Computer Timeline – Page 37 – Yet another site for bright people, crafted by Georgi Dalakov

22 Nov 1954

John Backus

John Warner Backus (1924-2007), a bachelor of mathematics from Columbia University, saw his first computer in 1950, when he was hired as a programmer in the IBM Computer Center on Madison Avenue, to take care of the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), an electromechanical computer (a hybrid of some 13000..Read More

10 Dec 1954

George Devol

The first industrial robot in the world, called Unimate, was made in the 1950s by the American inventor and entrepreneur George Charles Devol (1912–2011). Devol’s patent for the first digitally operated programmable robotic arm (see US pat. Nr. 2988237) represents the foundation of the modern robotics industry and earned him..Read More

08 Mar 1956

Gordon Pask

At the beginning of 1956, two young Cambridge scientists, the psychologist Gordon Pask (1928-1996) and physicist Robin McKinnon-Wood (1931-1995), created a hybrid teaching and learning analog computer, in response to a request by the Solartron Electronic Group for a machine to exhibit at the Physical Society Exhibition in London. ordon..Read More

15 Jul 1956

Logic Theorist (Simon, Newell and Shaw)

The first artificial intelligence program (the first program especially engineered to mimic the problem-solving skills of a human being) was created in 1955-56 by Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and John Shaw. erbert Alexander Simon (1916–2001), a Nobel Prize (in Economics) winner from 1978, was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and..Read More

12 Feb 1957

Russell Kirsch (scanner)

In the world of computers, the scanner is a device that optically scans images, printed or written text, a three-dimensional object, etc. representing it in a digital format. The now ubiquitous device can be found in offices as a desktop (or flatbed) scanner, where the document is placed on a..Read More

03 Mar 1957

Alex Bernstein

Quite a few engineers and computer pioneers worked on devices and programs, able to play chess (or to resolve simple chess problems), let’s mention only Leonardo Torres, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and Dietrich Prinz. By the middle 1950s computers became powerful enough, so it was a matter of time to..Read More

27 Feb 1958

John McCarthy

John McCarthy (1927-2011) is a legendary person in the fields of computer science and AI (artificial intelligence). Primarily known as the creator of one of the longest-lived computer languages in use—LISP (in 1958), McCarthy was one of the first people, to be interested in AI (since 1948) and coined the..Read More

18 Oct 1958

William Higinbotham

The American physicist and a leader in the nonproliferation movement William (Willy) Alfred Higinbotham (1910—1994) is credited with creating the first computer video game to display motion and allow interactive control with hand-held controllers in the middle of 1958. illiam Higinbotham earned an undergraduate degree from Williams College in 1932..Read More

11 Nov 1959

Ben Gurley (PDP-1)

In 1959, a small and relatively new company (founded in 1957) for logic modules and other laboratory equipment, located in an old woolen mill in Maynard Massachusetts, named Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), decided to build a computer. Ken Olsen, a cofounder of DEC, remembered: We had a dream of interactive..Read More

03 Mar 1960

Joseph Licklider

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990), called also J.C.R. or “Lick”, was an American scientist, an imaginative experimenter, and a theoretician, who left major marks not only in computer science but also in psychoacoustic. In the 1950s, working as an associate professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and director of..Read More