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World Brains
Belgian Paul Otlet has a modest goal: collect, organize, and share all the world’s knowledge. Otlet had co-created a massive “search engine” starting in the early 1900s. His Mundaneum now combines enhanced card catalogs with sixteen million entries, photos, documents, microfilm, and more. -
Operator at Complex Number Calculator (CNC) The Complex Number Calculator (CNC) is completed
In 1939, Bell Telephone Laboratories completes this calculator, designed by scientist George Stibitz. In 1940, Stibitz demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College. -
ERA 1101 ERA 1101 introduced
One of the first commercially produced computers, the company´s first customer was the US Navy. The 1101, designed by ERA but built by Remington-Rand, was intended for high-speed computing and stored 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, one of the earliest magnetic storage devices and a technology which ERA had done much to perfect in its own laboratories. -
Participants in COBOL's 25th Anniversary Celebration at The Computer Museum on May 16, 1985, surround the COBOL Tombstone, a gift in 1960 from Howard Bromberg (far right) to the COBOL Committee.” COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language)
A team drawn from several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon develop COBOL—an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language. Many of its specifications borrow heavily from the earlier FLOW-MATIC language. -
Pascal is introduced
The Pascal programming language, named after Blaise Pascal, a French physicist, mathematician and inventor turned philosopher, is introduced by Professor Niklaus Wirth. His aim with Pascal was to develop a programming language applicable to both commercial and scientific applications, and which could also be used to teach programming techniques to college students. -
ST506 5MB HDD Seagate ST506 hard disk drive
Seagate Technology creates the first hard disk drive for microcomputers, the ST506. The disk held 5 megabytes of data, five times as much as a standard floppy disk, and fit in the space of a floppy disk drive. The hard disk drive itself was a rigid metallic platter coated on both sides with a thin layer of magnetic material that stores digital data. -
Intel Touchstone Delta supercomputer Intel's Touchstone Delta supercomputer system comes online
Reaching 32 gigaflops (32 billion floating point operations per second), Intel’s Touchstone Delta has 512 processors operating independently, arranged in a two-dimensional communications “mesh.” Caltech researchers used this supercomputer prototype for projects such as real-time processing of satellite images, and for simulating molecular models in AIDS research. -
USB Flash drive
USB Flash drives are introduced. Sometimes referred to as jump drives or memory sticks, these drives consisted of flash memory encased in a small form factor container with a USB interface. They could be used for data storage and in the backing up and transferring of files between various devices. -
Tianhe-1A Supercomputer China's Tianhe supercomputers are operational
With a peak speed of over a petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second), the Tianhe 1 (translation: Milky Way 1) is developed by the Chinese National University of Defense Technology using Intel Xeon processors combined with AMD graphic processing units (GPUs). The upgraded and faster Tianhe-1A used Intel Xeon CPUs as well, but switched to nVidia's Tesla GPUs and added more than 2,000 Fei-Tang (SPARC-based) processors.
