle repetitious typesetter coding automatically. The firm developed a prototype model of the Directory Tape Processor (DTP) which eliminated all operator decisions, and produced a fully coded tape used for typesetting.

Fernando J. Corbató and team at MIT developed one of the first time-sharing operating systems, CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System.)

CTSS had one of the first computerized text formatting utilities, called RUNOFF, the precursor of word processing, and one of the first inter-user messaging implementations, presaging instant messaging and electronic mail.

In 1961 mathematician and founder of Stanford University's Computer Science department George E. Forsythe coined the term "computer science" in his paper "Engineering Students Must Learn both Computing and Mathematics", J. Eng. Educ. 52 (1961) 177-188, quotation from p. 177.

Of this Donald Knuth wrote, "In 1961 we find him using the term 'computer science' for the first time in his writing:

[Computers] are developing so rapidly that even computer scientists cannot keep up with them. It must be bewildering to most mathematicians and engineers...In spite of the diversity of the applications, the methods of attacking the difficult problems with computers show a great unity, and the name of Computer Sciences is being attached to the discipline as it emerges. It must be understood, however, that this is still a young field whose structure is still nebulous. The student will find a great many more problems than answers. 

"He [Forsythe] identified the "computer sciences" as the theory of programming, numerical analysis, data processing, and the design of computer systems, and observed that the latter three were better understood than the theory of programming, and more available in courses" (Knuth, "George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science," Communications of the ACM, 15 (1972) 722).

Expensive Typewriter, a text editing program written for the DEC PDP-1 at MIT by Stephen D. Piner, that could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter, has been called the first word processing program.  It was called "expensive" because the DEC PDP-1, the first minicomputer, then cost $100,000.  The name was also taken in the spirit of a 1960 computer text editor called Colossal Typewriter.

♦ You can download a PDF of a report on the program written by Stephen Piner and dated August 1, 1972 at the Computer History Museum at this link: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/pdp-1/DEC.pdp_1.1972.102650079.pdf (accessed 06-22-2011).

Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, aboard the Vostok 3KA-3 (Vostok 1) spacecraft, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome Site  No. 1 became both the first human to travel into space, and the first to orbit the earth. Gagarin's spaceflight about the Vostok 1 consisted of a single orbit of the earth lasting 108 minutes.  Gagarin ejected from the spacecraft at 7 km, 23,000 feet, and parachuted to earth separately from the spacecraft.

In his secret postflight report, Gagarin described the first human experience of spaceflight, and prolonged microgravity: 

"I ate and rank normally, I could eat and drink. I noticed no physiological difficulties. The feeling of weightlessness was somewhat unfamilar compared with Earth conditions. Here, you feel as if you were hanging in a horzontal position in straps. You feel as if you are suspended. Obviously, the tightly fitted suspension system presses upon the thorax. . . . Later I got used to it and had no unpleasant sensations. I made entries into the logbook, reported, worked with the telegraph key. When I had meals, I also had water. I let the writing pad out of my hands and it floated together with the pencil in front of me. Then, when I had to write the next report, I took the pad, but the pencil wasn't where it had been. It had flown off somewhere. The eye was secured to the pencil with a screw, but obviously they should have used glue or secured the pencil more tightly. The screw got loose and flew away. I closed up the journal and put it in my pocket. It wouldn't be any good anyway, because I had nothing to write with" (quoted by Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race: 1945-1974 (2000) 278).

A minor detail mentioned in this quote is that Gagarin communicated with earth by radio, using a telegraph key, rather than by voice. His call sign was Kedr (Siberian Pine, Russian: Кедр).

Wesley A. Clark, a computer scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, started building the LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer).  This machine, which some later called both the first mini-computer and a forerunner of  the personal computer, was first used in 1962. It had small table-top size, “low cost” ($43,000), keyboard and display, file system and an interactive operating system. It's design was placed in the public domain. Eventually fifty of the machines were sold by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Leonard Kleinrock submitted his MIT thesis proposal, Information Flow in Large Communication Nets.

Kleinrock's thesis proposal was the first paper on what later came to be known as data communications, or data networking theory. (See Reading 13.2.)

Texas Instruments delivered the first integrated circuit computer to the U.S. Air Force.

“The advanced experimental equipment has a total volume of only 6.3 cubic inches and weighs only 10 ounces. It provides the identical electrical functions of a computer using conventional components which is 150 times its size and 48 times its weight and which also was demonstrated for purposes of comparison. It uses 587 digital circuits (Solid Circuit™ semiconductor net works) each formed within a minute bar of silicon material. The larger computer uses 8500 conventional components and has a volume of 1000 cubic inches and weight of 480 ounces.”

John W. Haanstra, Chairman, Bob O. Evans, Vice Chairman, and others at IBM issued as a confidential internal document Processor Products—Final Report of SPREAD Task Group.

In the period from 1952 through 1962, IBM produced seven families of systems—the 140, 1620, 7030 (Stretch), 7040, 7070, 7080, and 7090 groups. They were incompatible with one another, and both users and IBM staff recognized problems caused by this incompatibility. The SPREAD report, as adopted by IBM, led to the development of the IBM System/360 family of compatible computers and peripherals, and essentially reformed the company.

"IBM's public commitment to the SPREAD plan was embodied in the System/360, announced in Poughkeepsie on April 7, 1964. Six machines were announced: the 360 Model 30, 40, 50, 60, 62 and 70. Over the next few years, a number of additional systems were added to the 360 family.

"The SPREAD plan eventually allowed IBM to direct substantial resources toward the development of the full system—peripherals, programming, communications, and new applications. The success of System/360 is perhaps best measured by IBM's financial performance. In the six years from January 1, 1966 to December 31, 1971, IBM's gross income increased 2.3 times, from $3.6 billion to $8.3 billion, and net earnings after taxes increrased 2.3 times, from $477 million to $1.1 billion. In 1982 direct descendants of System/360 accounted for more than half of IBM's gross income and earnings.

"Perhaps most important, the SPREAD Report permitted IBM to focus on an excellence not possible with multiple architectures. It resulted in powerful new peripherals, programming, terminals, high-volume applications, and complementary diversifications whose future can only be imagined" (Bob O. Evans, "Introduction to SPREAD Report," Annals of the History of Computing 5 [1983] 5).  The text of the report was reprinted in the same journal issue on pp. 6-26.

Nearly all copies of this confidential report were destroyed. An original copy, donated by one of the authors, Jerome Svigals, is preserved in the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

Programmer and computer scientist Steve Russell, aka Steve "Slug" Russell, and his team at MIT, including members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, took about 200 hours to program the first computer game for a commercially available computer on a DEC PDP-1.

Inspired by the space battles in the Lensman serial of science fiction space opera by E. E. "Doc" Smith, the computer game, or videogame, was called Spacewar .

American biologist, writer, and ecologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in Boston through Houghton, Mifflin. This very carefully documented book convincingly proved the disastrous effects of DDT in the environment, and generated a storm of controversy. It was later credited with founding the "environmental movement" in the United States.

Canadian professor of English literature, literary critic, rhetorician, and communication theorist at the University of Toronto Marshall McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in which he divided history in four epochs: oral tribe culture, manuscript culture, the Gutenberg galaxy and the electronic age.

McLuhan argued that a new communications medium was responsble for the break between each of the four time periods. Writing before computing was pervasive in society, he was concerned with the influence of radio, television and film on print culture, and on the impact of media, independent of content, upon thinking, and social organization:

"The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ('visual homogenizing of experience'), which in turn impacts social interactions ('fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a. . . specialist outlook'). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of 'segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."

The Los Angeles Times newspaper drove Linotype hot metal typesetters with perforated tape created from RCA computers, greatly speeding up typesetting.

The key to this advance was development of a dictionary and a method to automate hyphenation and justification of text in columns. These tasks had taken 40 percent of a manual Linotype operator's time.

Inforonics, founded in 1962 by MIT graduate Larry Buckland in Littleton, Massachusetts, developed and maintained "one of the first data publishing and retrieval systems used by organizations such as the U.S. Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library."

While working as a consulting scientist at General Electric Company in Syracuse, New York, Nick Holonyak Jr. invented the first visible light-emitting-diode (LED). 

ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, was founded at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

ICPSR became the world's largest archive of digital social science data,  acquiring, preserving, and distributing original research data, and providing training in its analysis.

Austrian-American economist Fritz Machlup of Princeton published The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States.

In this book Machlup introduced the concept of the knowledge industry. "He distinguished five sectors of the knowledge sector: education, research and development, mass media, information technologies, information services. Based on this categorization he calculated that in 1959 29% per cent of the GNP in the USA had been produced in knowledge industries" (Wikipedia article on Information Society, accessed 04-25-2011).

"In 1962, Bell Labs developed the first digitally multiplexed transmission of voice signals. This innovation not only created a more economical, robust and flexible network design for voice traffic, but also laid the groundwork for today's advanced network services such as 911, 800-numbers, call-waiting and caller-ID. In addition, digital networking was the foundation for the convergence of computing and communications."

Leonard Kleinrock published "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" in RLE Quarterly Progress Reports. This was the first publication to describe and analyze an algorithm for chopping messages into smaller pieces, later to be known as packets. Kleinrock's MIT doctoral thesis, Message Delay in Communication Nets with Storage, filed in December 1962, elaborated on the impact of this algorithm on data networks. (See Reading 13.3.)

J.C.R. Licklider of Bolt, Baranek, and Newman and Welden E. Clark published “Online Man-Computer Communication,” calling for time-sharing of computers, for graphic displays of information, and the need for an improved graphical interface. (See Reading 10.6.)

On June 10, 1962 a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral launched the AT&T TELSTAR 1 satellite, designed and built at Bell Labs. It was the first privately owned active communications satellite, transmitting the first direct television pictures from the United States to Europe. It became the first satellite to relay signals from the earth to a satellite and back.

"Telstar was unique in that it had the ability to receive a signal, amplify it, and then transmitted it back to elsewhere on earth . . . which is, after all, the core of what a communications satellite does. This technology allowed telephones calls to be bounced from coast to coast and around the world. The satellite was powered by Bell Labs solar cells and transistors – two other Bell Labs pioneering inventions."

A bug in the flight software for the Mariner I space probe caused the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch. Mission control destroyed the rocket over the Atlantic Ocean.

"The investigation into the accident discovered that a formula written on paper in pencil was improperly transcribed into computer code, causing the computer to miscalculate the rocket's trajectory."

In 2005 Wired Magazine characterized this bug as the first of the "ten greatest software bugs of all time."

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, completed his report, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, for the Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research. This report led J. C. R. Licklider of DARPA to fund SRI's Augmentation Research Center.

On October 1, 1962 J.C. R. Licklider was appointed Director of The Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), a division of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Licklider's  initial budget was $10,000,000 per year. Licklider eventually initiated the sequence of events leading to ARPANET.

Demonstration of DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computers), a joint development effort between General Motors in Detroit, and IBM, which began development in 1959. This was the first computer-assisted design (CAD) program.

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard was promulgated, specifying the pattern of seven bits to represent letters, numbers, punctuation, and control signals in computers.

"Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published during 1963, a major revision during 1967, and the most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (now mostly obsolete) that affect how text and space is processed; 94 are printable characters, and the space is considered an invisible graphic. The most commonly used character encoding on the World Wide Web was US-ASCII until 2008, when it was surpassed by UTF-8" (Wikipedia article on ASCII, accessed 01-29-2010).

Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts introduced the PDP-5, DEC’s first 12 bit computer.

This was later called “the world’s first commercially produced mini computer.” The PDP-8 introduced in 1965 was also given this designation.

In work initiated at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital in early 1956, and continued briefly in mid-1957, South African-born American physicist Allen M. Cormack showed that changes in tissue density could be computed from x-ray data. His results were subsequently published in two papers:

"Representation of a Function by its Line Integrals, with Some Radiological Applications," Journal of Applied Physics 34 (1963) 2722-27; "Representation of a Function by its Line Integrals, with Some Radiological Applications. II,"  Journal of Applied Physics 35 (1964) 2908-13.  

No machine was constructed at this time because of limitations in computing power, and these papers generated little interest until Godfrey Hounsfield and colleagues invented computed tomography, and built the first CT scanner in 1971, taking Cormack's theoretical calculations into a real application.

In 1963 Ivan Sutherland, a student at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, working on the experimental TX- 2 computer, created the first graphical user interface, or first interactive graphics program, in his Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. 

Sketchpad was an early application of vector graphics.

In 1963 Compugraphic of Brookline, Massachusetts introduced the Linasec I and II, the first general typesetting computers. These automated tape processors produced justified tapes to drive the Linotype machines used in the newspaper industry.

Net production of the Linasec— in excess of 3,600 lines per hour compared to the manually-set 600 lines per hour— enabled newspapers to carry more detailed, late breaking news stories.

On December 10, 2010 Sotheby's in New York sold a single rather worn sheet of binder paper on which Bob Dylan wrote the original lyrics of his most famous song, The Times They Are A-Changin, probably in October 1963. This battered piece of paper with messy writing sold for $422,500.

"Dylan's friend, Tony Glover, recalls visiting Dylan's apartment in September 1963, where he saw a number of song manuscripts and poems lying on a table. 'The Times They Are a-Changin'  had yet to be recorded, but Glover saw its early manuscript. After reading the words 'come senators, congressmen, please heed the call', Glover reportedly asked Dylan: 'What is this shit, man?', to which Dylan responded, 'Well, you know, it seems to be what the people like to hear'.

"Dylan recalled writing the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the moment. In 1985, he told Cameron Crowe: 'This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced of course by the Irish and Scottish ballads . . .'Come All Ye Bold Highway Men', 'Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens'. I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.'

"The climactic lines of the final verse: 'The order is rapidly fadin'/ And the first one now/ Will later be last/ For the times they are a-changin' have a Biblical ring, and several critics have connected them with lines in the Gospel of Mark, 10:31, 'But many that are first shall be last, and the last first.'

"A self-conscious protest song, it is often viewed as a reflection of the generation gap and of the political divide marking American culture in the 1960s. Dylan, however, disputed this interpretation in 1964, saying 'Those were the only words I could find to separate aliveness from deadness. It had nothing to do with age.' A year later, Dylan would say: 'I can't really say that adults don't understand young people any more than you can say big fishes don't understand little fishes. I didn't mean 'The Times They Are a-Changin' ' as a statement. . . It's a feeling" (Wikipedia article on The Times They Are a-Changin', accessed 12-11-2010).

As a result of Engelbart's 1962 report, J. C. R. Licklider, the first director of the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), funded Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in early 1963. The first experiments done there included trying to connect a display at SRI to the massive and unique AN/FSQ-32 computer at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

In 1963, Kenneth C. Knowlton, working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, developed the BEFLIX (Bell Flicks) programming language for bitmap computer-produced movies, using an IBM 7094 computer and a Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. Each frame contained eight shades of grey and a resolution of 252 x 184.  Using this technique, Knowlton in 1963 created a 10 minute 16mm silent film entitled A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies.   At the Spring Joint Computer Conference of AFIPS, on April 21-23, 1964 Knowlton delivered a paper entitled, appropriately enough, "A computer technique for producing animated movies." This was published in the Proceedings on pp. 67-87. The paper reproduced some images from Knowlton's film and indicated that the film could be borrowed from Bell Labs. Most of the paper reproduced programming code in Beflix.

In January 2013 Knowlton's 1963 silent film could be viewed on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lmi6cmrq0w

From his office at The Pentagon J.C.R. Licklider, Director of Behavioral Sciences Command & Control Research at ARPA,  the U. S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sent a memo to members and affiliates of what he jokingly called the "Intergalactic Computer Network, "outlining a key part of his strategy to connect all their individual computers and time-sharing systems into a single computer network spanning the continent” (Waldrop).

Computer scientist Lawrence G. Roberts published Machine Perception of Three Dimensional Solids, MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report, TR 315, May 1963. This contained "the first algorithm to eliminate hidden or obscured surfaces from a perspective picture" (Carlson, A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, accessed 05-30-2009).

In 1965, Roberts implemented a homogeneous coordinate scheme for transformations and perspective,  publishing Homogenous Matrix Representation and Manipulation of N-Dimensional Constructs, MIT MS-1505. Roberts's "solutions to these problems prompted attempts over the next decade to find faster algorithms for generating hidden surfaces" (Carlson, op. cit.).

The Printing and the Mind of Man exhibition took place in London at the British Museum and at Earls Court Exhibition Centre during a period of only two weeks, from July 16 to July 27, 1963.

The lengthy and complex title of its catalogue, with an emblem and tailpiece designed and engraved by Reynolds Stone, read: Catalogue of a display of printing mechanisms and printed materials arranged to illustrate the history of Western civilization and the means of the multiplication of literary texts since the XV century, organised in connection with the eleventh International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition, under the title Printing and the Mind of Man, assembled at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London, 16-27 July 1963. The catalogue described and illustrated with 32 black & white plates, and a color plate reproducing a page from the Mainz Psalter, more than 656 examples of printing and printing technology documenting the influence of print on the development of Western civilization. This exhibition occurred at Earls Court.  The catalogue also described, and illustrated with 16 black & white plates, an exhibition of 163 examples of Fine Printing mounted at the British Museum from July to September 1963.  At the end of their Acknowledgements on p. 9 of the catalogue the Supervisory Committee for the exhibition– librarian Frank Francis, typographer and historian of typography Stanley Morison and writer and antiquarian bookseller John Carter– stated:

"We pay tribute to the organizers of the Gutenberg Quincentenary Exhibition of Printing, assembled at Cambridge in 1940 (and prematurely disassembled because of the risks from enemy bombing). It was our original inspiration for several sections of our display, and its invigorating catalogue has been our constant friend."

Comparison of the 641 items described in the catalogue of 1940 with those described in the catalogue of 1963 show a great deal of overlap, especially as Percy Muir and John Carter, who had been prime movers in the exhibition in 1940, were extensively involved with the exhibition of 1963. The 1963 exhibition and its catalogue were, of course, significant expansions and improvements over the early wartime effort.

The 1963 catalogue was  followed in 1967 by a further-expanded larger format cloth-bound edition edition with a dramatic double-page engraved title by Reynolds Stone, significantly more detailed annotations, and without discussion of "printing mechanisms," entitled Printing and the Mind of Man. A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization, compiled and edited by antiquarian booksellers and bibliographers John Carter and Percy H. Muir, assisted by book historian and writer Nicolas Barker, antiquarian bookseller H.A. Feisenberger, bibliographer Howard Nixon and historian of printing S.H. Steinberg.

This exhibition, and especially the 1967 book based on it, was, and remains, immensely influential on both institutional and private collectors of landmark books that influenced the development of Western Civilization.   

Taking place at the dawn of online searching and the ARPANET, and roughly twenty years before the development of the personal computer, this exhibition and its catalogues may also record the peak of the print-centric view of information before the development of electronic information technology leading to the Internet. The only references to computing in the exhibition and its catalogues were to Napier on logarithms, and to Leibniz's stepped-drum calculator. The exhibition and catalogues included references to the invention of radio, telephone and films, but not to television. 

Sebastian Carter, "Printing & the Mind of Man," Matrix 20 (2000) 172-180.

On July 26, 1963 the first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom 2, was launched by NASA on a Delta rocket B booster from Cape Canaveral. "Its orbit was inclined rather than geostationary. . . The satellite successfully kept stationary at the altitude calculated by Herman Potočnik Noordung in the 1920s.

"During Syncom 2's first year, NASA conducted voice, teletype, and facsimile tests, as well as 110 public demonstrations to acquaint people with Syncom's capabilities and invite their feedback. In August 1963, President John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C., telephoned Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Balewa aboard USNS Kingsport docked in Lagos Harbor; the first live two-way call between heads of state by satellite. The Kingsport acted as a control station and uplink stationa' (Wikipedia article on Syncom, accessed 05-24-2009).

For the 26th Annual meeting of the American Documentation Institute, held in Chicago from October 6-11, 1963, Hans Peter Luhn of IBM, then president of the American Documentation Institute, issued Automation and Scientific Communication. Short Papers Contributed to the Theme Sessions. . . . On the verso of the title page of this quarto volume a statement reads:

"This 128 page book has been printed from type set automatically with the aid of electronic information processing equipment. It is believed that this is the first volume of technical articles ever produced in this manner."  

Further down the page it states,

"Oklahoma Publishing Co. performed keypunching from manuscripts, processing on an IBM 1620, automatic type-setting on Linotype and printing of reproduction proofs (Bill Wlliams, Chairman, Research Committee)."

A special printed slip pasted onto the front pastedown endpaper of a cloth-bound copy in my collection reads:

"FIRST BOOK OF TECHNICAL ARTICLES TYPE-SET BY COMPUTER:

"This is No. 75 of 100 copies of a special edition of this book, prepared as a memento as a token of recognition to those who were involved in its creation and who are here identified by their signatures:

[manually signed by] "H. P. Luhn, S.E. Furth, B Williams, Doris Craig, S. L. Reed Jr. J P Blandean, R M Maxwell, Haribert H Luhn, John Bustin (?). 

[manually] "Countersigned Chicago, Ill, October 6, 1963, R M Hayes, President, American Documentation Institute."

The work was issued in two parts. Part one, described above, was mailed to participants before the meeting. Ordinary copies were in printed wrappers. Part two was available at the meeting which took place from October 6 to 11.  After its title page and table of contents part two was paginated continuously with part one (pp. 129-382). The verso of the title page of part two stated, "International Business Machines Corp., Data Processing Division performed keypunching of bibliographic informatiion, processing on an IBM 1401 for creating table of contents and KWIC and author index to titles of the papers published; a bibliography and citation index to the titles of all referenced papers, a KWIC and author index thereto; and furnished reproduction proofs of this material (R. M. Maxwell, Manager)."

Luhn "planned and directed the efforts that led to the first volume of technical papers produced by fully automatic typesetting techniques. These efforts, moreover, were successfuly carried out within the remarkable dealine requirements of often not more than three weeks from receipt of author manuscript to inclusion in a printed and bound volume, typeset by computer.

"In addition, within the same brief time period, the bibliographic information for the approximately 600 'short papers' accepted was keypunched and processed on a computer to produce the table of contents, a KWIC index, an author index, a citation index to the bibliographical references in the papers, a KWIC index to the titles of these cited references, a bibliography of the cited papers, and an author index to the citations" (Schultz [ed] H. P. Luhn: Pioneer of Information Science. Selected Works [1968] 29).

When I wrote this entry on June 23, 2012 I did not know of any earlier printed book on any subject typeset by computer.

In November 1963 touch-tone telephone dialing, developed at Bell Labs, was introduced, enabling calls to be switched digitally. The research leading to the design of the touch-tone keyboard was conducted by industrial psychologist John E. Karlin, head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department, the first department of its kind at any American company.

"The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with 1-2-3' on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.  

"The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/john-e-karlin-who-led-the-way-to-all-digit-dialing-dies-at-94.html, accessed 02-10-2013).

The first use of the term "hacker" in the context of computing appeared in the MIT student newspaper, The Tech:

"Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system. . . .The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found. . . . Because of the 'hacking,' the majority of the MIT phones are 'trapped.' "

Leonard Kleinrock published his 1962 PhD thesis in book form as Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay, providing a technology and mathematical theory of data communications. (See Reading 13.4.)

Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, wrote On Distributed Communications, describing the use of redundant routing and message blocks to send information across a decentralized network topology.

RCA announced the Spectra series of computers, which could run the same software as IBM’s 360 machines. The Spectra computers were also the first commercial computers to use integrated circuits.

SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business-Related Environment), an online airline reservation system developed by American Airlines and IBM, and based on two IBM mainframes in Briarcliff Manor, New York, became operational.

SABRE worked over telephone lines in “real time” to handle seat inventory and passenger records from terminals in more than 50 cities.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began using social security numbers as tax ID numbers.

At Dartmouth Thomas E. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny invented BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).

Systems Development Corporation, Santa Monica, California, developed the first computerized encyclopedia.

Eugene Garfield and the Institute for Scientific Information published the first Science Citation Index in five printed volumes, indexing 613 journals and 1.4 million citations, using the method of citation analysis.

Two years later Science Citation Index became available on magnetic tape.

IBM introduced the Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST).

"With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects.

"This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today. It also introduced word processing as a definite idea and concept. The term was first used in IBM's marketing of the MT/ST as a 'word processing' machine. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer. He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing. IBM redefined it 'to describe electronic ways of handling a standard set of office activities -- composing, revising, printing, and filing written documents.' "

Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invented the first plasma video display for the PLATO Computer System.

The display was monochrome neon orange and incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics. Built by Owens-Illinois glass, the flat panels were marketed under the name "Digivue."

Woodbrow W. "Bledsoe, along with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson of Panoramic Research, Palo Alto, California, researched programming computers to recognize human faces (Bledsoe 1966a, 1966b; Bledsoe and Chan 1965). Because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency, little of the work was published. Given a large database of images—in effect, a book of mug shots—and a photograph, the problem was to select from the database a small set of records such that one of the image records matched the photograph. The success of the program could be measured in terms of the ratio of the answer list to the number of records in the database. Bledsoe (1966a) described the following difficulties:

" 'This recognition problem is made difficult by the great variability in head rotation and tilt, lighting intensity and angle, facial expression, aging, etc. Some other attempts at facial recognition by machine have allowed for little or no variability in these quantities. Yet the method of correlation (or pattern matching) of unprocessed optical data, which is often used by some researchers, is certain to fail in cases where the variability is great. In particular, the correlation is very low between two pictures of the same person with two different head rotations.'

"This project was labeled man-machine because the human extracted the coordinates of a set of features from the photographs, which were then used by the computer for recognition. Using a GRAFACON, or RAND TABLET, the operator would extract the coordinates of features such as the center of pupils, the inside corner of eyes, the outside corner of eyes, point of widows peak, and so on. From these coordinates, a list of 20 distances, such as width of mouth and width of eyes, pupil to pupil, were computed. These operators could process about 40 pictures an hour. When building the database, the name of the person in the photograph was associated with the list of computed distances and stored in the computer. In the recognition phase, the set of distances was compared with the corresponding distance for each photograph, yielding a distance between the photograph and the database record. The closest records are returned.

"This brief description is an oversimplification that fails in general because it is unlikely that any two pictures would match in head rotation, lean, tilt, and scale (distance from the camera). Thus, each set of distances is normalized to represent the face in a frontal orientation. To accomplish this normalization, the program first tries to determine the tilt, the lean, and the rotation. Then, using these angles, the computer undoes the effect of these transformations on the computed distances. To compute these angles, the computer must know the three-dimensional geometry of the head. Because the actual heads were unavailable, Bledsoe (1964) used a standard head derived from measurements on seven heads.

"After Bledsoe left PRI [Panoramic Research, Inc.] in 1966, this work was continued at the Stanford Research Institute, primarily by Peter Hart. In experiments performed on a database of over 2000 photographs, the computer consistently outperformed humans when presented with the same recognition tasks (Bledsoe 1968). Peter Hart (1996) enthusiastically recalled the project with the exclamation, 'It really worked!' " (Faculty Council, University of Texas at Austin, In Memoriam Woodrow W. Bledsoe, accessed 05-15-2009).

Bledsoe, W. W. 1964. The Model Method in Facial Recognition, Technical Report PRI 15, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W., and Chan, H. 1965. A Man-Machine Facial Recognition System-Some Preliminary Results, Technical Report PRI 19A, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966a. Man-Machine Facial Recognition: Report on a Large-Scale Experiment, Technical Report PRI 22, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966b. Some Results on Multicategory Patten Recognition. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 13(2):304-316.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1968. Semiautomatic Facial Recognition, Technical Report SRI Project 6693, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California.

Canadian educator, philosopher, and media theorist of the University of Toronto Marshall McLuhan published Undertstanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

"In it McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study — popularly quoted as the medium is the message'. McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that 'a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.' More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

"The book is the source of the well-known phrase 'The medium is the message'. It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists" (Wikipedia article on Understanding Media, accessed 11-14-2009)

American social scientist Bertram Myron Gross coined the expression "information overload" in his book, The Managing of Organizations: the Administrative Struggle.

Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) was operational at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.

MEDLARS was the first large scale, computer-based, retrospective search service available to the general public.

On January 11, 1964 Surgeon General of the United States Luther L. Terry issued Smoking and Health. Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. This 387 page report was published on a Saturday to minimize the negative effect on the American stock markets, while maximizing the coverage in Sunday newspapers. It was issued by the U.S. Government Printing Office for $1.25.

"The report concluded that lung cancer and chronic bronchitis are causally related to cigarette smoking. The report also noted out that there was suggestive evidence, if not definite proof, for a causative role of smoking in other illnesses such as emphysema, cardiovascular disease, and various types of cancer. The committee concluded that cigarette smoking was a health hazard of sufficient importance to warrant appropriate remedial action.

"In June 1964, the Federal Trade Commission voted by a margin of 3-1 to require that cigarette manufacturers "clearly and prominently" place a warning on packages of cigarettes effective January 1, 1965, stating that smoking was dangerous to health, in line with the warning issued by the Surgeon General's special committee. The same warning would be required in all cigarette advertising effective July 1, 1965.

"The landmark Surgeon General's report on smoking and health stimulated a greatly increased concern about tobacco on the part of the American public and government policymakers and led to a broad-based anti-smoking campaign. It also motivated the tobacco industry to intensify its efforts to question the scientific evidence linking smoking and disease. The report was also responsible for the passage of the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965, which, among other things, mandated Surgeon General's health warnings on cigarette packages" (Wikipedia article on Luther Terry, accessed 11-11-2012).

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly received U.S. patent no. 3,120,606 for the ENIAC— a general patent on the stored-program electronic computer, roughly 18 years after their application. Sperry Rand Univac, owner of the patent, charged a 1.5 percent royalty for all electronic computers sold by all companies except IBM, with which it had previously cross-licensed patents.  Since IBM manufactured the majority of computers produced at this time, the royalties on the patent were not as large as they could have been.

Texas Instruments in partnership with Zenith Radio introduced the first consumer product containing an integrated circuit— a hearing aid.

American mathematician and researcher in artificial intelligence Ray Solomonoff published "A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference, Part I" Information and Control, 7, No. 1, 1-22,  and  "A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference, Part II," Information and Control, 7, No. 2,  224-254.

This two-art paper is considered the beginning of algorithmic information theory.

Solomonoff first described his results at a Conference at Caltech, 1960, and in a report of February, 1960: "A Preliminary Report on a General Theory of Inductive Inference."

IBM announced the System/360 family of compatible machines.  All IBM System/360 products ran the same operating system—OS/360. Previously products developed by different divisions of IBM were incompatible.

IBM System/360 products were the first IBM computers capable of both commercial and scientific applications that were offered at what was considered a “reasonable price.” Their architecture incorporated Microprogramming.

In May 1964 the Central Intelligence Bureau of the Chinese People's Liberation Army issued in Beijing or Tianjin Mao Zedong, Mao Zhu XI Yu Lu (Quotations of Chairman Mao.) This "probably still holds the world record for most copies printed of a single work in under four years (720 million books by the end of 1967)."

See Oliver Lei Han,"Sources and Early Printing History of Chairman Mao’s 'QUOTATIONS',", @The Bibliographical Society of America Bibsite, accessed 11-30-2010).

Here is a description of the first edition adapted from Michael R. Thompson Autumn Miscellany, List 96, accessed 11-30-2010:

"MAO TSE TUNG [MAO ZEDONG]. Mao zhuxi yulu [Chinese, i.e., Quotations of Chairman Mao]. [n.p., probably Beijing: Central Intelligence Bureau of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, May, 1964]. Sixteenmo, with the page size measuring 5 3/8: x 4.” 2, half-title printed in red with blank verso], [2, title printed in green and red with blank verso], [2, portrait of Mao in brown tones, with blank verso], [2, endorsement leaf by Lin Biao with blank verso], 2 (letterpress introduction), 2 (table of contents, listing 30 chapters), 250 pp. The endorsement leaf is in the earliest state, with the misprint in the second character down of the second vertical row from the right. (See Oliver Han Lei, “How Read is the Little Red Book, in the Antiquarian Book Review, November 2003). In the earliest binding of off-white paper wrappers with front cover printed in black and red, and spine printed in red.

"First edition, distinguishable from other editions by its slightly larger paper size, by containing thirty chapters and ending at page 250. Contains the Lin Biao’s endorsement leaf, with three sentences for the diary of Lei Feng, printed letterpress in calligraphic script. The endorsement leaf is lacking in most copies because of political circumstances. Lin Biao, head of National Defense, had risen in power within the Mao hierarchy and was designated to become Mao’s successor. However, rumors surfaced that Lin was planning to assassinate Mao. While never completely proven, they caused Lin to leave suddenly on a military transport for an undisclosed location when their plane was shot down in Mongolia on the evening of September 12, 1971. Subsequently, Mao attempted to eradicate his name from modern history, and the endorsement leaf was ordered to be torn out or defaced in all copies as a sign of loyalty to Mao. Therefore, copies with the endorsement leaf are uncommon.

"The first state was printed in an edition of 50,000-60,000 copies. It was never intended for sale, but was issued to members of the military as inspirational reading. It was only in the second state that the well-known vinyl cover first appeared. By 1967, the book had been translated into more than thirty-six languages and an estimated 720 million copies had been printed. . . ."

M. R. Davis and T. O. Ellis of The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, published The RAND Tablet: A Machine Graphical Communication Device. They indicated that the device had been in use since 1963.

"The RAND table is believed to be the first such graphic device that is digital, is relatively low-cost, possesses excellent linearity, and is able to uniquely describe 10 [to the 6th power] locations in the 10" x 10" active table area. . . . the tablet has great potential no only in such applications as digitizing map information, but also as a working tool in the study of more esoteric applications of graphical languages for man-machine interaction. . . . " (p.iv)

"The RAND tablet device generates 10-bit x and 10-bit y stylus position information. It is connected to an input channel of a general-purpose computer and also to an oscilloscope display. The display control multiplexes the stylus position information with computer-generated information in such a way that the oscilloscope display contains a composite of the current pen position (represented as a dot) and the computer output. In addition, the computer may regenerate meaningful track history on the CRT, so that while the user is writing, it appears that the pen has "ink." This displayed "ink" is visualized from the oscilloscope display while hand-directing the stylus position on the tablet. users normally adjust within a few minutes to the conceptual superposition of the displayed ink and the actual off-screen pen movement. There is no apparent loss of ease or speed in writing, printing, constructing arbitrary figures, or even in penning one's signature" (pp. 2-3).

J. W. Ward, History of Pen Computing: Annotated Bibliography in On-line Character Recognition and Pen Computing: http://rwservices.no-ip.info:81/pens/biblio70.html#DavisMR64 , accessed 12-30-2009).

The first geostationary communication satellite, Syncom 3, was launched by NASA with a Delta D #25 launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral.

"The satellite, in orbit near the International Date Line, was used to telecast the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo to the United States. It was the first television program to cross the Pacific ocean" (Wikipedia article on Syncom, accessed 05-24-2009).

Robert Moog created the first substractive synthesizer to utilize a keyboard as a controller, and demonstrated it at the Audio Engineering Society convention in October 1964. 

"The Moog synthesizer gained wider attention in the music industry after it was demonstrated at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967. The commercial breakthrough of a Moog recording was made by Wendy Carlos in the 1968 record Switched-On Bach, which became one of the highest-selling classical music recordings of its era.

The Moog synthesizer became one of the first widely used electronic musical instruments. It is a member of the quintephone family of musical instruments, which generate sounds "informatically."

The Homestead Meeting between J.C.R. Licklider and Lawrence G. Roberts of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory inspired Roberts to develop the concept of a computer-to-computer network that could communicate via data packets. This became the basis of the ARPANET.

Computer scientist Jerome H. Salzer of MIT wrote TYPESET and RUNOFF, memorandum editor and type-out commmands. RUNOFF was the first computer text formatting program to see significant use. It's formatting commands derived from the commands used by typesetters to manually format documents.

"It actually consisted of a pair of programs, TYPSET (which was basically a document editor), and RUNOFF (the output processor). RUNOFF had support for pagination and headers, as well as text justification (TJ-2 appears to have been the earliest text justification system, but it did not have the other capabilities).

"RUNOFF is a direct predecessor of the runoff document formatting program of Multics, which in turn was the ancestor of the roff and nroff document formatting programs of Unix, and their descendants. It was also the ancestor of FORMAT for the IBM System/360, and of course indirectly for every computerized word processing system.

"Likewise, RUNOFF for CTSS was the predecessor of the various RUNOFFs for DEC's operating systems, via the RUNOFF developed by the University of California, Berkeley's Project Genie for the SDS 940 system.

"The name is alleged to have come from the phrase at the time, I'll run off a copy" (Wikipedia article on TYPESET and RUNOFF, accessed 01-31-2010).

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts, introduced the PDP-8, the first “production model minicomputer.” “Small in physical size, selling in minimum configuration for under $20,000.”

In 1965 William A. Fetter of The Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington, issued the first book on computer graphics: Computer Graphics in Communication. This 110-page work with nearly 100 illustrations may be the first monograph illustrated with computer graphics. Fetter had coined the term "computer graphics" in 1960. The book was "Written for the Course Content Development Study in Engineering Graphics Supported by the National Science Foundation September, 1964." As a reflection of the novelty of its topic, the book contained a bibliography of seven references but stated that none were used directly in its development.

J.C.R. Licklider, Director of Project MAC (Machine-Aided Cognition and Multiple-Access Computers) at MIT and Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, published Libraries of the Future, a study of what libraries might be at the end of the twentieth century. Licklider's book reviewed systems for information storage, organization, and retrieval, use of computers in libraries, and library question-answering systems. In his discussion he was probably the first to raise general questions concerning the transition of the book from exclusively printing on paper to electronic form.

Honeywell attempted to open the home computer market with its Kitchen Computer.

The H316 was the first under-$10,000 16-bit machine from a major computer manufacturer. It was the smallest addition to the Honeywell "Series 16" line, and was available in three versions: table-top, rack-mountable, and self-standing pedestal. The pedestal version, complete with cutting board, was marketed by Neiman Marcus as "The Kitchen Computer.” It came with some built-in recipes, two weeks' worth of programming, a cook book, and an apron.

There is no evidence that any examples were sold.

Though its exact history is murky, email (e-mail) began as a way for users on time-sharing mainframe computers to communicate.

Among the first systems to have an email facility were System Development Corporation of Santa Monica's programming for the AN/FSQ-32  (Q32) built by IBM for the United States Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC), and MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).  The authors of the first email program for CTSS were American software engineer Tom Van Vleck and American computer scientist Noel Morris. The two men created the program in the summer of 1965.

"A proposed CTSS MAIL command was described in an undated Programming Staff Note 39 by Louis Pouzin, Glenda Schroeder, and Pat Crisman. Numerical sequence places the note in either Dec 64 or Jan 65. PSN 39 proposed a facility that would allow any CTSS user to send a message to any other. The proposed uses were communication from "the system" to users informing them that files had been backed up, and communication to the authors of commands with criticisms, and communication from command authors to the CTSS manual editor.

"I was a new member of the MIT programming staff in spring 1965. When I read the PSN document about the proposed CTSS MAIL command, I asked "where is it?" and was told there was nobody available to write it. My colleague Noel Morris and I wrote a version of MAIL for CTSS in the summer of 1965. Noel was the one who saw how to use the features of the new CTSS file system to send the messages, and I wrote the actual code that interfaced with the user. The CTSS manual writeup and the source code of MAIL are available online. (We made a few changes from the proposal during the course of implementation: e.g. to read one's mail, users just used the PRINT command instead of a special argument to MAIL.)  

"The idea of sending "letters' using CTSS was resisted by management, as a waste of resources. However, CTSS Operations did need a faclility to inform users when a request to retrieve a file from tape had been completed, and we proposed MAIL as a solution for this need. (Users who had lost a file due to system or user error, or had it deleted for inactivity, had to submit a request form to Operations, who ran the RETRIEVE program to reload them from tape.) Since the blue 7094 installation in Building 26 had no CTSS terminal available for the operators, one proposal for sending such messages was to invoke MAIL from the 7094 console switches, inputting a code followed by the problem number and programmer number in BCD. I argued that this was much too complex and error prone, and that a facility that let any user send arbitrary messages to any other would have more general uses, which we would discover after it was implemented" (http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html, accessed 06-20-2011).

♦ In June 2011 writer and filmmaker Errol Morris published a series of five illustrated articles in The New York Times concerning the roles of his brother Noel and Tom Van Vleck in the invention of email. The first of these appeared at this link: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/did-my-brother-invent-e-mail-with-tom-van-vleck-part-one/?hp#ftn6.  The articles, in an usual dialog form, captured some of the experience of programming time-sharing mainframes and what it was like to send and receive emails at this early date.

Hearings were held by the House of Representatives Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy by computers.

Self-styled "systems humanist" Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson) published "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate," ACM '65 Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, 84-100. 

In this paper Nelson coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia  to refer to features of a computerized information system.  He used the word "link" to refer the logical connections that came to be associated with the word "hyperlink."  

Nelson is also credited with inventing the word hyperlink, though its published origin is less specific:

"The term "hyperlink" was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson and his assistant Calvin Curtin at the start of Project Xanadu. Nelson had been inspired by "As We May Think", a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of information into a "trail" of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward through the list.

In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by Douglas Engelbart (with Jeff Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968)" (Wikipedia article on Hyperlink, accessed 08-29-2010). 

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, the NewMedia Reader (2003) 133-45.

In 1965 the U. S. Postal Sevice introduced OCR software to sort mail.

Chinese-British-American electrical engineer and physicist Charles K. Kao of STC's Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, Essex, England, and George A. Hockham promoted the idea that the attenuation in optical fibers could be reduced below 20 dB per kilometer, allowing fibers to be a practical medium for communication. Kao and Hockham proposed that the attenuation in fibers available at the time was caused by revovable impurities rather than by fundamental physical effects such as scattering. Eventually fiber optic communication became the technology enabling the Internet backbone.

In 2009 Charles Kao received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication." A more detailed account of Kao's work, placing it in historical perspective, was prepared by the Nobel Prize Committee and may be accessed at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/phyadv09.pdf

Paul Tenczar developed the TUTOR programming language for use in developing electronic learning programs called "lessons" for the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It has "powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics and features to stimulate handling student records and statistics by instructors." This also made it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons— that is, games—including flight simulators, war games, role-playing, such as Dungeons and Dragons (dnd), card games, word games, and Medical lesson games.

The first documentation of the TUTOR language, under this name, appears to be The TUTOR Manual, CERL Report X-4, by R. A. Avner and P. Tenczar, January 1969.

Programmer and systems analyst Henriette Avram completed the Library of Congress MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) Pilot Project, creating the foundation for the national and international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries.

The MARC standards consist of the MARC formats, which are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form, and related documentation. . . . Its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogs.

British mathematician Irving John Good, originally named Isidore Jacob Gudak, published "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine," Advances in Computers, vol. 6 (1965) 31ff.

This paper, published while Good held research positions at Trinity College, Oxford and at Atlas Computer Laboratory, originated the concept later known as "technological singularity," which anticipates the eventual existence of superhuman intelligence:

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." 

Stanley Kubrick consulted Good regarding aspects of computing and artificial intelligence when filming 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), one of whose principal characters was the paranoid HAL 9000 supercomputer.

American historian and archivist Theodore R. Schellenberg published The Management of Archives.

Philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist John Alan Robinson, while at Rice University, published "A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle", Communications of the ACM, 5: 23–41.

This paper introduced the resolution principle, a standard of logical deduction in AI applications.

The first public exhibitions of computer art were:

Feb 5-19, 1965:

Generative Computergrafik. Studien-Galerie des Studium Generale, Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. held by Frieder Nake and Georg Nees. Opened by Max Bense.  

Apr 6-24, 1965:

Computer-generated pictures. Howard Wise Gallery, New York, held by A. Michael Noll, Bela Julesz, both of whom worked at Bell Labs.

Nov 5-26, 1965:

Computergrafik. Galerie Wendelin Niedlich, Stuttgart. held by Frieder Nake and Georg Nees. Opened by Max Bense.

American mathematician James W. Cooley of IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York,  and American statistician John W. Tukey published "An algorithm for the machine calculation of complex Fourier series", Mathematics of  Computation 19, 297–301. This paper enunciated the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, the most common fast Fourier transform algorithm.

"The motivation for it [FFT algorithm] was provided by Dr. Richard L. Garwin at IBM Watson Research who was concerned about verifying a Nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union for the SALT talks. Garwin thought that if he had a very much faster Fourier Transform he could plant sensors in the ground in countries surrounding the Soviet Union. He suggested the idea of how Fourier transforms could be programmed to be much faster to both Cooley and Tukey. They did the work, the sensors were planted, and he was able to locate nuclear explosions to within 15 kilometers of where they were occurring" (Wikipedia article on James Cooley, accessed 03-06-2012).

Maurice Wilkes introduced memory caching.

On April 6, 1965, Intelsat I (nicknamed Early Bird), was placed in geosynchronous orbit above the Atlantic Ocean by a Thrust Augmented Delta D rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.  Built by the Space and Communications Group of Hughes Aircraft Company (later Hughes Space and Communications Company, and now Boeing Satellite Systems) for COMSAT, Intelsat I was the first commercial communications satellite to be placed in geosynchronous orbit, and the first satellite to provide direct and near instantaneous contact between Europe and North America. It handled television, telephone, and facsimile transmissions. It measured nearly 76 x 61 cm and weighed 34.5 kg.

"It [Intelsat I] helped provide the first live TV coverage of a spacecraft splashdown, that of Gemini 6 in December 1965. Originally slated to operate for 18 months, Early Bird was in active service for four years, being deactivated in January 1969, although it was briefly activated in June of that year to serve the Apollo 11 flight when the Atlantic Intelsat satellite failed. It was deactivated again in August 1969 and has been inactive since that time (except for a brief reactivation in 1990 to commemorate its 25th launch anniversary), although it remains in orbit. . . .Early Bird was one of the satellites used in the then record-breaking broadcast of Our World" (Wikipedia article on Intelsat I, accessed 03-23-2012).

Co-founder and Chairman of Intel Corporation Gordon Moore published "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits," Electronics Magazine,  April 19, 1965. In this article he observed that the the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, and predicted that this trend would continue. The press called this “Moore’s Law.”

"The term "Moore's law" was coined around 1970 by the Caltech professor, VLSI pioneer, and entrepreneur Carver Mead. Predictions of similar increases in computer power had existed years prior. Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" had predicted that by the turn of the millennium, we would have "computers with a storage capacity of about 10^9", what today we would call "128 megabytes." Moore may have heard Douglas Engelbart, a co-inventor of today's mechanical computer mouse, discuss the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in a 1960 lecture. A New York Times article published August 31, 2009, credits Engelbart as having made the prediction in 1959. . . .

"Moore slightly altered the formulation of the law over time, in retrospect bolstering the perceived accuracy of his law. Most notably, in 1975, Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years. Despite popular misconception, he is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months". However, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months." (Wikipedia article on Moore' Law, accessed 11-19-2011).

The color cover of the July 1965 issue of Fortune magazine was the first magazine cover designed using computer graphics, though the editor and designer made not have been aware of that at the time. The cover reproduced a photograph of graphics displayed on a computer screen. Two color filters made the computer image appear in color.  On p. 2 of the issue the magazine explained their cover as follows:

"This cover is the first in Fortune's thirty-five years to have been executed wholly by machine— a PDP-1 computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corp., and loaned to Forune by Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The myriad arrows photographed in upward flight across the machine's oscilloscope symbolize the predominant direction of corporate statistics in 1964, while the large, glowing numeral [500] represents the number of companies catalogued in the Directory of the 500 Largest Industrial Corporations. . . ."

On p. 97, editor, Duncan Norton-Taylor, devoted his monthly column to the cover, writing:

"In the course of events, Fortune's art director, Walter Allner, might have frowned on filling the column at left with an array of abbreviations and figures, for Allner is no man to waste space on uninspired graphics. But these figures are his special brain children. They are the instructions that told a PDP-1 computer how to generate the design on this month's cover. This program was 'written' to Allner's specifications and punched into an eight-channel paper tape by Sanford Libman and John Price, whose interest in art and electronics developed at M.I.T.

"Generating the design on an oscilloscope and photographing required about three hours of computer time and occupied Price, Allner, and Libman until four one morning. Multiple exposure through two filters added color to the electron tube's glow. . . . 

"Walter Allner was born in Dessau, Germany. He studied at the Bauhaus-Dessau under Josef Albers, Vasily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. . . . 

"Allner confesses to certain misgivings about teaching the PDP-1 computer too much about Fortune cover design, but adds, philosophically: 'If the computer puts art directors out of work, I'll at least have had some on-the-job training as a design-machine programer [sic]."

Herzogenrath & Nierhoff-Wielk, Ex Machina—Frühe Computergrafik bis 1979. Ex Machina—Early Computer Graphics up to 1978 (2007) 243.

In October 1965 Lawrence G. Roberts did the first actual network experiment, tying MIT Lincoln Labs’ TX-2 in Lexington, Massachusetts to System Development Corporation's Q32 in Santa Monica, California.

This was the first time that two computers talked to each other, and the first time that packets were used to communicate between computers.

The New York Stock Exchange completed automation of its basic trading functions.

Semiconductor memory began to replace magnetic-core memory.

The IRS completed computerization of income-tax processing, with a central facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and satellite locations around the United States.

American electrical engineer and inventor Robert H. Dennard of IBM invented Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) cells— one-transistor memory cells that stored each single bit of information as an electrical charge in an electronic circuit. DRAM technology permitted major increases in memory density.

"The idea for DRAM came to Dennard in 1966, in an epiphany on his living room couch in Westchester County, New York, as he enjoyed the waning daylight over the Croton River Gorge. That morning, he had attended an all-day meeting of IBM researchers, where they shared projects with one another in an attempt to stir ideas and foster collaboration. At the time, Dennard was working on metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) transistor memories for computers. Earlier in the day, he had listened to the group trying to improve magnetic core memory. Something about his own work and what he saw at the review troubled Dennard. The magnetic memory being developed by his competing researchers had drawbacks, but it was extremely simple. His MOS project had promise, on the other hand, but it was quite complicated, using six transistors for each bit of information.

“ 'I thought, ‘What could I do that would be really simple,’' Dennard recalled. There on his couch, he thought through the characteristics of MOS technology—it was capable of building capacitors, and storing a charge or no charge on the capacitor could represent the 1 and 0 of a bit of information. A transistor could control writing the charge to the capacitor. The more Dennard thought, the more he knew he could make a simple memory out of this.

“ 'I called my boss that night around 10 p.m.,' Dennard said. 'It’s a rare event that I’d call him. He listened to me, then suggested we talk about it tomorrow. I joke that he basically told me to take two aspirin and call him in the morning.' 

Dennard still had to work on the six-transistor memory, so he worked on his new idea in his spare time, eventually figuring out the subtleties of writing a charge to the capacitor by way of an access transistor, and then reading it back through the same transistor. In 1967, Dennard and IBM filed a patent application for his single-transistor dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and the patent was issued in 1968.

"In 1970, Intel ® built a very successful 1-kilobit DRAM chip using a three-transistor cell design, while several manufacturers produced 4-kilobit chips using Dennard’s single-transistor cell by the mid-1970s. Wave after wave of innovation followed, driven by Moore’s Law and scaling principles pioneered by Dennard and coworkers at IBM in the early 1970s. This progress continued through the years, resulting in the DRAM chips of today with capacities of up to 4,000,000,000 bits. Dennard said he could not foresee how important DRAM would become when he invented it: 'I knew it was going to be a big thing, but I didn’t know it would grow to have the wide impact it has today' " (http://www-943.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/dram/, accessed 07-021-2011).

English molecular biologist Aaron Klug at the University of Cambridge formulated a method for digital image processing of two-dimensional images.

A. Klug and D. J. de Rosier, “Optical filtering of electron micrographs: Reconstruction of one-sided images,” Nature 212 (1966): 2932.

Stephen B. Gray, computers editor for Electronics magazine, founded The Amateur Computer Society, possibly the first personal computer club.

Richard Gering's Data Corporation of Beavercreek, Ohio, contracted with the U.S. Air Force to develop a computer-assisted, full-text system to keep track of procurement contracts and equipment inventory.

Roger K. Summit, "the father of online search," had the DIALOG online information retrieval system operational for Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, California.

The Second Vatican Council under Pope Paul VI abolished the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, founded in 1557.

Using the Project MAC, an early time-sharing system at MIT, Cyrus Levinthal built the first system for the interactive display of molecular structures. 

"This program allowed the study of short-range interaction between atoms and the "online manipulation" of molecular structures. The display terminal (nicknamed Kluge) was a monochrome oscilloscope (figures 1 and 2), showing the structures in wireframe fashion (figures 3 and 4). Three-dimensional effect was achieved by having the structure rotate constantly on the screen. To compensate for any ambiguity as to the actual sense of the rotation, the rate of rotation could be controlled by globe-shaped device on which the user rested his/her hand (an ancestor of today's trackball). Technical details of this system were published in 1968 (Levinthal et al.). What could be the full potential of such a set-up was not completely settled at the time, but there was no doubt that it was paving the way for the future. Thus, this is the conclusion of Cyrus Levinthal's description of the system in Scientific American (p. 52):

It is too early to evaluate the usefulness of the man-computer combination in solving real problems of molecular biology. It does seems likely, however, that only with this combination can the investigator use his "chemical insight" in an effective way. We already know that we can use the computer to build and display models of large molecules and that this procedure can be very useful in helping us to understand how such molecules function. But it may still be a few years before we have learned just how useful it is for the investigator to be able to interact with the computer while the molecular model is being constructed.

"Shortly before his death in 1990, Cyrus Levinthal penned a short biographical account of his early work in molecular graphics. The text of this account can be found here."

You can watch a six minute film produced with the interactive molecular graphics and modeling system devised by Cyrus Levinthal and his collaborators in the mid-1960s at this link.

In 1966 the Research and Development department of National Cash Register (NCR) of Dayton, Ohio produced an edition of all 1245 pages of  the World Publishing Company's No. 715 Bible on a single 2" x 1-3/4" photochromatic microform (PCMI) The microform contained both the Old Testament on 773 pages and the New Testament on 746 pages, and was issued in a paper sleeve with title on the cover and information about the process inside and on the back.

On the microform each page of double column Bible text was about 0.5 mm wide and 1 mm high. Each text character was 8 um high (ie 8/1000ths of a millimeter). NCR noted on the paper wallet provided with the microform that this represented a linear reduction of about 250:1 or an area reduction of 62,500:1. This would correspond to the original text being circa 2 mm high. To put this into perspective, NCR also noted that if this reduction was used on the millions of books on the 270+ miles of shelving in the Library of Congress, the entire Library of Congress as it existed in 1966 could be stored in six standard filing cabinets.

♦ In 1971 Apollo 14 lunar module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell carried 100 of the microform bibles aboard the lunar module Antares, as confirmed by NASA's official manifest. Launched January 31, 1971, Mitchell and the bibles reached the Fra Mauro formation of the Moon on February 5 aboard the Antares before returning to the command module for the voyage back to Earth. This was the first edition of the Bible to reach the Moon, and probably the first book of any kind of reach the moon and return. A second parcel containing 200 microform Bibles flew in Edgar Mitchell's command module "PPK" bag in lunar orbit, and did not land. These 200 copies represented extra Bibles to be used if something happened to the lunar module copies.

American showman, songwriter, and artist Bobb Goldsteinn (Bob Goldstein) coined the term multimedia to promote the July 1966 opening of his "LightWorks at L'Oursin" show at Southampton, Long Island, New York.

"On August 10, 1966, Richard Albarino of Variety borrowed the terminology, reporting: 'Brainchild of songscribe-comic Bob (‘Washington Square’) Goldstein, the ‘Lightworks’ is the latest multi-media music-cum-visuals to debut as discothèque fare' " (Wikipedia article on Multimedia, accessed 08-29-2010).

The evolving concept of multimedia involves combinations of text, still images, video, animation, sound, and interactivity. Thus, technically an illustrated book could be considered a multimedia object with a combination of texts and images; however, multimedia primarily implies combinations of electronic media.

Lawrence G. Roberts wrote Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers, describing networking research at MIT.

In December 1966 electrical engineer Lawrence G. Roberts became Chief Scientist at the ARPA IPTO (Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Processing Technology Office), and began the design of the ARPANET. The ARPANET program as proposed to Congress by Roberts explored computer resource sharing and packet switching communications to ensure reliability.

In 1967 French cartographer and theorist of information graphics  Jacques Bertin published Sémiologie graphique. Les diagrammes, les réseaux, les cartes in Paris at the press of Gauthier-Villars. This work provided the first theoretical foundation for information graphics: a systematic classification of the use of visual elements to display data and relationships, primarily in static graphics. Bertin's system consists of seven visual variables: position, form (shape), orientation, color (hue), texture, value (lightness or darkness of color), and size, combined with a visual semantics for linking data attributes to visual elements.

Bertin revised his book for a second edition published in 1973. It was translated into German in 1974. In 1983 an English translation of the second French edition by William J. Berg, with a foreward by Howard Wainer, and a new preface by Bertin, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press as Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps. In 2010 the English translation was reissued with a new Foreward by Wainer. The 438 page book contains over 1000 images, a few in color.

A widely referenced quotation from Bertin's book is:

"And now, at the end of the twentieth century, with the pressure of modern information and the advances of data processing, graphics is passing through a new and fundamental stage. The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image.

"When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the 'illustration,' to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the 'representation' of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing. . . . " [I added the bold face. JN]

In his foreward to the 1983 English translation Wainer called Bertin's work, "the most important work on graphics since the publication of Playfair's Atlas [The Commerical and Political Atlas (1785-86)]."

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, England developed the NPL Data Network under Donald Watts Davies.

This was an experiment in packet switching.

Data Corporation of Beavercreek, Ohio,  contracted with the Ohio Bar Automated Research Corporation to create a full-text, interactive research service for Ohio statutes.

Ted Nelson (Theodor Holm Nelson), Andries van Dam, and students at Brown University collaborated on the first hypertext editing system, based on Nelson's concept of hypertext.

They developed the project on an IBM 360/50 mainframe.

Texas Instruments filed the patent for the first hand-held electronic calculator, invented by Jack S. Kilby, Jerry Merryman, and Jim Van Tassel. The patent (Number 3,819,921) was awarded on June 25, 1974.

This miniature calculator employed a large-scale integrated semiconductor array containing the equivalent of thousands of discrete semiconductor devices.

Directors of fifteen New York-area museums formed the Museum Computer Network to create a prototype system for a shared museum data bank.

The project recruited curators and registrars to develop a data dictionary that  accommodated the diverse methods used to describe museum collections. The resulting tagged record format allowed for the description of individual objects with separate records for artist biographical information and reference citations. Jack Heller's GRIPHOS (General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies) system provided the information storage, search, and retrieval infrastructures for the records.

Ecologist Robert MacArthur of Princeton and biologist E. O. Wilson of Harvard published The Theory of Island Biogeography through Princeton University Press. In this work they showed that the species richness of an area could be predicted in terms of such factors as habitat area, immigration rate and extinction rate.

"Island biogeography is a field within biogeography that attempts to establish and explain the factors that affect the species richness of natural communities. The theory was developed to explain species richness of actual islands. It has since been extended to mountains surrounded by deserts, lakes surrounded by dry land, forest fragments surrounded by human-altered landscapes. Now it is used in reference to any ecosystem surrounded by unlike ecosystems. The field was started in the 1960s by the ecologists Robert MacArthur and E.O. Wilson, who coined the term theory of island biogeography, as this theory attempted to predict the number of species that would exist on a newly created island.

"For biogeographical purposes, an 'island' is any area of suitable habitat surrounded by an expanse of unsuitable habitat. While this may be a traditional island—a mass of land surrounded by water—the term may also be applied to many untraditional 'islands', such as the peaks of mountains, isolated springs in the desert, or expanses of grassland surrounded by highways or housing tracts. Additionally, what is an island for one organism may not be an island for another: some organisms located on mountaintops may also be found in the valleys, while others may be restricted to the peaks" (Wikipedia article on Island biogeography, accessed 05-08-2009).

While a professor at UCLA, Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman Andrew Viterbi developed the Viterbi algorithm,  "as an error-correction scheme for noisy digital communication links, finding universal application in decoding the convolutional codes used in both CDMA and GSM digital cellular, dial-up modems, satellite, deep-space communications, and 802.11 wireless LANs. It is now also commonly used in speech recognition, keyword spotting, computational linguistics, and bioinformatics. For example, in speech-to-text (speech recognition), the acoustic signal is treated as the observed sequence of events, and a string of text is considered to be the "hidden cause" of the acoustic signal. The Viterbi algorithm finds the most likely string of text given the acoustic signal" (Wikipedia article on Viterbi algorithm, accessed 12-29-2009).

Henry Kucera (born Jindřich Kučera) of Brown University and Nelson Francis published Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English.

A founding work on corpus linguistics, this book "provided basic statistics on what is known today simply as the Brown Corpus. The Brown Corpus was a carefully compiled selection of current American English, totaling about a million words drawn from a wide variety of sources. Kucera and Francis subjected it to a variety of computational analyses, from which they compiled a rich and variegated opus, combining elements of linguistics, psychology, statistics, and sociology" (Wikipedia article on Brown Corpus, accessed 06-07-2010)./

Musicologist Edmund A. Bowles, in his capacity as manager of Professional Activities in the Department of University Relations at IBM, edited Computers in Humanistic Research. Readings and Perspectives. This was the first anthology of research on humanities computing.

In 1967 there were 35,000 computers operating in the United States.

Bowles (ed.) Computers in Humanistic Research (1967) v,

In 1964 American educational psychologist at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) Ellis Batten Page, inspired by developments in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, began research on automated essay scoring. Page published his initial research in 1967 as "Statistical and linguistic strategies in the computer grading of essays," Coling 1967: Conférence Internationale sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues, Grenoble, France, August 1967.  The same year he also published "The imminence of grading essays by computer," Phi Delta Kappan, 47 (1967) 238-243. The following year he published, with Dieter H. Paulus  The analysis of essays by computer (Final report, Project No. 6-1318). Washington, D. C.: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; Office of Education; Bureau of Research. That year he published his successful work with a program he called Project Essay Grade (PEG) in "The Use of the Computer in Analyzing Student Essays," International Review of Education, 14(3), 253-263. Page's work is considered the beginning of automated essay scoring, the development of which could not become cost effective until computing became far cheaper and more pervasive in the 1990s. 

Later at Duke University, Page renewed his development and research in automated scoring and, in 1993, formed Tru-Judge, Inc., anticipating the potential for commercial applications of the software. In 2002, and in declining health, Page sold the intellectual property assets of Tru-Judge to Measurement Incorporated, educational company that provides achievement tests and scoring services for state governments, other testing companies and various organizations and institutions.

The United States Senate held hearings on computer privacy.

At the ARPANET Design Session held by Lawrence G. Roberts at the ARPA IPTO PI meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Wesley Clark suggested the use of mini-computers for network packet switches instead of using the main frame computers on the Arpanet for switching.

These machines were called Interface Message Processors.

The Department of Defense requested the Director of the Advanced Research Planning Agency (ARPA) to form a Task Force “to study and recommend hardware and software safeguards that would satisfactorily protect classified information in multi-access, resource-sharing computer systems.” Their report was published in 1970.

Professor of mechanical engineering and researcher in interactive computer graphics at MIT's Electronic Systems Laboratory Steven A. Coons published Surfaces for Computer-aided Design of Space Forms, Project MAC Report MAC-TR-41, MIT.

Known as the "The Little Red Book,

" the paper described what became known as the "Coons Patch"— "a formulation that presented the notation, mathematical foundation, and intuitive interpretation of an idea that would ultimately become the foundation for surface descriptions that are commonly used today, such as b-spline surfaces, NURB surfaces, etc. His technique for describing a surface was to construct it out of collections of adjacent patches, which had continuity constraints that would allow surfaces to have curvature which was expected by the designer. Each patch was defined by four boundary curves, and a set of "blending functions" that defined how the interior was constructed out of interpolated values of the boundaries" (Carlson, A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, accessed 05-30-2009).

The Our World TV special, the first live, international satellite television production, was broadcast on June 25, 1967 from the BBC control room in London, using satellites Intelsat I (Early Bird), Intelsat II and ATS-1.

 "Creative artists, including opera singer Maria Callas, The Beatles and painter Pablo Picasso, representing nineteen different nations were invited to perform or appear in separate segments featuring their respective countries. The two-and-half-hour event had the largest television audience ever up to that date: an estimated 400 million people around the globe watched the broadcast. Today, it is most famous for the segment from the United Kingdom starring The Beatles. They sang their specially composed song "All You Need Is Love" to close the broadcast" (Wikipedia article on Our World [TV special] accessed 03-23-2012).

Electrical engineer and inventor Douglas C. Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center at SRI  filed a patent for an X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System. This device eventually became known as the Mouse.

Only July 5, 1967  three university presidents, three university vice- presidents, and four university library directors from the Ohio College Association met at Ohio State University in Columbus to found the non-profit Ohio College Library Center (OCLC). 

"The group hired Frederick G. Kilgour to build a ‘cooperative, computerized network in which most, if not all, Ohio libraries would participate.’ Fred’s idea was to merge the newest information storage and retrieval system, the computer, with the oldest, the library. His vision was that this new computerized library would be active rather than passive, that people would no longer go to the library, but that the library would go to the people. Back in 1967, this was a rather revolutionary idea.

"The first step in this vision would be to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database. The network and database would streamline operations and control rising costs. It also would bring libraries together to work cooperatively to keep track of the world’s information for the benefit of researchers and scholars" (http://www.oclc.org/about/history/beginning.htm, accessed 03-07-2012).

After the bibliographical database expanded far beyond the state of Ohio it was renamed Online Computer Library Center, retaining the same initials.

Welsh computer scientist Donald W. Davies of the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, introduced the use of the term “packet” to describe discrete blocks of data sent over networks in his paper called “A Digital Communications Network for Computers.”

In October 1967 Lawrence G. Roberts published the first paper on the design of the ARPANET: “Multiple computer networks and intercomputer communication,” at the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles at Gatlinburg, Tennessee. (See Reading 13.5)

In 1968 forest products manufacturer Mead Corporation of Dayton, Ohio, purchased Data Corporation.

In 1968 Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, created the first Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) head mounted display system.

Sutherland's head mounted display was so heavy that it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the formidable appearance of the device inspired its name—the Sword of Damocles. The system was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment were simple wireframe rooms.

Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, both professors at the University of Utah, founded Evans & Sutherland to commercialize the use of computers as simulators for training purposes.

Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, California, introduced the programmable desk calculator, the HP 9100A.

 "HP called it a desktop calculator, because, as Bill Hewlett said, 'If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared.' An engineering triumph at the time, the logic circuit was produced without any integrated circuits; the assembly of the CPU having been entirely executed in discrete components. With CRT display, magnetic-card storage, and printer, the price was around $5000. The machine's keyboard was a cross between that of a scientific calculator and an adding machine. There was no alphabetic keyboard" (Wikipedia article on Hewlett-Packard, accessed 03-10-2010).

Mansell, in London, began publication of The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: a Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by other American Libraries. One of the largest sets of printed volumes ever published, and most probably the largest printed bibliography, it was completed in 1981 in 754 folio volumes, containing a total of over 12,000,000 entries on 528,000 pages, and occupying approximately 130 feet of shelf space. It was produced manually by photocopying library catalogue cards.

NUC was superceded around 1995 by bibliographical databases such as OCLC WorldCat on the Internet.

The film 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by American film director Stanley Kubrick in collaboration with science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke, captured imaginations with the idea of a computer that could see, speak, hear, and “think.” 

Perhaps the star of the film was the HAL 9000 computer. "HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer) is an artificial intelligence, the sentient on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery. HAL is usually represented only as his television camera "eyes" that can be seen throughout the Discovery spaceship. . . . HAL is depicted as being capable not only of speech recognition, facial recognition, and natural language processing, but also lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting emotions, expressing emotions, reasoning, and chess, in addition to maintaining all systems on an interplanetary voyage.

"HAL is never visualized as a single entity. He is, however, portrayed with a soft voice and a conversational manner. This is in contrast to the human astronauts, who speak in terse monotone, as do all other actors in the film" (Wikipedia article on HAL 9000, accessed 05-24-2009).

"Kubrick and Clarke had met in New York City in 1964 to discuss the possibility of a collaborative film project. As the idea developed, it was decided that the story for the film was to be loosely based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", written in 1948 as an entry in a BBC short story competition. Originally, Clarke was going to write the screenplay for the film, but Kubrick suggested during one of their brainstorming meetings that before beginning on the actual script, they should let their imaginations soar free by writing a novel first, which the film would be based on upon its completion. 'This is more or less the way it worked out, though toward the end, novel and screenplay were being written simultaneously, with feedback in both directions. Thus I rewrote some sections after seeing the movie rushes -- a rather expensive method of literary creation, which few other authors can have enjoyed.' The novel ended up being published a few months after the release of the movie" (Wikipedia article on Arthur C. Clarke, accessed 05-24-2009).

Philip K. Dick published his science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It told of the moral crisis of Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who stalked androids—robots visually identifical to people—in a fall-out clouded, dystopic, partially deserted San Francisco.

In 1982 the novel was brought to the screen as Blade Runner, with its location changed to Los Angeles. 

IBM adopted a new marketing policy of charging separately for most systems engineering activities, future computer programs, and customer education courses. This “unbundling” gave rise to the software and services industry.

K. G. Pontius Hultén published The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, the catalogue of an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This was a landmark exhibition on the history of the machine in its relationship to art from the Renaissance to 1968; or as the editor stated, it was "a collection of comments on technology by artists of the Western world" (p. 3). The art reproduced and described in the catalogue— including much that was radical for its time—was mainly in traditional media such as prints or paintings, sculptural or mechanical, with a few electro-mechanical items, and one example of laser art. Only the last two items in the exhibition were examples of computer graphics, the first of which was a trite reclining nude executed on what appears to be a dot matrix printer by the artist, Leon D. Harman.

The design and production of the catalogue was unusually excellent, including a very striking binding of aluminum sheeting with a stamped enamel-painted design of the MOMA building on the upper cover.

In 1968 German electrical engineers Helmut Gröttrup of Stuttgart and Jürgen Dethloff, of Hamburg, invented the smart card (chip card, or integrated circuit card [ICC]) and applied for the patent. The patent for the smart card was finally granted to both inventors in 1982. The first wide use of the cards was for payment in French pay phones—France Telecom Télécarte—starting in 1983-84.

In 1968 Stephen A. Benton, then of Polaroid Corporation, and later at MIT's Media Lab, invented the Benton hologram or rainbow hologram, a hologram designed to be viewed under white light illumation rather than laser light, which was required to view holograms before this invention.  

"The rainbow holography recording process uses a horizontal slit to eliminate vertical parallax in the output image, greatly reducing spectral blur while preserving three-dimensionality for most observers. A viewer moving up or down in front of a rainbow hologram sees changing spectral colors rather than different vertical perspectives. Stereopsis and horizontal motion parallax, two relatively powerful cues to depth, are preserved. The holograms found on credit cards are examples of rainbow holograms" (Wikipedia article on rainbow hologram, accessed 11-23-2012).

English molecular biologist Aaron Klug described techniques for the reconstruction of three-dimensional structures from electron micrographs, thus founding the processing of three-dimensional digital images.

D. J. de Rosier and A. Klug, “Reconstruction of three dimensional structures from electron micrographs,” Nature 217 (1968) 13034.

J.C.R. Licklider of MIT and Robert W. Taylor published The Computer as a Communication Device in which they described features of the future ARPANET. (See Reading 13.6.)

The Museum Computer Network and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with funding from IBM, organized the first U.S. conference on museum computing.

Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove founded Intel. The company's first property was purchased in Santa Clara, California.

The company was originally incorporated under the name of NM Electronics.

From August 2  to October 20, 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, curated by British art critic, editor, and Assistant Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Jasia Reichardt, at the suggestion of Max Bense. This was the first widely attended international exhibition of computer art, and the first exhibition to attempt to demonstrate all aspects of computer-aided creative activity: art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture, animation.

"It drew together 325 participants from many countries; attendance figures reached somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 (accounts differ) and it received wide and generally positive press coverage ranging from the Daily Mirror newspaper to the fashion magazine Vogue. A scaled-down version toured to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC and then the Exploratorium, the museum of science, art and human perception in San Francisco. It took Reichardt three years of fundraising, travelling and planning" (Mason, a computer in the art room. the origins of british computer arts 1950-80 [2008] 101-102)

For the catalogue of the show Reichardt edited a special issue of Studio International magazine, consisting of 100 pages with 300 images, publication of which coincided with the exhibition in 1968. The color frontispiece reproduced a color computer graphic by the American John C. Mott-Smith "made by time-lapse photography successively exposed through coloured filters, of an oscilloscope connected to a computer." The cover of the special issue was designed by the Polish-British painter, illustrator, film-maker, and stage designer Franciszka Themerson, incorporating computer graphics from the exhibition. Laid into copies of the special issue were 4 leaves entitled "Cybernetic Serendipity Music," each page providing a program for one of eight tapes of music played during the show. This information presumably was not available in time to be printed in the issue of Studio International.

Reichardt's Introduction  (p. 5) included the following:

"The exhibition is divided into three sections, and these sections are represented in the catalogue in a different order:

"1. Computer-generated graphics, computer-animated films, computer-composed and -played music, and computer poems and texts.

"2. Cybernetic devices as works of art, cybernetic enironments, remoted-control robots and painting machines.

"3. Machines demonstrating the uses of computers and an environment dealing with the history of cybernetics.

"Cybernetic Sernedipity deals with possibilites rather than achievements, and in this sense it is prematurely optimistic. There are no heroic claims to be made because computers have so far neither revolutionized music, nor art, nor poetry, the same way that they have revolutionized science.

"There are two main points which make this exhibition and this catalogue unusual in the contexts in which art exhibitions and catalogues are normally seen. The first is that no visitor to the exhibition, unless he reads all the notes relating to all the works, will know whether he is looking at something made by an artist, engineer, mathematician, or architect. Nor is it particularly important to know the background of all the makers of the various robots, machines and graphics- it will not alter their impact, although it might make us see them differently.

"The other point is more significant.

"New media, such as plastics, or new systems such as visual music notation and the parameters of concrete poetry, inevitably alter the shape of art, the characteristics of music, and content of poetry. New possibilities extend the range of expression of those creative poeple whom we identify as painters, film makers, composers and poets. It is very rare, however, that new media and new systems should bring in their wake new people to become involved in creative activity, be it composiing music drawing, constructing or writing.

"This has happened with the advent of computers. The engineers for whom the graphic plotter driven by a computer represented nothing more than a means of solving certain problems visually, have occasionally become so interested in the possibilities of this visual output, that they have started to make drawings which bear no practical application, and for which the only real motives are the desire to explore, and the sheer pelasure of seeing a drawing materialize. Thus people who would never have put pencil to paper, or brush to canvas, have started making images, both still and animated, which approximate and often look identical to what we call 'art' and put in public galleries.

"This is the most important single revelation of this exhibition." 

Some copies of the special issue were purchased by Motif Editions of London.  Those copies do not include the ICA logo on the upper cover and do not print the price of 25s. They also substitute two blanks for the two leaves of ads printed in the back of the regular issue. They do not include the separate 4 leaves of programs of computer music.  These special copies were sold by Motif Editions with a large  (75 x 52 cm) portfolio containing seven 30 x 20 inch color lithographs with a descriptive table of contents. The artists included Masao Komura/Makoto Ohtake/Koji Fujino (Computer Technique Group); Masao Komura/Kunio Yamanaka (Computer Technique Group); Maugham S. Mason, Boeing Computer Graphics; Kerry Starnd, Charles "Chuck" Csuri/James Shaffer & Donald K. Robbins/ The art works were titled respectively 'Running Cola is Africa', 'Return to Square', 'Maughanogram', 'Human Figure', 'The Snail', 'Random War' & '3D Checkerboard Pattern'.  Copies of the regular edition contained a full-page ad for the Motif Editions portfolio for sale at £5 plus postage or £1 plus postage for individual prints.

In 1969 Frederick A. Praeger Publishers of New York and Washington, DC issued a cloth-bound second edition of the Cybernetic Serendipity catalogue with a dust jacket design adapted from the original Studio International cover. It was priced $8.95. The American edition probably coincided with the exhibition of the material at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. The Praeger edition included an index on p. 101, and no ads. Comparison of the text of the 1968 and 1969 editions shows that the 1969 edition contains numerous revisions and changes.

In 2005 Jasia Reichardt looked back on the exhibition with these comments:

"One of the journals dealing with the Computer and the Arts in the mid-sixties, was Computers and the Humanities. In September 1967, Leslie Mezei of the University of Toronto, opened his article on 'Computers and the Visual Arts' in the September issue, as follows: 'Although there is much interest in applying the computer to various areas of the visual arts, few real accomplishments have been recorded so far. Two of the causes for this lack of progress are technical difficulty of processing two-dimensional images and the complexity and expense of the equipment and the software. Still the current explosive growth in computer graphics and automatic picture processing technology are likely to have dramatic effects in this area in the next few years.' The development of picture processing technology took longer than Mezei had anticipated, partly because both the hardware and the software continued to be expensive. He also pointed out that most of the pictures in existence in 1967 were produced mainly as a hobby and he discussed the work of Michael Noll, Charles Csuri, Jack Citron, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, and H.P. Paterson. All these names are familiar to us today as the pioneers of computer art history. Mezei himself too was a computer artist and produced series of images using maple leaf design and other national Canadian themes. Most of the computer art in 1967 was made with mechanical computer plotters, on CRT displays with a light pen or from scanned photographs. Mathematical equations that produced curves, lines or dots, and techniques to introduce randomness, all played their part in those early pictures. Art made with these techniques was instantaneously recognisable as having been produced either by mechanical means or with a program. It didn't actually look as if it had been done by hand. Then, and even now, most art made with the computer carries an indelible computer signature. The possibility of computer poetry and art was first mentioned in 1949. By the beginning of the 1950s it was a topic of conversation at universities and scientific establishments, and by the time computer graphics arrived on the scene, the artists were scientists, engineers, architects. Computer graphics were exhibited for the first time in 1965 in Germany and in America. 1965 was also the year when plans were laid for a show that later came to be called 'Cybernetic Serendipity' and presented at the ICA in London in 1968. It was the first exhibition to attempt to demonstrate all aspects of computer-aided creative activity: art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture, animation. The principal idea was to examine the role of cybernetics in contemporary arts. The exhibition included robots, poetry, music and painting machines, as well as all sorts of works where chance was an important ingredient. It was an intellectual exercise that became a spectacular exhibition in the summer of 1968" (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/exhibitions/serendipity/images/1/, accessed 06-16-2012). This website reproduces photographs of the actual exhibition and a poster printed for the show.

The term “software engineering” was coined at a NATO conference, in Garmisch, Germany, in response to the perception that computer programming had not kept up with advances in computer hardware.

In 1968 print dealer and book collector Paul B. Victorius of Charlottesville, Virginia published Computer Art and Human Response by computer artist Lloyd Sumner. This oblong 8vo of 96 pages, dedicated "To my good friends the Burroughs B5500 and the Calcomp 565," appears to be the first monograph by a computer artist, and because it explains techniques, it is probably the first book on how to produce computer art, as William Fetter's 1965 book on Computer Graphics in Communication was focused on computer graphics used in engineering.

Sumner's book is extensively illustrated with numerous plotter images output on the Calcomp 565, several of which are reproduced in color, making it one of the earliest books exclusively illustrated with computer graphics. Sumner's book was probably published in December 1968.  The text refers to Sumner's participation in the Cybernetic Serendipity show in London held from August to October 1968, indicating that "over 50,000 people" attended that show, and the introduction to the book by the president of the University of Virginia is dated August 1968. Two presentation copies in my collection are dated December 12 and 13 respectively.

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, demonstrated at the San Francisco Convention Center an “oNLine System” (NLS), the features of which included hypertext, text editing, screen windowing, and email. To make this system operate, Engelbart used the mouse which he had invented the previous year.

The first manned Apollo flights occurred, including Apollo 8, launched from the Kennedy Space Center, which circumnavigated the moon on Christmas Eve.

In 1969 or 1970 the first automatic teller machine (ATM) was installed. Dates conflict as to whether this was in 1969 or slightly later. The first machine installed at Chemical Bank in New York may have been only a cash dispenser.

In 1969 Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. This was the first operating system designed to run on computers of all sizes, making open systems possible. UNIX became the foundation for the Internet.

In this year 32,393 books are produced in the United Kingdom.

Compuserve was founded in Columbus, Ohio, as a way to generate income from Golden United Life Insurance mainframe computers during non-business hours.

Comcast became the first commercial online service in the United States.

Working at Bell Labs, in 1969 Willard Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), a sensor for recording images.

Twenty years later, in 2009 Boyle and Smith shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor." The Nobel Prize Committee prepared a report putting the discovery of the CCD in perspective. It may be accessed at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/phyadv09.pdf

"The lab [Bell Labs] was working on the picture phone and on the development of semiconductor bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed 'Charge "Bubble" Devices'. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor. As the CCD started its life as a memory device, one could only "inject" charge into the device at an input register. However, it was immediately clear that the CCD could receive charge via the photoelectric effect and electronic images could be created. By 1969, Bell researchers were able to capture images with simple linear devices; thus the CCD was born. Several companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, RCA and Texas Instruments, picked up on the invention and began development programs. Fairchild was the first with commercial devices and by 1974 had a linear 500 element device and a 2-D 100 x 100 pixel device. Under the leadership of Kazuo Iwama, Sony also started a big development effort on CCDs involving a significant investment. Eventually, Sony managed to mass produce CCDs for their camcorders. Before this happened, Iwama died in August 1982. Subsequently, a CCD chip was placed on his tombstone to acknowledge his contribution" (Wikipedia article on Charge-coupled device, accessed 10-06-2009).

IBM introduced the Generalized Markup Language, GML, developed by Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie, whose surname initials were used by Goldfarb to make up the term GML. 

GML was "a set of macros that implemented intent-based markup tags for the IBM text formatter, "'SCRIPT.' SCRIPT was the main component of IBM's Document Composition Facility (DCF). A starter set of tags in GML was provided with the DCF product.

"GML simplifies the description of a document in terms of its format, organization structure, content parts and their relationship, and other properties. GML markup (or tags) describes such parts as chapters, important sections, and less important sections (by specifying heading levels), paragraphs, lists, tables, and so forth." (Wikipedia article on IBM Generalized Markup Language, accessed 12-21-2008).

Engineer and computer designer Konrad Zuse published Rechnender Raum. This was translated into English in 1970 under the title, Calculating Space. It was the first book on digital physics.

"Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed in real time on some sort of cellular automata or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out (among other things) that the classical notions of entropy and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes.

"Bell's theorem is sometimes thought to contradict Zuse's hypothesis, but it is not applicable to deterministic universes, as Bell himself pointed out. Similarly, while Heisenberg's uncertainty principle limits in a fundamental way what an observer can observe, when the observer is himself a part of the universe he is trying to observe, that principle does not rule out Zuse's hypothesis, which views any observer as a part of the hypothesized deterministic process. So far there is no unambiguous physical evidence against the possibility that "everything is just a computation," and a fair bit has been written about digital physics since Zuse's book appeared" (Wikipedia article on Calculating Space, accessed 05-16-2009).

"The first digital sampler was the EMS(Electronic Music Studios) Musys system developed by Peter Grogono (software), David Cockerell (hardware and interfacing) and Peter Zinovieff (system design and operation) at their London (Putney) Studio c. 1969. The system ran on two mini-computers, a pair of Digital Equipment’s PDP-8s. These had the tiny memory of 12,000 (12k) bytes, backed up by a hard drive of 32k and by tape storage (DecTape)—all of this absolutely minuscule by today’s standards. Nevertheless, the EMS equipment was used as the world’s first music sampler and the computers were used to control the world's first digital studio" (Wikipedia article on Sampler (musical instrument), with hyperlinks that I added, accessed 08-29-2009).

Houghton Mifflin of Boston published The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

"The AHD broke ground among dictionaries by using corpus linguistics for compiling word-frequencies and other information. It took the innovative step of combining prescriptive information (how language should be used) and descriptive information (how it actually is used). The descriptive information was derived from actual texts. Citations were based on a million-word, three-line citation database[the Brown Corpus] prepared by Brown University linguist Henry Kucera" (Wikipedia article on The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, accessed 06-07-2010).

Austrian American physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster (born Heinz von Förster), director of the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and James W. Beauchamp published Music by Computers.  This was probably the first book on computer music to include recordings of actual compositions. Four thin analog sound recordings (33-1/3 RPM) on thin flexible vinyl were included in a pocket in the inside back cover.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) no. 608.

The Laserdisc (videodisc) invented and originally called "Videodisk" using a transparent disc by David Paul Gregg in 1958 and by James Russell in 1965, was enhanced by Philips Electronics in 1969 by using a videodisc in reflective mode.  Music Corporation of America (MCA), purchaser of Gregg's patents, and Philips first publically demonstated the videodisc in 1972 and first made the technology available on the market in Atlanta, Georgia on December 15, 1978 with the MCA DiscoVision release of the film Jaws. Laserdisc technology became the basis for compact discs (CDs).

In 1971 Phil Ray and Gus Roche of Computer Terminal Corporation of San Antonio, Texas, later known as Datapoint Corporation, began shipping the Datapoint 2200, a mass-produced programmable terminal, which could be used as a simple stand-alone personal computer.

"It was intended by its designers simply to be a versatile, cost-efficient terminal for connecting to a wide variety of mainframes by loading various terminal emulations from tape rather than being hardwired as most terminals were. However, enterprising users in the business sector (including Pillsbury Foods) realized that this so-called 'programmable terminal' was equipped to perform any task a simple computer could, and exploited this fact by using their 2200s as standalone computer systems. Equally significant is the fact that the terminal's multi-chip CPU (processor) became the embryo of the x86 architecture upon which the original IBM PC and its descendants are based.

"Aside from being one of the first personal computers, the Datapoint 2200 has another connection to computer history. Its original design called for a single-chip 8-bit microprocessor for the CPU, rather than a conventional processor built from discrete TTL modules. In 1969, CTC contracted two companies, Intel and Texas Instruments, to make the chip. TI was unable to make a reliable part and dropped out. Intel was unable to make CTC's deadline. Intel and CTC renegotiated their contract, ending up with CTC keeping its money and Intel keeping the eventually completed processor.

"CTC released the Datapoint 2200 using about 100 discrete TTL components (SSI/MSI chips) instead of a microprocessor, while Intel's single-chip design, eventually designated the Intel 8008, was finally released in April 1972. The 8008's seminal importance lies in its becoming the ancestor of Intel's other 8-bit CPUs, which were followed by their assembly language compatible 16-bit CPU's—the first members of the x86-family, as the instruction set was later to be known. Thus, CTC's engineers may be said to have fathered the world's most commonly used and emulated instruction set architecture from the mid-1980s to date" (Wikipedia article on Datapoint 2200, accessed 09-12-2012).

in Network Working Group Request for Comment: 1 Steve Crocker at UCLA embodied peer to peer architecture (P2P) as one of the key concepts of the ARPANET.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was founded by Jerry Sanders and seven others from Fairchild Semiconductor. It began operations as a producer of logic chips.

Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, lunar module pilot, became the first human beings to walk on the moon. A Saturn V rocket launched the Command Module, Service Module ("Columbia") and Lunar Module ("Eagle") from the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39 in Merritt Island, Florida.

The moon landing was almost canceled in the final seconds because of an overload of the Apollo Guidance Computer’s memory, but on advice from Earth, Armstrong and Aldren ignored the warnings and landed safely. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first recognizably modern embedded system used in real-time by astronaut pilots.

The first ARPANET node was installed at the UCLA Network Measurement Center.

Leonard Kleinrock established the first network connection between a network packet switch called an Interface Message Processor, ancestor of today's routers, and a time-shared host computer. (See Reading 13.7.)

The first message was sent over the ARPANET from Leonard Kleinrock’s UCLA computer by student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 pm on 29 October 1969, to the second node at Stanford Research Institute’s computer in Menlo Park, California.

The message was simply “Lo.”

"The message text was the word login; the l and the o letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was lo. About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full login" (Wikipedia article on Arpanet, accessed 12-26-2012).

By December 5, 1969 the ARPANET consisted of four nodes:

1. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Leonard Kleinrock had established a Network Measurement Center. 

2. The Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center, where Douglas Engelbart had created the ground-breaking NLS system, a very important early hypertext system.

3. University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center. 

4. The University of Utah's Computer Science Department, where Ivan Sutherland had moved.