George Stibitz
On a late evening in November 1937, a research mathematician at the Bell Labs, George Stibitz, left his working place to go home, taking from the Bell stockroom two telephone relays, a couple of flashlight bulbs, a wire, and a dry cell. At home, Stibitz sat behind the kitchen table..Read More
Louis Couffignal
The French Mathematician and Cybernetics pioneer Louis Pierre Couffignal (1902-1966) was a pupil of the prominent French mathematician and engineer Philbert Maurice d’Ocagne (1862-1938), who instilled him with his own passion for calculating machines. ouis Couffignal published several articles and sent several notes to the French Academy of Science regarding..Read More
Konrad Zuse
While studying civil engineering at the Technical College (Technischen Hochschule) of Berlin Charlottenburg Konrad Zuse stumbled upon a serious problem, during his work with the construction of buildings and roads. This type of construction requires solving huge systems of linear equations, which was very hard to be done by means..Read More
Jorge Luis Borges
In 1939 the famous Argentine writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges published in Buenos Aires an essay entitled La bibliotheca total (The Total Library), describing his fantasy of an all-encompassing archive or universal library. A universal library is supposed to contain all existing information, all books, all works (regardless of..Read More
John Atanasoff
Working on his doctoral thesis in theoretical physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1929, the young scientist John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995) first time met a severe computational problem, being forced to perform complex calculations, using traditional computing tools like the slide rule and mechanical calculator Monroe type. fter returning..Read More
Edward Condon
In April 1940, in the Westinghouse Pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York (together with Westinghouse’s robots Elektro and Sparko) was shown an electromechanical computer, playing the Nim game. The originator of the idea was the American physicist Edward Uhler Condon (1902-1974), who in 1937 was employed at Westinghouse..Read More