1937

Howard Aiken presents to IBM the original concept of the Mark I

November 1937

The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), called Mark I by Harvard University's staff, was a general purpose electro-mechanical computer that was used in the war effort during the last part of World War II. The original concept was presented to IBM by Howard Aiken in November 1937. After a feasibility study by IBM's engineers, Thomas Watson Sr. - chairman and CEO of IBM- personally approved the project and its funding in February 1939.

Links:
Z1 at Wikipedia
Simulation of the Z1 at Konrad Zuse Internet Archive

1938

Zuse Z1 is completed

1938

The Z1 was a mechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse from 1935 to 1936 and built by him from 1936 to 1938. It was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched tape. A reproduction of this machine (pictured) is housed in the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin. The Z1 was the first freely programmable computer in the world which used Boolean logic and binary floating point numbers. It contained almost all parts of a modern computer, e. g. control unit, memory, micro sequences, floating point logic (Only the logical unit was not realised) and input output devices. It was destroyed in the bombardment of Berlin in December 1943, during World War II, together with all construction plans. Z1 was the first in a series of computers designed by Konrad Zuse. The Z2 and Z3 were follow-ups based on many of the same ideas as the Z1.

Links:
Z1 at Wikipedia
Simulation of the Z1 at Konrad Zuse Internet Archive

1939

HP is founded

January 1, 1939

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. One of the company's earliest customers was Walt Disney Productions which bought eight Model 200B oscillators (at $71.50 each) for use in certifying the Fantasound surround sound systems installed in theaters for the movie Fantasia.

Links:
official website
Hp at Wikipedia
Hp history at HP Alumni
The museum of Hp calculators

1940

Stibitz's Complex Number Calculator is completed

September 11, 1940

George Stibitz, of AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories, demonstrated his Complex Number Calculator, the world's first electrical digital computer, to the American Mathematical Society at a meeting at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. A teletypewriter was installed in a lecture hall at Dartmouth and connected via a modified teletypewriter line to Stibitz's electromechanical computer in New York. An attendant at the keyboard entered equations suggested by meeting attendees. The messages travelled down the circuit to New York, and the answers were returned to the teletypewriter via the same route.
This is considered to be the first demonstration of remote access computing.
As Bell Labs built other relay computers during the war, its name was later changed from the initial Complex Number Computer to Bell Labs Model 1. The cost was some 20000 USD.

Links:
official website
US Patent
Detailed description of the calculator at history-computer.com

1941

Zuse Z3 is completed

1941

Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 computer using 2,300 relays. The Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length. The original Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid of Berlin in late 1943. However, Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in the 1960s which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Links:
Z3 at Wikipedia
A Bombe simulator (javascript)

The first British 'Bombe' is completed

1941

The Bombe was an electromechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. It was a substantial development from a device that had been designed in 1938 by Polish Cipher Bureau cryptologist Marian Rejewski, and known as the 'cryptologic bomb' (Polish: bomba kryptologiczna), a mechanical means of decrypting Nazi military communications during WWII.
The initial design of the bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. Many bombes were built. Together they dramatically improved the intelligence gathering and processing capabilities of Allied forces

Links:
Bombe at Wikipedia
Detailed description at cryptomuseum.com
A Bombe simulator (javascript)

1942

John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry build the ABC Computer

1942

Watch: The ABC in action

Professor John Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry built the world's first electronic-digital computer at Iowa State University between 1939 and 1942. To be truth, to say that it was the first is a debate among historians of computer technology. Most would probably credit John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, creators of the ENIAC, with the title.
Conceived in 1937, the ABC computer was not programmable, being designed only to solve systems of linear equations. It was successfully tested in 1942.
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer represented several innovations in computing, including a binary system of arithmetic, parallel processing, regenerative memory, and a separation of memory and computing functions.
Atanasoff and Berry's computer work was not widely known until it was rediscovered in the 1960s. At that time, the ENIAC was considered to be the first computer in the modern sense because Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were the first to patent a digital computing device, the ENIAC computer. But in 1973 a U.S. District Court invalidated the ENIAC patent and concluded that the ENIAC inventors had derived the subject matter of the electronic digital computer from Atanasoff.
Atanasoff was quite generous in stating, "there is enough credit for everyone in the invention and development of the electronic computer."
The legal result was a landmark: Atanasoff was declared the originator of several basic computer ideas, but the computer as a concept was declared un-patentable and thus was freely open to all. This result has been referred to as the "dis-invention of the computer." A full-scale reconstruction of the ABC was completed in 1997 and proved that the ABC machine functioned as Atanasoff had claimed.

Links:
ABC Computer at Wikipedia
ABC at the IOWA University website
ABC at the NC State University website Patent court case

Books:
Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer

1943

Project Whirlwind begins

1943

During World War II, the U.S. Navy approached MIT about the possibility of creating a computer to drive a flight simulator for training bomber crews. The Servomechanisms Lab in MIT building 32 conducted a short survey that concluded such a system was possible. The Navy decided to fund development under Project Whirlwind, and the lab placed Jay Forrester in charge of the project.

Links:
Whirlwind at MIT museum website
Whirlwind at Wikipedia

The Relay Interpolator is completed

1943

With the entry of the United States into the Second World War in December 1941, Bell Labs shifted its priorities toward military projects. The U.S. Army asked Bell Labs to design a machine to assist in testing its M-9 Gun Director. Bell Labs mathematician George Stibitz recommended using a relay-based calculator for the project. The result was the Relay Interpolator, later called the Bell Labs Model II.
It was built from 440 relays and memory capacity of 7 numbers. Speed of multiplication was 4 seconds (multiplication by repeated addition). Since it was programmable by paper tape, it was used for other applications following the war (the concept of programmability arose at Bell Labs only after they noticed the limitation of the Bell Labs Model 1!).

Links:
The Relay Interpolator at history-computer.com website