1958
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

1959
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

1960
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

22 Aug 1960

Edward Fredkin

Edward “Ed” Fredkin (1934–2023) was an American physicist, pilot, programmer, engineer, hardware designer, and businessman, whose work inside and outside academia has influenced major developments in computer science and in the foundation of theoretical physics for the past 50 years. Although Fredkin’s initial focus was physics, he became involved with..Read More

01 Nov 1960

Paul Baran

Three people can be credited as inventors of packet-switched networks, thus laying the foundations for the Internet: Paul Baran, Leonard Kleinrock, and Donald Davies. n 1959 Paul Baran (1926-2011), a Litvak (Lithuanian Jew), whose family emigrated to the USA when he was a child (interestingly, Leonard Kleinrock was also born..Read More

1961
22 Aug 1961

Steve Russell

Spacewar was not the first computer game ever written (let’s mention only OXO by Alexander Douglas and Tennis for Two by William Higinbotham), but it has an unquestioned place in the dawn of the computer age and the history of computer games. Spacewar was the first to gain widespread recognition,..Read More

14 Dec 1961

Wesley Clark

The work on advanced Laboratory INstrument Computer (LINC) was started in May 1961 by Wesley Clark and a team of engineers, led by Charles Molnar (Clark designed the logic, while Molnar did the engineering) at Lincoln Laboratory of MIT, Massachusetts, and the machine was eventually launched by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in..Read More

1962
17 May 1962

Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard

The first object-oriented programming language was developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by two Norwegian computer scientists—Ole-Johan Dahl (1931-2002) and Kristen Nygaard (1926-2002). risten Nygaard, an MS in mathematics at the University of Oslo, started writing computer simulation programs in 1957. He was seeking a..Read More

28 Aug 1962

Morton Heilig

One of the earliest functioning efforts in virtual reality was made in the late 1950s by the American cinematographer and inventor Morton Leonard Heilig (1926-1997). Heilig described his vision of a multi-sensory theater in a 1955 paper entitled “The Cinema of the Future”, but it took him several years to..Read More

11 Sep 1962

John Loehlin

John Clinton Loehlin (1926–2020) was an American intelligence researcher, behavior geneticist, computer scientist, and psychologist. One of his groundbreaking achievements is the first attempt to endow a computer with emotion. In an effort to define and evaluate the major factors in “personality theory,” Loehlin wrote a computer program that was..Read More

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