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The Age of Spiritual Machines "Cronology - The years 1951 through 1979"

51133279_c.gif (5853 bytes)The Age of Spiritual Machines  
- by Raymond Kurzweil © 1990, MIT Press

Excerpts from his book:

Part 3 - The years 1951 through 1979.

Links to Chronology Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4

Year  Event
1950 The U.S. census is first handled by a programmable computer, UNIVAC, developed by Eckert and Mauchley. It is the first commercially marketed computer.
1950 Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" describes a means for determining whether a machine is intelligent known as the Turing test.
1950 Commercial color television begins in the U.S. Transcontinental black-and-white television is inaugurated the following year.
1950 Claude Elwood Shannon writes a proposal for a chess program.
1951 EDVAC, Eckert and Mauchley's first computer that implements the stored-program concept, is completed at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania.
1951 A Cybernetics Congress is held in Paris.
1952 The CBS television network uses UNIVAC to correctly predict the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of the United States.
1952 The pocket-sized transistor radio is introduced.
1952 The 701, IBM's first production-line electronic digital computer, is designed by Nathaniel Rochester and marketed for scientific use.
1953 James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick discover the chemical structure of the DNA molecule.
1953 Two statements of major importance to modern existentialism appear: Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Waiting for Godot, a play by Samuel Beckett.
1955 The Remington Rand Corporation merges with Sperry Gyroscope to become the Sperry-Rand Corporation, one of IBM's chief competitors for a time.
1955 IBM introduces its first transistor calculator, with 2,200 transistors instead of the 1,200 vacuum tubes that would otherwise be required.
1955 The first design is created for a robotlike machine for industrial use in the U.S.
1955 Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon develop IPL-II, the first AI language.
1955 The beginning space program and the military in the U.S., recognizing the need for computers powerful enough to steer rockets to the moon and missiles through the stratosphere, fund major research projects.
1956 Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon create The Logic Theorist, which uses recursive search techniques to solve mathematical problems.
1956 The first transatlantic telephone cable begins to operate.
1956 Fortran, the first scientific computer programming language, is invented by John Backus and a team at IBM.
1956 MANIAC I, the first computer program to beat a human being in a chess game, is developed by Stanislaw Ulam.
1956 Artificial Intelligence is named at a computer conference at Dartmouth College.
1957 Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon develop the General Problem Solver, which uses means-end analysis to solve problems.
1957 Noam Chomsky writes Syntactic Structures, the first of many important works that will earn him the title of father of modern linguistics. This work seriously considers the computation required for natural-language understanding.
1958 Jack St. Clair Kilby invents the first integrated circuit.
1958 John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky found the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1958 The first U.S. commercial jet flies from New York to Paris.
1958 Allen Newall and Herbert Simon predict that within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion.
1958 John McCarthy introduces LISP, an early (and still widely used) AI language.
1958 The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is established. It will fund much important computer-science research in the decades to come.
1958-1959 Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce independently develop the chip, which leads to much cheaper and smaller computers.
1959 Arthur Samuel's checker-playing program, completed as a study in machine-learning, performs as well as some of the best players of the time.
1959 Dartmouth's Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny find an alternative to batch processing: time sharing.
1959 The advent of electronic document preparation will increase U.S. paper consumption of printed documents: the nation now consumes 7 million tons of paper per year; that number will increase to 22 million in 1986. American businesses will use 850 billion pages in 1981, 2.5 trillion pages in 1986, and 4 trillion in 1990.
1959 Grace Murray Hopper, one of the first programmers of the Mark I, develops COBOL, a computer language designed for business use.
1960 The Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency substantially increases its funding of computer research.
1960 About 6,000 computers are in operation in the United States.
1960 Yehoshua Bar-Hillel's "Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High-Quality Translation" points out the difficulty of machine translation from one natural language to another: a program needs to actually understand the world a particular passage refers to.
1960 Current neural-net machines incorporate a small number of neurons organized in only one or two layers. Such simple models are mathematically proved to be limited in what they can do.
1961 President John F. Kennedy, addressing a joint session of Congress, says, "I believe we should go to the moon," thereby launching Project Apollo, which will provide the impetus for important research in computer science.
1961 Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human being to orbit the earth.
1962 A U.S. company markets the world's first industrial robots.
1962 The first Department of Computer Science offering a Ph.D. is established at Purdue University.
1962 Time sharing is introduced on a computer in Philadelphia for inventory control.
1962 John Glenn, Jr., in his Mercury 6 space capsule, becomes the first American to orbit the earth. The U.S. space probe Mariner is the first object made by human beings to voyage to another planet. An America's Telstar becomes the first active communications satellite, relaying television pictures around the globe.
1962 D. Murphy and Richard Greenblatt develop the TECO text editor, one of the first word-processing systems, for use on the PDP1 computer at MIT.
1962 Frank Rosenblatt publishes Principles of Neurodynamics, in which he defines the perceptron, a simple processing element for neural networks. He first introduced the perceptron at a conference in 1959.
1962 Thomas Kuhn publishes The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he theorizes about the nature of the growth of scientific knowledge.
1963 M. Ross Quillian's work leads to the semantic network as a means of representing knowledge in terms of concepts and relationships among concepts.
1963 Project MAC is established at MIT for computer-science research.
1963 AI researchers of the 1960s, noting the similarity between human and computer languages, adopt the goal of parsing natural-language sentences. Susumo Kuno's parsing system reveals the great extent of syntactic and semantic ambiguity in the English language. It is tested on the sentence "Time flies like an arrow."
1963 John McCarthy founds the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University.
1963 Marvin Minsky publishes his influential Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence.
1964 IBM solidifies its leadership of the computer industry with the introduction of its 360 series.
1964 Daniel Bobrow completes his doctoral work on Student, a natural-language program that can solve high-school level word problems in algebra.
1964 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, predicts that integrated circuits will double in complexity each year. His statement will become known as Moore's law and will prove true for decades to come.
1964 Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media foresees electronic media, especially television, as creating a "global village" in which "the medium is the message."
1965 Raj Reddy founds the Robotics Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University. The Institute becomes a leading research center for AI.
1965 The DENDRAL project begins at Stanford University, headed by Bruce Buchanan, Edward Feigenbaum, and Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg. Its purpose is to experiment on knowledge as the primary means of producing problem-solving behavior. The first expert system, DENDRAL, embodies extensive knowledge of molecular-structure analysis. Follow-up work, carried out through the early 1970s, produce Meta-DENDRAL, a learning program that automatically devises new rules for DENDRAL.
1965 Hubert Dreyfus presents a set of philosophical arguments against the possibility of artificial intelligence in a RAND Corporation memo entitled "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence."
1965 Led by Edward Feigenbaum and his associates at Heuristic Programming Project, which will later become the Knowledge Systems Laboratory, begins at Stanford University.
1965 Herbert Simon predicts that by 1985 "machines will be capable of doing any work a man can do."
Mid 1960s Computers are beginning to be widely used in the criminal justice system.
Mid 1960s Scientific and professional knowledge is beginning to be codified in a machine-readable form.
1966 Richard Greenblatt develops a fairly sophisticated chess-playing program, a version of which defeats Herbert Dreyfus, an AI critic who strongly doubts the ability of computers to play chess.
1967 Seymour Papert and his associates at MIT begin working on LOGO, an education-oriented programming language that will be widely used by children.
1967 The software business is born when IBM announces it will no longer sell software and hardware in a single unit.
1968 David Hubel and Torstein Wiesel publish the first of many important papers on the macaque monkey cortex. hey discover edge-detection cells in the outer layer of the visual cortex.
1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle publish The Sound Pattern of English, a landmark study of English phonetics./TD>
1968 The film 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, presents HAL, a computer that can see, speak, hear, and think like its human colleagues aboard a spaceship.
1969 Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to stand on the moon.
1969 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert write Perceptrons, a book that presents limitations of single six-layer neural nets.
1970 The GNP on a per capita basis and in constant 1958 dollars is $3,500, or more than six times as much as a century ago.
1970 The floppy disk is introduced for storing data in computers.
1970 Harry Pople and Jack Myers of the University of Pittsburgh begin work on Internist, a system that aids physicians in the diagnosis of a wide range of diseases.
1970 Patrick Winston's doctoral work presents a program that learns to recognize an arch, and it also addresses the problem of machine learning.
1970 Terry Winograd completes his landmark thesis on SHRDLU, a natural-language system that exhibits diverse intelligent behavior in the small world of children's blocks. SHRDLU is criticized, however, for its lack of generality.
1971 Kenneth Colby, Sylvia Weber, and F.D. Hilk present a report on PARRY, a program simulating a paranoid person, in a paper entitled "Artificial Paranoia." The program is so convincing that clinical psychiatrists cannot distinguish its behavior from that of a human paranoid person.
1971 The first microprocessor is introduced in the U.S.
1971 The first pocket calculator is introduced. It can add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
1971 Direct telephone dialing on a regular basis begins between parts of the U.S. and Europe.
1972 Hubert Dreyfus publishes What Computers Can't Do, an elaboration of his 1965 criticism of AI. He argues that symbol manipulation cannot be the basis of human intelligence.
1973 Alain Colmerauer presents an outline of PROLOG, a logic-programming language. The language will become enormously popular and will be adopted for use in the Japanese Fifth Generation Program.
1973 Roger Shank and Robert Abelson develop scripts, knowledge-representation systems used to describe familiar everyday situations.
1974 The first computer-controlled industrial robot is developed.
1974 Edward Shortliffe completes his doctoral dissertation on MYCIN, an expert system designed to help medical practitioners prescribe an appropriate antibiotic by determining the precise identity of a blood infection. Work to augment this program with other important systems, notable TEIRESIAS and EMYCIN will continue through the early 1980s. TEIRESIAS will be developed in 1976 by Randall Davis to serve as a powerful information-structuring tool for knowledge engineers. EMYCIN, by William van Melle, will represent the skeletal structure of inferences.
1974 Marvin Minsky issues "A Framework for Representing Knowledge" as an MIT AI memo, a landmark in knowledge representation.
1974 The SUMEX-AIM computer-communications network is established to promote the development of applications of artificial intelligence to landmark medicine.
1975 Benoit Mendelbrot writes "Les objet fractals: Forme, hasard, et Dimension," his first long essay on fractal geometry, a branch of mathematics that he developed.
1975 Medicine is becoming an important area of applications for AI research. Four major medical expert systems have been developed by now: PIP, CASNET, MYCIN, and Internist.
1975 The Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency launches its Image Understanding Program to stimulate research in the area of machine vision.
1975 More than 5,000 microcomputers are sold in the U.S., and the first personal computer, with 256 bytes of memory, is introduced.
1970s The role of knowledge in intelligent behavior is now a major focus of AI research. Bruce Buchanan and Edward Feigenbaum of Stanford University pioneer knowledge engineering.
1976 Daniel Bell publishes The Post-Industrial Society, which introduces the concept of a society in which the "axial principle" is the centrality and codification of knowledge.
1976 As a representation of a visual image, David Marr proposes a primal sketch, containing information that describes brightness changes, blobs, and textures.
1976 Kurzweil Computer Products introduces the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which reads aloud any printed text that is presented to it. Based on omnifont-character-recognition technology, it is intended to be a sensory aid for the blind.
1976 Douglas Lenat presents a program called AM (for Automated Mathematician) as part of his Stanford doctoral dissertation. AM, a precursor to EURISKO, is a knowledge-based system that makes "discoveries" in number theory and abstract mathematics.
1976 Joseph Weizenbaum, who created the famous ELIZA program, which simulates a Rogerian psychotherapist, publishes Computer Power and Human Reason. He argues that even if we could build intelligent machines, it would be unethical to do so.
1976-1977 Lynn Conway and Carver Mead collaborate and put together a collection of principles for VLSI design. Their classic textbook Introduction to VLSI Design is published in 1980. VLSI circuits will form the basis of the fourth generation of computers.
1977 David Marr and Tomaso Poggio point out the salient difference between the human brain and today's computer in a paper on computer vision, "From Understanding Computation to Understanding Neural Circuitry." While the connection to components ratio is only 3 in computers, it is 10,000 in the cortex of a mammal.
1977 Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak design and build the Apple Computer.
1977 The first computer camp for children is held in Connecticut.
1977 The film Star Wars features C3PO and a galaxy of other imaginative true-to-life robots with a wide spectrum of convincing human emotions.
1977 Voyagers 1 and 2 are launched and radio back billions of bytes of computerized data about new discoveries as they explore the outer planets of our solar system.
1977 The Apple II, the first personal computer to be sold in assembled form, is successfully marketed.
1978 David Marr and H.K. Nishihara propose a new representation of visual information. The 2 1/2-dimensional sketch, presents the depth and orientation of all visible surfaces.
1978 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Carnegie-Mellon University begin work on XCON, an expert system that configures computer systems. By 1980 XCON will come into regular use, saving millions of dollars at DEC plants.
1979 In a landmark study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by nine researchers, the performance of MYCIN is compared with that of doctors on ten cases of meningitis. MYCIN does at least as well as the medical experts. The potential of expert systems in medicine becomes widely recognized.
1979 Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston create Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, credited with establishing the personal computer as a serious business tool.
1979 Pac Man and other early computerized video games appear.

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