1950 to 1960 Timeline Outline

The Turing Test
(1950)

The First Weather Forecast by Electronic Computer
(1950)

The First Textbook on How to Build an Electronic Computer
(1950)

The First Treatise on Software for an Operational Stored-Program Computer
(1950)

Compiling a Bibliography by Electric Punched Card Tabulating
(1950)

The Hamming Codes
(1950)

11,638 New Books Are Published in the U.K.
(1950)

Whirlwind is in Limited Operation
(1950)

After 1954 More News Was Distributed Electronically than on Paper
(1950)

The First Supercomputer
(1950 – 1954)

The Bic Pen
(1950)

Archival Records Include "Machine-Readable Materials"
(1950)

Coining the Expression, Information Retrieval
(1950)

Schmieder's Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis
(1950)

The Earliest Pioneer in Electronic Art
(1950 – 1953)

"Can Man Build a Superman?"
(January 23, 1950)

The First Credit Card
(February 1950)

Eckert-Mauchly is Sold to Remington Rand
(February 6, 1950)

The First Technical Paper on Computer Chess
(March 1950)

Simon, the First Personal Computer
(November 1950)

The First Russian Stored-Program Computer
(November 6, 1950 – 1951)

IBM's First Electronic Computer, the 701
(1951)

The First OCR System: "GISMO"
(1951)

Applying New Technology to the Searching and Storage of Information
(1951)

Pioneer Televangelist
(1951)

The First Use of Magnetic Tape for Data Storage
(1951)

"The First of the True Robots"
(1951)

"Language and Communication"
(1951)

Calculating Machines and Human Thought
(January 8 – January 13, 1951)

Ferranti Mark I
(February 1951)

One of the Earliest Computer Games
(February – October 1951)

The Origins of NORAD
(February 16, 1951)

The First Rock and Roll Recording, Named After First American Muscle Car?
(March 3 – March 5, 1951)

The First Electronic Computer Commercially Manufactured in the United States
(March 31 – June 14, 1951)

The First Graphical Display for a Computer
(April 20, 1951)

Maurice Wilkes Introduces Microprogamming
(July 9 – July 12, 1951)

The First Computer Salesman in England
(July 9 – July 12, 1951)

The First Application of an Electronic Computer to Molecular or Structural Biology
(July 9 – July 12, 1951)

The First Demonstration of Computer Music
(August 7 – August 9, 1951)

The Oldest Known Recordings of Computer Music
(Circa November 1951)

First Stored-Program Computer to Run Business Programs on a Routine Basis
(November 17, 1951)

Once Finally Operational, the EDVAC is Obsolete
(1952)

Vaccuum Tubes Especially Designed for Digital Circuits
(1952)

Magnetic Core Memory Replaces Electrostatic Memory on the Whirlwind
(1952)

First Electronic Computer Produced in France
(1952)

The First Graphical Computer Game
(1952)

The First Compiler
(1952)

"The Education of a Computer"
(1952)

National Educational Television
(1952)

Decipherment of Linear B
(1952 – 1953)

The First Trackball
(1952)

Probably the Best "Book Store" Film Noir
(1952)

First West Coast Computer Meeting
(April 30 – May 2, 1952)

The IAS Machine is Fully Operational
(June 10, 1952)

Applying Computer Methods to Library Cataloguing and Research
(June 24 – June 27, 1952)

The First Electronic Computer in Germany
(September 1952)

The First Electronic Computer in Canada
(September 8 – September 10, 1952)

The First Journal on Electronic Computing
(October 1952)

UNIVAC Short Code II
(October 24, 1952)

UNIVAC Predicts the Election of Dwight D. Eisenhower
(November 4, 1952)

The National Security Agency is Founded
(November 4, 1952)

IBM Produces an "Electronic Data Processing Machine"
(December 1952)

First Widely Read English Book on Electronic Computing
(1953)

The Uniterm Indexing System
(1953)

Invention of the MASER
(1953)

The Idea of a Genetic Code
(1953 – 1954)

"Fahrenheit 451"
(1953 – 2011)

The Beginning of Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
(1953)

Perhaps the First Computer-Controlled Aesthetic System
(1953)

To What Extent Can Human Mental Processes be Duplicated by Switching Circuits?
(February 1953)

IBM Installs its First Stored Program Electronic Computer, the 701, but They Don't Call it a Computer
(March 27, 1953)

The Double Helix
(April 25, 1953)

Discovery of DNA's Method of Replication
(May 30, 1953)

The First Report on the Application of Electronic Computers to Business
(June 1953)

IBM 702
(September 1953)

The Beginning of Medical Ultrasonography
(October 29, 1953)

The Deuce
(1954)

Early Library Information Retrieval System
(1954)

Coining the Phrase "Social Network"
(1954)

First Computer to Incorporate Indexing & Floating Point Arithmetic
(1954)

The First Computer to be Sold to a Non-Governmental Customer in the U.S.
(1954)

The First High-Level Algebraic Language
(1954)

First Commercial Transistor Radio
(1954)

The First Light Pen
(1954)

Probably the First Widely-Accepted Controlled Vocabulary
(1954 – 1960)

Chartae Latinae Antiquiores
(1954)

Journal of the ACM
(January 1954)

The Georgetown-IBM Experiment in Machine Translation
(January 7, 1954)

Color Television Broadcasting
(January 22, 1954)

The First Color Television
(March 24, 1954)

The First Silicon Transistor
(May 10, 1954)

Grace Hopper Organizes the First Symposium on Software
(May 13 – May 14, 1954)

Alan Turing Dies
(June 7, 1954)

The First Use of a Computer to Write Literary Texts
(October 1954)

The First Routine Real-Time Numerical Weather Forecasting
(December 1954)

One of the Earliest Surviving British Television Dramas
(December 12 – December 14, 1954)

The First Solid State Computer
(1955)

Magnetic Core Storage Units
(1955)

The ENIAC is Retired
(1955)

The First Amino Acid Sequence of a Protein
(1955)

The First Stored-Program Computer Produced for Sale in France
(1955)

The Computer and the Brain
(1955)

Machine Methods for Information Searching
(1955)

The First Transatlantic Telephone Cable is Operational
(1955 – September 25, 1956)

The Courier Monospaced Typeface Debuts
(1955)

The Sensorama
(1955 – 1962)

The First Independent Software Company
(1955)

"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. . . "
(April 15, 1955 – 1956)

The Foundation of Citation Analysis
(July 15, 1955)

Coining the Term, Artificial Intelligence
(August 31, 1955)

The Beginning of Computerization of Banking
(September 1955)

The First Full-Scale Programmable Japanese Computer
(October 1955)

Origins of The Term "Software"
(1956 – January 1958)

The First Video Tape Recorder
(1956)

The First Hard Drive: $10,000 per Megabyte
(1956)

Intelligence Amplification by Machines
(1956)

Proving the Feasibility of Weather Prediction by Numerical Process
(1956)

Standing up to Censorship and McCarthyism
(1956)

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" Filmed
(1956)

The First Sample-Playback Keyboard
(Circa 1956)

First Japanese Stored-Program Computer
(March 1956)

First International Congress on Cybernetics
(June 26 – June 29, 1956)

The First Artificial Intelligence Program
(July 1956)

Magnetic Ink Character Reading
(July 1956)

Sperry Rand Cross-Licenses Patents with IBM
(August 21, 1956)

Chomsky's Hierarchy of Syntactic Forms
(September 1956)

First Computer Conference in Italy
(October 17 – October 18, 1956)

First Japanese Conference on Electronic Computers
(November 1956)

IBM Phases Out Vacuum Tubes
(1957)

Control Unit Based on Microprogramming
(1957)

Physically the Largest Computers Ever Built
(1957)

Mechanized Encoding of Library Information
(1957)

So-Called Second Generation of Computers
(1957)

The First English-Language Data-Processing Compiler
(1957)

FORTRAN: The First High-Level Programming Language to Achieve High Use
(1957)

The First Significant Computer Music Composition
(1957)

Beginning of Doppler Ultrasound
(1957)

Satirizing the Role of Automation in Eliminating Jobs, and Librarians
(1957)

The First Paper on Machine Learning
(1957)

Invention of the Image Scanner; Creation of the First Digital Image
(1957)

The Helvetica Typeface Debuts Under a Different Name
(1957)

Chomsky's Syntactic Structures
(1957)

There are Forty Computers on American University Campuses
(1957)

The First Computerized Concordance of the Bible
(1957)

von Neumann Dies
(February 8, 1957)

On Protein Synthesis
(September 1957)

The First Operational Satellite Navigation System
(October 4, 1957 – 1960)

Sputnik is Launched
(October 4, 1957)

The First Solution of the Three-Dimensional Molecular Structure of a Protein
(1958 – 1960)

First Commercial Electronic Computer Produced in Germany
(1958)

The First Transistorized Supercomputer
(1958)

The First Video Game
(1958)

The IBM 1401, a Relatively Inexpensive Computer
(1958)

Automatic Document Indexing Program
(1958)

An Improved Modem
(1958)

Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE)
(1958)

A Computer Occupying a Half Acre of Floor Space
(1958)

Longevity of Paper is a Function of its Acidity or Alkalinity
(Circa 1958)

The First Obstetrical or Gynecological Sonograms
(1958)

The U.S. Launches Explorer-1
(January 31, 1958)

ARPA is Founded
(February 7, 1958)

Kilby Conceives of the Integrated Circuit
(July 1958)

The Burroughs Atlas Guidance Computer
(July 19, 1958)

BankAmericard
(September 1958)

Game Tree Pruning
(October 1958)

The American Express Card
(October 1, 1958)

The Perceptron
(November 1958)

Keyword in Context (KWIC) Indexing
(November 1958)

First International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence
(November 24 – November 27, 1958)

The First Voice Transmission from the First Communications Satellite
(December 19, 1958)

ERMA and MICR
(1959)

Manufacturing Integrated Circuits
(1959)

The TX-2 Computer for the Study of Human-Computer Interaction
(1959)

The Complicated Discovery of the LASER
(1959)

The Nautical Almanac is Finally Produced by an Electronic Computer
(1959)

First Book on Computer Music
(1959)

The U.S. Banking Industry Adopts Magnetic Ink Character Recognition
(1959 – 1960)

The Most Voluminous Printed Catalogue of a Single Library
(1959 – 1972)

Auto-Encoding of Documents for Information Retrieval
(1959)

Human Versus Machine Intelligence and Communication
(1959)

Origins of Corpus Linguistics
(1959)

The First "Large Scale" Application of Humanities Computing in the U. S.
(1959)

The First Digital Poetry
(1959)

The First Computer Computer Matching Dating Service
(1959)

COBOL
(May 28 – May 29, 1959)

First Formal Definition of Hacker
(June 1959)

The Corona Strategic Imaging Satellites
(June 1959 – May 1972)

Machines Can Learn from Past Errors
(July 1959)

Early Expert Systems for Medical Diagnosis
(July 3, 1959)

The Xerox 914
(September 16, 1959)

The PDP-1: Programmed Data Processor, Not Called a Computer
(December 1959)