1918
Enigma
The German Enigma is surely the best-known mechanical cipher machine. Invented in 1918, it was developed as a commercial and military encipherment system. Enigma
1918
Enigma
The German Enigma is surely the best-known mechanical cipher machine. Invented in 1918, it was developed as a commercial and military encipherment system. Enigma is an electro-mechanical device that utilised a stepping wheel system to scramble a plain text message to produce cipher text via polyalphabetic substitution. The number of cipher text alphabets is enormous, leading Germanys military authorities to believe (wrongly, as it turned out) in the absolute security of this system.
1937
Zuses Z1
The first known working binary digital computer was called the Z1 and was built by Konrad Zuse. It had a mechanical memory system. A prototype with electromagnetic relays called the Z2 was built a year later, with storage capacity for 16 words, plus card punch and reader I/O. It had 200 relays and operated with 16-bit integer arithmetic. The idea was to use this basic design in a bigger system like the Z1. The result was the Z3, which had a 64-word capacity, floating-point arithmetic, 22-bit word length and 2,400 relays. Of these, 600 were for calculations and 1,800 for memory.
Construction was interrupted in 1939 when Zuse was called up for military service, so the Z3 wasnt completed until 1941. The Z3 was the first fully functioning, program-controlled, electromechanical digital computer. The first three Z computers were destroyed during the war, but a fourth, the Z4, was saved and eventually ended up in Zurich. The Z4 was started in 1942 and was intended to have a storage capacity of 1,024 words.
1937
Turing Machine
In 1937, while a graduate student, Alan Turing wrote his amusingly entitled On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. The premise of Turings paper was that some classes of mathematical problems dont lend themselves to algorithmic representations and so arent easily solved by machines. Since Turing didnt have access to a real computer, because they didnt exist at the time, he invented his own as an abstract paper exercise, which consisted of a grid of squares, each containing a zero or a one.
This theoretical model became known as a Turing Machine, and is one of the first descriptions of a software program working with probabilities in a binary computing environment.
1943
Colossus
A few years after his theoretical work on Turing Machines, Alan Turing became a key player in the design and creation of Colossus, which was one of the worlds earliest working programmable electronic digital computers. Colossus was used during World War Two to break the code created by the German Geheimfernschreiber (secret telegraph), which was far stronger than Enigma. The Colossus Mark 1 consisted of 1,500 vacuum tubes, and was soon superseded by (and upgraded to) the Mark 2. Colossus read data at 5,000 characters per second and could perform up to 100 Boolean operations simultaneously through each of its five tape channels across a five-character matrix, in 200 microseconds. Although its hard to equate this with todays calculating power, Colossuss extreme specialisation makes it fast at breaking codes even compared to todays computers. In 1996, a Colossus went on show at Bletchley Park museum.
1945
ENIAC
Considered by some to be the first electronic digital computer, this massive American machine with 18,000 tubes was predated by both Colossus and Konrad Zuses first four Z systems.
1948
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is the fancy name for systems theory, which studies the way feedback loops work. It was invented during the 1940s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and paved the way for automation and computing. A multidisciplinary team including Norbert Wiener (mathematician), Warren McCulloch (neurophysiologist) and Jay Forrester (electronics engineer) modelled theories of how living organisms worked on self-regulating mechanical processes, and vice versa. Wieners Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, both published in 1948, marked the arrival of a new epoch. The latter founded information theory.
1950
Pizza/fast food
Would the great software applications that rule computing ever have existed without the humble pizza? The convenience of fast food, and its round-the-clock availability, freed the time of computer programmers so they could concentrate on the code without the distraction of preparing and taking breaks for meals.
The word pizza itself appears just before 1,000 AD, in the area between Naples and Rome, meaning pie. The word itself is probably related to the word pitta, meaning bread. However, it wasnt until the 1950s in America that pizza emerged as a dominant form of fast food. Since then, it has filled stomachs during many a late night coding session. See Douglas Couplands Microserfs on the pivotal importance of pizza in the history of Microsoft.
1959
The integrated circuit
The invention of the integrated circuit was central to the industry as we know it. In the late 1950s, electrical engineers were confounded by a problem they called the Tyranny of Numbers. This grandiose title referred to the problem of manufacturing the constituent electrical parts to make increasing complex circuits from discrete components. The problem was that as the design for circuits improved, the number of components required grew exponentially, far in excess of the number that could actually be physically assembled.
The solution to this problem came from two men - John Kilby was working at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductors. Their answer was to fabricate complete networks of components onto a single crystal of semiconductor material. This breakthrough, named the monolithic integrated circuit, enabled devices to be made much smaller, more complex and considerably faster, and is credited as being the discovery that kicked off the computer revolution of the late 20th century. In fact, Robert Royce went on to become one of the key instigators of this revolution as co-founder of chip giant Intel.