Assignments

Applications
Artificial intelligence

Airline reservations
Air defense

Research
IAS

Manchester Mark I
EDSAC

Real Time
Whirlwind
SAGE

Commercial machines
Ferranti Mark I
IBM 701
UNIVAC 1

Software
Subroutine libraries
Programming languages
- FORTRAN
- COBOL
- Algol 60

- LISP
- Plankalkül
Compilers

Technology
CRT display
Magnetic core memory

People
Alan M. Turing (1)
John McCarthy (2)
American Airlines SABRE
US Government SAGE


John von Neumann, Herman Goldstine

Williams, Kilburn, Tootill, et al.
Maurice Wilkes


Jay W. Forrester



Ferranti, Ltd. - Tootill, Robinson, et al.
Wallace J. Eckert
John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert




John Backus
Grace Hopper
Algol 60 Committee
Peter Naur, Editor
John McCarthy
Konrad Zuse

Notes

1. Alan M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 236 (1950), 433-460. Also available online at http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/B/9 (King's College, University of Cambridge, accessed 2004 Sep 25). This is the "Turing test" paper.

2. J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, and C. E. Shannon, "A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence," (1955 Aug 31). Also available online at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html (Formal Reasoning Group, Stanford University, accessed 2004 Oct 5). This generally is regarded as containing the first appearance of the term "artificial intelligence."

Bibliography

Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Basic Books, 1996).

Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Brian Randell, ed., The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1982). This has copies of many original works ranging from Charles Babbage writing about calculating engines in 1837 to Maurice Wilkes writing about the EDSAC in 1949.

Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith. Project Whirlwind  (Digital Press, 1980).

Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith. From Whirlwind to MITRE  (MIT Press, 2000).