Timeline of computing hardware before 1950

This article presents a detailed timeline of events in the history of computing software and hardware: from prehistory until 1949. For narratives explaining the overall developments, see History of computing.

Date	Event
725	Chinese inventor Liang Lingzan built the world's first fully mechanical clock; water clocks, some of them extremely accurate, had been known for centuries previous to this. This was an important technological leap forward; the earliest true computers, made a thousand years later, used technology based on that of clocks.^{[citation needed]}
850	The Banū Mūsā brothers, in their Book of Ingenious Devices, invented "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument", in this case a hydropowered organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically. This "cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century."^[1] They also invented an automatic flute player which appears to have been the first programmable machine.^[2]
c. 1000	Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the Planisphere, an analog computer.^[3] He also invented the first mechanical lunisolar calendar which employed a gear train and eight gear-wheels.^[4] This was an early example of a fixed-wired knowledge processing machine.^[5]^{[dubious – discuss]}
c. 1015	Arab astronomer, Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm al-Zarqālī (Arzachel) of al-Andalus, invented the Equatorium^{[citation needed]}, a mechanical analog computer device used for finding the longitudes and positions of the Moon, Sun and planets without calculation, using a geometrical model to represent the celestial body's mean and anomalistic position.^[6]
c. 1150	Arab astronomer, Jabir ibn Aflah (Geber), may have invented or inspired the Torquetum, an observational instrument and mechanical analog computer device used to transform between spherical coordinate systems.^[7] It was designed to take and convert measurements made in three sets of coordinates: horizon, equatorial, and ecliptic.
1206	Arab engineer, Al-Jazari, invented numerous automata and made numerous other technological innovations. One of these is a design for a programmable humanoid-shaped mannequin: this seems to have been the first serious, scientific (as opposed to magical) plan for a robot.^[8] He also invented the "castle clock", an astronomical clock which is considered to be the earliest programmable analog computer.^{[citation needed]} It displayed the zodiac, the solar and lunar orbits, a crescent moon-shaped pointer travelling across a gateway causing automatic doors to open every hour,^[9]^[10] and five robotic musicians who play music when struck by levers operated by a camshaft attached to a water wheel. The length of day and night could be re-programmed every day in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year.^[11]
1235	Persian astronomer Abi Bakr of Isfahan invented a brass astrolabe with a geared calendar movement based on the design of Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī's mechanical calendar analog computer.^[12] Abi Bakr's geared astrolabe uses a set of gear-wheels and is the oldest surviving complete mechanical geared machine in existence.^[13]^[14]
1300	Ramon Llull invented the Lullian Circle: a notional machine for calculating answers to philosophical questions (in this case, to do with Christianity) via logical combinatorics. This idea was taken up by Leibniz centuries later, and is thus one of the founding elements in computing and information science.
c. 1416	Jamshīd al-Kāshī invented the Plate of Conjunctions, an analog computer instrument used to determine the time of day at which planetary conjunctions will occur,^[15] and for performing linear interpolation. He also invented a mechanical "planetary computer" which he called the Plate of Zones, which could graphically solve a number of planetary problems, including the prediction of the true positions in longitude of the Sun and Moon,^[16] and the planets;^[17] the latitudes of the Sun, Moon, and planets; and the ecliptic of the Sun. The instrument also incorporated an alhidade and ruler.^[18]
1493	Leonardo da Vinci produced drawings of a device consisting of interlocking cog wheels which can be interpreted as a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction. A working model inspired by this plan was built in 1968 but it remains controversial whether Leonardo really had a calculator in mind.^[19] Da Vinci also made plans for a mechanical man: an early design for a robot.
1614	Scotsman John Napier reinvented a form of logarithms and an ingenious system of movable rods (1617, referred to as Napier's Rods or Napier's bones). These rods were based on the lattice or gelosia multiplication algorithm and allowed the operator to multiply, divide, and calculate square and cube roots by moving the rods around and placing them in specially constructed boards.
1622	William Oughtred developed slide rules based on logarithms as developed by John Napier.
1623	German polymath Wilhelm Schickard drew a device that he called a calculating clock on two letters that he sent to Johannes Kepler; one in 1623 and the other in 1624. A fire later destroyed the machine as it was being built in 1624 and he decided to abandon his project.^[20] This machine became known to the world only in 1957 when the two letters were discovered. Some replicas were built in 1961.^[21] This machine had no impact on the development of mechanical calculators.^[22]

Date	Place	Event
1642	France	French polymath Blaise Pascal invented the mechanical calculator.^[23] Called machine arithmétique, Pascal's calculator and eventually Pascaline, its public introduction in 1645 started the development of mechanical calculators first in Europe and then in the rest of the world. It was the first machine to have a controlled carry mechanism.^[24] Pascal built 50 prototypes before releasing his first machine (eventually twenty machines were built). The Pascaline inspired the works of Gottfried Leibniz (1671), Thomas de Colmar (1820) and Dorr E. Felt (1887).
1666	United Kingdom	Sir Samuel Morland (1625–1695), of England, produced a non-decimal adding machine,^[25] suitable for use with English money. Instead of a carry mechanism, it registered carries on auxiliary dials, from which the user re-entered them as addends.
1672	Germany	German mathematician, Gottfried Leibniz started designing a machine which multiplied, the 'Stepped Reckoner'. It could multiply numbers of up to 5 and 12 digits to give a 16 digit result. Two machines were built, one in 1694 (it was discovered in an attic in 1879), and one in 1706.^[26]
1685	Germany	In an article titled "Machina arithmetica in qua non additio tantum et subtractio sed et multiplicatio nullo, diviso vero paene nullo animi labore peragantur", Gottfried Leibniz described a machine that used wheels with movable teeth which, when coupled to a Pascaline, could perform all four mathematical operations.^[27] There is no evidence that Leibniz ever constructed this pinwheel machine.
1709	Italy	Giovanni Poleni was the first to build a calculator that used a pinwheel design. It was made of wood and was built in the shape of a calculating clock.^[28]
1726	United Kingdom	Jonathan Swift described (satirically) a machine ("engine") in his Gulliver's Travels. The "engine" consisted of a wooden frame with wooden blocks containing parts of speech. When the engine's 40 levers are simultaneously turned, the machine displayed grammatical sentence fragments.
1774	Germany	Philipp Matthäus Hahn, in what is now Germany, made a successful portable calculator able to perform all four mathematical operations.
1775	United Kingdom	Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, of England, designed and constructed a successful multiplying calculator similar to Leibniz's.
1786	Germany	J. H. Müller, an engineer in the Hessian army, first conceived of the idea of a difference engine (first written reference to the basic principles of a difference machine is dated to 1784).
1801 ^[29]	France	Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed the Jacquard loom, an automatic loom controlled by punched cards.
1820	France	Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar invented the 'Arithmometer' which after thirty more years of development became, in 1851, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. An operator could perform long multiplications and divisions quickly and effectively by using a movable accumulator for the result. This machine was based on the earlier works of Pascal and Leibniz.

Date	Event
1822	United Kingdom	Charles Babbage designed his first mechanical computer, the first prototype of the decimal difference engine for tabulating polynomials.
1831	Italy	Giovanni Plana designed a Perpetual Calendar machine, which can calculate the precise calendar for over 4000 years, accounting for leap years and variation in day length.
1832	Russia	Semen Korsakov proposed the usage of punched cards^{[citation needed]} for information storage and search. He designed several machines to demonstrate his ideas, including the so-called linear homeoscope.
1832	United Kingdom	Babbage and Joseph Clement produced a prototype segment of his difference engine,^[30] which operated on 6-digit numbers and second-order differences (i.e., it could tabulate quadratic polynomials). The complete engine, which would have been room-sized, was planned to operate both on sixth-order differences with numbers of about 20 digits, and on third-order differences with numbers of 30 digits. Each addition would have been done in two phases, the second one taking care of any carries generated in the first. The output digits were to be punched into a soft metal plate, from which a printing plate might have been made. But there were various difficulties, and no more than this prototype piece was ever finished.
c. 1833	United Kingdom	Babbage conceived, and began to design, his decimal 'Analytical Engine'.^[31] A program for it was to be stored on read-only memory, in the form of punched cards. Babbage continued to work on the design for years, though after about 1840 design changes seem to have been minor. The machine would have operated on 40-digit numbers; the 'mill' (CPU) would have had 2 main accumulators and some auxiliary ones for specific purposes, while the 'store' (memory) would have held a thousand 50-digit numbers. There would have been several punched card readers, for both programs and data; the cards were to be chained and the motion of each chain reversible. The machine would have performed conditional jumps. There would also have been a form of microcoding: the meaning of instructions were to depend on the positioning of metal studs in a slotted barrel, called the "control barrel". The machine envisioned would have been capable of an addition in 3 seconds and a multiplication or division in 2–4 minutes. It was to be powered by a steam engine. In the end, no more than a few parts were actually built.
1835	United States	Joseph Henry invented the electromechanical relay.
1840	Italy	Charles Babbage's first public exposition about his Analytical Engine at Accademia delle Scienze, Turin.^[32]
1842	France	Timoleon Maurel patented the Arithmaurel, a mechanical calculator with a very intuitive user interface, especially for multiplying and dividing numbers because the result was displayed as soon as the operands were entered. It received a gold medal at the French national show in Paris in 1849.^[33] Unfortunately its complexity and the fragility of its design prevented it from being manufactured.^[34]
1842	United Kingdom	Construction of Babbage's difference engine was cancelled as an official project.^[35] The cost overruns had been considerable (£17,470 was spent, which, in 2025 money, would be about £1,677,000 ^[36]).
1843	Sweden	Per Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard produced a 5-digit numbers and third-order model of the difference engine with printer; the Swedish government agreed to fund their next development in 1851.
1846	United Kingdom	Babbage began to work on an improved difference engine (the Difference Engine No.2), producing a completely executed set of plans by 1849.^[37] The machine would have operated on 7th-order differences and 31-digit numbers, but nobody was found to pay to have it built. In 1989–1991 a team at London's Science Museum did build one from the surviving plans. They built components using modern methods, but with tolerances no better than Clement could have provided... and, after a bit of tinkering and detail-debugging, they found that the machine works properly. In 2000, the printer was also completed.
1847	United Kingdom	British Mathematician George Boole developed binary algebra (Boolean algebra)^[38] which has been widely used in binary computer design and operation, beginning about a century later. See 1939.

Date	Place	Event
1851	France	After 30 years of development, Thomas de Colmar launched the mechanical calculator industry by starting the manufacturing of a much simplified Arithmometer (invented in 1820). Aside from its clones, which started thirty years later,^[39] it was the only calculating machine available anywhere in the world for forty years (Dorr E. Felt only sold one hundred comptometers and a few comptographs from 1887 to 1890^[40]). Its simplicity made it the most reliable calculator to date. It was a big machine (a 20 digit arithmometer was long enough to occupy most of a desktop). Even though the arithmometer was only manufactured until 1915, twenty European companies manufactured improved clones of its design until the beginning of WWII. Prominent clone manufacturers included Burkhardt, Layton, Saxonia, Gräber, Peerless, Mercedes-Euklid, XxX, and Archimedes.
1853	Sweden	To Babbage's delight, the Scheutzes completed the first full-scale difference engine, which they called a Tabulating Machine. It operated on 15-digit numbers and 4th-order differences, and produced printed output just as Babbage's would have. A second machine was later built in 1859 to the same design by the firm of Bryan Donkin of London.
1856	United States	The first Tabulating Machine (see 1853) was bought by the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, and the second was ordered in 1857 by the British government. The Albany machine was used to produce a set of astronomical tables; but the Observatory's director was fired for this extravagant purchase, and the machine never seriously used again, eventually ending up in a museum. The second machine had a long and useful life.
c. 1859	Sweden	Martin Wiberg produced a reworked difference-engine-like machine intended to prepare interest rates (first publication in 1860) and logarithmic tables (first publication in 1875).
1866	United Kingdom	The first practical logic machine (logical abacus) was built by William Stanley Jevons.
1871	United Kingdom	Babbage produced a prototype section of the Analytical Engine's mill and printer.^[41]
1878	Spain	Ramón Verea, living in New York City, invented a calculator with an internal multiplication table; this was much faster than the shifting carriage, or other digital methods of the time. He wasn't interested in putting it into production, however; it seems he just wanted to show that a Spaniard could invent as well as an American.
1878	United Kingdom	A committee investigated the feasibility of completing the Analytical Engine, and concluded that it would be impossible now that Babbage was dead. The project was then largely forgotten, except by a very few; Howard Aiken was a notable exception.
1884	United States	Dorr Felt, of Chicago, developed his Comptometer. This was the first calculator in which operands are entered by pressing keys rather than having to be, for example, dialled in. It was feasible because of Felt's invention of a carry mechanism fast enough to act while the keys return from being pressed. Felt and Tarrant started a partnership to manufacture the comptometer in 1887.
1886	United States	First use of Herman Hollerith tabulating system in the Baltimore Department of Health.
1887	United States	Herman Hollerith filed a patent application for an integrating tabulator (granted in 1890), which could add numbers encoded on punched cards. First recorded use of this device was in 1889 in the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army. In 1896 Hollerith introduced improved model.^[42]
1889	United States	Dorr Felt invented the first printing desk calculator.
1890	United States Sweden Russia	A multiplying calculator more compact than the Arithmometer entered mass production.^[43]^[44] The design was the independent, and more or less simultaneous, invention of Frank S. Baldwin, of the United States, and Willgodt Theophil Odhner, a Swede living in Russia. Fluted drums were replaced by a "variable-toothed gear" design: a disk with radial pegs that could be made to protrude or retract from it.
1890	United States	The 1880 US census had taken 7 years to complete since all processing had been done by hand from journal sheets. The increasing population suggested that by the 1890 census, data processing would take longer than the 10 years before the next census—so a competition was held to find a better method. It was won by a Census Department employee, Herman Hollerith, who went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company, later to become IBM. He invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine. Prior uses of machine readable media had been for control (Automatons, Piano rolls, looms, ...), not data. "After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on punched cards..."^[45] His machines used mechanical relays to increment mechanical counters. This method was used in the 1890 census. The net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the scheduled publications, and the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators, was to reduce the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census.^[46] The inspiration for this invention was Hollerith's observation of railroad conductors during a trip in the Western United States; they encoded a crude description of the passenger (tall, bald, male) in the way they punched the ticket.
1891	United States	William S. Burroughs of St. Louis invented a machine similar to Felt's (see 1884) in 1885 but unlike the comptometer it was a 'key-set' machine which only processed each number after a crank handle was pulled. The true manufacturing of this machine started in 1891 even though Burroughs had started his American Arithmometer Company in 1886 (it later became Burroughs Corporation and is now called Unisys).
1899	Japan	Ryōichi Yazu began^{[citation needed]} the development of a mechanical calculating machine (automatic abacus).^[47] Ryoichi independently conducted research on calculating machines, and it took three years to complete his biquinary mechanical desktop calculating machine, before applying for a patent in 1902.^[48] It was Japan's first successful mechanical computer.^[49]^{[dubious – discuss]}^[48]
c. 1900	United States	The Standard Adding Machine Company released the first 10-key adding machine in about 1900. The inventor, William Hopkins, filed his first patent on October 4, 1892. The 10 keys were set on a single row.
1902	United States	First model of Dalton adding machine is built.^[50] Remington advertised the Dalton adding machine as the first 10-key printing adding machine.^[51] The 10 keys were set on two rows. Six machines had been manufactured by the end of 1906.
1905	Japan	Ichitaro Kawaguchi, an engineer at the Ministry of Communications and Transportation, built the Kawaguchi Electric Tabulation Machine,^[49] used to tabulate some of the results of the 1904 Demographics Statistical Study.^[52]
1906	United Kingdom	Henry Babbage, Charles's son, with the help of the firm of R. W. Munro, completed the 'mill' from his father's Analytical Engine, to show that it would have worked. It does. The complete machine was not produced.
1906	United States	Audion (vacuum tube or thermionic valve) invented by Lee De Forest.
1906	United States	Herman Hollerith introduces a tabulator with a plugboard that can be rewired to adapt the machine for different applications. Plugboards were widely used to direct machine calculations until displaced by stored programs in the 1950s.^[53]
1909	Republic of Ireland	Following Babbage, although unaware of his earlier work, Percy Ludgate in 1909 published the 2nd of the only two designs for mechanical analytical engines in history.^[54]
1913	Spain	In his work Essays on Automatics (1913), Leonardo Torres y Quevedo formulates what will be a new branch of engineering: automation and designed a Babbage type of calculating machine that used electromechanical parts which introduced the idea of floating-point arithmetic.^[55]
1919	United Kingdom	William Henry Eccles and F. W. Jordan published the first flip-flop circuit design.
1924	Germany	Walther Bothe built an AND logic gate - the coincidence circuit, for use in physics experiments, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics 1954. Digital circuitries of all kinds make heavy use of this technique.
1928	United States	IBM standardizes on punched cards with 80 columns of data and rectangular holes. Widely known as IBM Cards, they dominate the data processing industry for almost half a century.
1929	United States	Westinghouse AC Calculating board. An AC network analyzer used for alternating current (AC) electrical transmission line simulations up until the 1960s.
c. 1930	United States	Vannevar Bush built a partly electronic differential analyzer capable of solving differential equations.
c. 1930	United Kingdom	Welsh physicist C. E. Wynn-Williams, at Cambridge, England, used a ring of thyratron tubes to construct a binary digital counter that counted emitted alpha particles.^[56]

Date	Place	Event
1931	Austria	Kurt Gödel of Vienna University, Austria, published a paper on a universal formal language based on arithmetic operations. He used it to encode arbitrary formal statements and proofs, and showed that formal systems such as traditional mathematics are either inconsistent in a certain sense, or contain unprovable but true statements. This result is often called the fundamental result of theoretical computer science.
1931	United States	IBM introduced the IBM 601 Multiplying Punch, an electromechanical machine that could read two numbers, up to 8 digits long, from a card and punch their product onto the same card.^[57]
1934	Japan, Soviet Union, United States	From 1934 to 1937, NEC engineer Akira Nakashima, Claude Shannon and Viktor Shestakov published a series of papers introducing switching circuit theory.^[58]^[59]^[60]^[61]
1934	United States	Wallace Eckert of Columbia University connects an IBM 285 Tabulator, an 016 Duplicating Punch and an IBM 601 Multiplying Punch with a cam-controlled sequencer switch that he designed. The combined system was used to automate the integration of differential equations.^[62]
1936	United Kingdom	Alan Turing of Cambridge University, England, published a paper on 'computable numbers'^[63] which reformulated Kurt Gödel's results (see related work by Alonzo Church). His paper addressed the famous 'Entscheidungsproblem' whose solution was sought in the paper by reasoning (as a mathematical device) about a simple and theoretical computer, known today as a Turing machine. In many ways, this device was more convenient than Gödel's arithmetics-based universal formal system.
1937	United States	George Stibitz of the Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs), New York City, constructed a demonstration 1-bit binary adder using relays. This was one of the first binary computers, although at this stage it was only a demonstration machine; improvements continued leading to the Complex Number Calculator of January 1940.
1937	United States	Claude E. Shannon published a paper on the implementation of symbolic logic using relays as his MIT Master's thesis.
1938	Germany	Konrad Zuse of Berlin, completed the 'Z1', the first mechanical binary programmable computer. It was based on Boolean Algebra and had some of the basic ingredients of modern machines, using the binary system and floating-point arithmetic. Zuse's 1936 patent application (Z23139/GMD Nr. 005/021) also suggested a 'von Neumann' architecture (re-invented about 1945) with program and data modifiable in storage. Originally the machine was called the 'V1' but retroactively renamed after the war, to avoid confusion with the V-1 flying bomb. It worked with floating-point numbers (7-bit exponent, 16-bit mantissa, and sign bit). The memory used sliding metal parts to store 16 such numbers, and worked well; but the arithmetic unit was less successful, occasionally suffering from certain mechanical engineering problems. The program was read from holes punched in discarded 35 mm movie film. Data values could have been entered from a numeric keyboard, and outputs were displayed on electric lamps. The machine was not a general purpose computer (i.e., Turing complete) because it lacked loop capabilities.
1939	United States	William Hewlett and David Packard established the Hewlett-Packard Company in Packard's garage in Palo Alto, California with an initial investment of $538 (equivalent to $12,018 in 2024); this was considered to be the symbolic founding of Silicon Valley. HP would grow to become one of the largest technology companies in the world today.
1939 Nov	United States	John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry of Iowa State College (now the Iowa State University), Ames, Iowa, completed a prototype 16-bit adder. This was the first machine to calculate using vacuum tubes.
1939 - 1940	Germany	Helmut Schreyer completed a prototype 10-bit adder^{[citation needed]} using vacuum tubes, and a prototype memory using neon lamps.^{[citation needed]}
1940	United States	At Bell Labs, Samuel Williams and George Stibitz completed a calculator which could operate on complex numbers, and named it the 'Complex Number Calculator'; it was later known as the 'Model I Relay Calculator'. It used telephone switching parts for logic: 450 relays and 10 crossbar switches. Numbers were represented in 'plus 3 BCD'; that is, for each decimal digit, 0 is represented by binary 0011, 1 by 0100, and so on up to 1100 for 9; this scheme requires fewer relays than straight BCD. Rather than requiring users to come to the machine to use it, the calculator was provided with three remote keyboards, at various places in the building, in the form of teletypes. Only one could be used at a time, and the output was automatically displayed on the same one. On 9 September 1940, a teletype was set up at a Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a connection to New York, and those attending the conference could use the machine remotely.
1940	Germany	Konrad Zuse completed the 'Z2' (originally 'V2'), which combined the Z1's existing mechanical memory unit with a new arithmetic unit using relay logic. Like the Z1, the Z2 lacked loop capabilities. The project was interrupted for a year when Zuse was drafted in 1939, but continued after he was released. In 1940 Zuse presented the Z2 to an audience of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt ("German Laboratory for Aviation") in Berlin-Adlershof.

Timeline of computing hardware before 1950

Pre-computing

The analog computer

Antiquity

Medieval–1640

1641–1820

Invention of the mechanical computer

1822-1851

1851–1930

1931–1940

Invention of the programmable computer

1941–1949

Computing timeline

References

Sources

External links

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