Now come with me back to 1937, when it all started. A Bell Laboratories scientist named George Stibitz built a demonstration adder that he called the Model K because he made it on his kitchen table. It was a simple demonstration circuit that, in their words, “provided proof of concept for applying Boolean logic to the design of computers.”
Now come with me a couple of years later to 1939, when Hewlett-Packard was founded. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, and when it came out it became a popular piece of testing equipment. Walt Disney Pictures bought eight of their second model, the 200B, to test the recording and speaker systems for the 12 specially equipped theatres that were able to play the movie “Fantasia” in 1940.
Talking about 1939, that was also the year the CNC was demonstrated. It was finished in 1939, but it was not demonstrated until 1940 by the same person who made the Model K, George Stibitz. He demonstrated it in New York City at the American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College and stunned the group by using the CNC to perform calculations with a teletype terminal connected to special telephone lines. This is likely the first example of remote-access computing.
The Z3 was an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse. He worked on it without help or ideas from other computer projects. The Z3 used 2,300 relays, did calculations in binary floating point, and had a 22-bit word length. It was used to do aerodynamic calculations. In late 1943, it was destroyed during an air raid on Berlin. In the 1960s, Zuse helped rebuild the Z3, and this rebuilt version is now on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich the exact same year as that the first bombe was made. The British Bombe was an electromechanical machine used in World War II to help break down nazi Enigma-coded military messages. It was designed by Alan Turing and Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. Many Bombes were built so that the Allies could find the daily rotor starting positions for Enigma machines, which then made it possible to read German messages. The basic idea came from the earlier Polish “Bomba” machine, created in 1938 by codebreaker Marian Rejewski.
After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in 1939, Professor John Vincent Atanasoff secured funding to construct a full-scale machine at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). Working with graduate student Clifford Berry, Atanasoff designed and built the machine between 1939 and 1942. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) later became central to a patent dispute over the invention of the electronic digital computer. The case was settled in 1973, when it was determined that ENIAC co-designer John Mauchly had examined the ABC shortly after it became operational.
Now come to 1943 when the United States army asked Bell Laboratories to make a machine to help in testing there M-9 gun director, a type of analog computer that aims large guns to their targets. The mathematician George Stibitz recomends using a relay based calculator for the project. The result of those was the Relay Interpolator later named the Bell Labs Model 2 The Relay Interpolator used 440 relays and since it was programmable by paper tape it was used for other things after the war ended. That same year the Curta calculator was designed by Curt Herzstark he was an Austrian engineer and he had worked in his familys manufacturing business all the way until 1943 when the nazis arrested him While imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp for the remainder of World War II, he refined his pre-war design for a calculator that used a modified version of Leibniz’s “stepped drum” mechanism. After the war, Herzstark’s Curta entered history as the smallest all-mechanical, four-function calculator ever produced.
Now come with me to 1944 when a British engineer Tommy Flowers built the Colossus to built to crack the Lorenz ciphers used by the Nazis in World War II. Ten Colossus machines were ultimately produced, each containing up to 2,500 vacuum tubes. Continuous rolls of punched paper tape carrying potential solutions to a given code were put through the machine using a system of pulleys. Colossus cut the time needed to decipher Lorenz messages from weeks down to hours. Many historians credit the Colossus machines with significantly shortening the war by revealing enemy plans and intentions. The existence of Colossus remained secret until the 1970s. Thought of by Harvard physics professor Howard Aiken and engineered and constructed by IBM, the Harvard Mark I was a room-sized calculator based on electromechanical relays. A fifty foot long camshaft ran the length of the machine, coordinating thousands of individual components, and it relied on 3,500 relays. The Mark I generated mathematical tables but was quickly overtaken by newer, fully electronic stored program computers.
In a widely circulated paper, mathematician John von Neumann describes the design of a stored-program computer, featuring electronic storage for both instructions and data. This innovation removes the need for older, more awkward programming methods such as plugboards, punched cards, and paper tape. Born in Hungary, von Neumann showed remarkable ability across many fields, including hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, statistics, and the application of mechanical devices to computation. After World War II, he focused on developing the computer at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.
come to 1945 in a widely circulated paper, mathematician John von Neumann describes the design of a stored-program computer, featuring electronic storage for both instructions and data. This innovation removes the need for older, more awkward programming methods such as plugboards, punched cards, and paper tape. Born in Hungary, von Neumann showed remarkable ability across many fields, including hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, statistics, and the application of mechanical devices to computation. After World War II, he focused on developing the computer at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.