John Atanasoff, a professor of mathematics and physics at Iowa State College, built an electronic binary computer that represents the first applications of electronics to automatic calculation. Despite never being fully operational, his ideas were major contributions to modern electronic computers. He was long familiar with the problems of solving…
In 1938 Orson Wells’ infamous “War of the Worlds” was heard on the radio. Scripted as a series of short news briefs describing an alien invasion, it caused massive panic and revealed the power of mass media. Despite four announcements that it was fictional, thousands of calls flooded police departments…
Considered the first electromechanical computers, they were created by Konrad Zuse in 1938. He began construction of the Z1 in 1936, setting out to make a computing machine with faster, more extensive calculating power than the existing desk calculators. Deciding on a binary system for greater calculating speed, he set…
Born June 22, 1910, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, German scientist Konrad Zuse built the first of two electromechanical computers, the Z1 and Z2. A civil engineering student in 1934, he quickly saw the potential value of a machine that solved tedious algebra in minutes. He built them using binary, setting the use of…
Conceived by John Atanasoff in 1937, the Atanasoff-Berry (or ABC) Computer was one of the first modern electronic digital computers. Designed to solve linear equations, it was tested in 1942. It formed the foundation of many modern computing concepts including binary arithmetic and electronic switching. Work was discontinued in the…
Stanford University classmates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded HP in 1939. The company’s first product, built in a Palo Alto garage, was an audio oscillator—an electronic test instrument used by sound engineers. One of HP’s first customers was Walt Disney Studios, which purchased eight oscillators to develop and test…
Written by the mathematician Alan Turing and published in 1936, this paper demonstrates that there are problems to which no mechanically computable solution exists by detailing the design of a theoretical digital computer. German mathematician David Hilbert theorized in 1928 that all math problems could be solved and that a…
Born June 23rd, 1912 in London, England, Turing displayed a penchant for math at an early age. He attended Kings College, Cambridge, and Princeton, where he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. He published “On Computable Numbers” in 1936, which established the theoretical foundations of digital, stored-program computing. During WWII he…
Designed by the Department of Communications of the British Foreign Office, the Colossus was an entirely electronic deciphering machine. Driven by a need to break the codes being used by the Germans, who had their own electromechanical machine called Enigma creating them, they were built in secrecy and the first…
George Stibitz created the Complex Number Calculator (CNC) at Bell Labs in 1937. Called the Model K, it was capable of calculating complex numbers using binary addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It was entirely relay-based and was based on Stibitz’s theory that the electromechanical relays of telephone switching systems could…