| Panel 1 -- 1939-1945 |
| 1939 | Atanasoff-Berry Computer created at Iowa State |
| 1940 | Konrad Zuse -Z2 uses telephone relays instead of mechanical logical circuits |
| 1943 | Collossus - British vacuum tube computer |
| 1944 | Grace Hopper, Mark I Programmer (Harvard Mark I) |
| 1945 | First Computer "Bug", Vannevar Bush "As we may think" |
| Panel 2 -- 1946-1949 |
| 1946 | J. Presper Eckert & John Mauchly,
ACM, AIEE, ENIAC, Stan Ulam & John von Neumann - The Monte Carlo Method includes images of Von Neumann's first program written for a modern computer (handwritten - 1945) and a sample flow diagram from Goldstine/Von Neumann (1947). |
| 1947 | First Transistor, Harvard Mark II (Magnetic Drum Storage)
|
| 1948 | Manchester Mark I (1st stored-program digital computer),
Whirlwind at MIT
|
| 1949 | Short Order Code by John Mauchly, Core Memory-Jay Forrester |
| Panel 3 -- 1950-1955 |
| 1950 | Alan Turing-Test of Machine Intelligence,
Univac I (US Census Bureau)
|
| 1951 | William Shockley invents the Junction Transistor
|
| 1952 | Illiac I,
Univac I at Livermore predicts 1952 election,
MANIAC built at Los Alamos, AVIDAC built at Argonne
|
| 1953 | Edvac, IBM 701
|
| 1954 | IBM 650 (first mass-produced computer),
FORTRAN developed by John Backus ORACLE-Oak Ridge Automated Computer And Logical Engine
|
| 1955 | Texas Instruments introduces the silicon transistor, Univac II introduced |
| Panel 4 -- 1956-1960 |
| 1956 | MANIAC 2, DEUCE (fixed head drum memory), John McCarthy-MIT Artificial Intelligence Department |
| 1957 | IBM introduces RAMAC: random-access method of accounting & control - hard disk, John Backus - IBM first Fortran compiler |
| 1958 | Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Musasino-1: 1st parametron computer, Jack Kilby-First integrated circuit prototype; Robert Noyce works separately on IC's, NEC 1101 & 1102 |
| 1959 | Bell's modem data phone, Robert Noyce & Gordon Moore file patent for Integrated Circuit for Fairchild Semiconductor Corp., IBM 7090-fully transistorized |
| 1960 | Paul Baran at Rand develops packet-switching, NEAC 2201, Whirlwind-air traffic control, Livermore Advanced Research Computer (LARC), Control Data Corportation CDC 1604, First major international computer conference |
| Panel 5 -- 1961-1965 |
| 1961 | IBM Stretch-Multiprogramming |
| 1962 | Control Data Corporation opens lab in Chippewa Falls headed by Seymour Cray, Telestar launced, Atlas-virtual memory and pipelined operations, Timesharing-IBM 709 and 7090 |
| 1963 | IBM 360-third generation computer, Limited test ban treaty, IEEE formed |
| 1964 | The Sage System, CDC 6600 designed by Seymour Cray (First commercially successful supercomputer-speed of 9 megaflops) |
| 1965 | J.A. Robinson develops unification theory |
| Panel 6 -- 1966-1970 |
| 1966 | RS-232-C standard for data exchange between computers & peripherals, IBM 1360 Photostore-onlne terabit mass storage |
| 1967 | CMOS integrated circuits, Texas Instruments Advanced Scientific Computer (ASC) |
| 1968 | RAND-decentralized communication network concept, Donald Knuth-algorithms & data structures separate from their programs, Univac 9400 |
| 1969 | Arpanet, Seymour Cray-CDC 7600 (40 megaflops), US Moon Landing |
| 1970 | Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, "Computer" monthly debuts, Unix developed by Dennis Ritchie & Kenneth Thomson |
| Panel 7 -- 1971-1975 |
| 1971 | CDC Star, Nicholas Wirth develops Pascal,
Ted Hoff, S. Mazor, & F. Fagin-Intel 4004 microprocessor-a "computer on a chip"
Global modeling of terrestrial carbon exchanges |
| 1972 | Ray Tomlinson sends first email, IEEE Computer Society |
| 1973 | Large-scale integration, Burrough's Illiac IV early large scale parallel processing |
| 1974 | John Vincent Atanasoff recognized as the creator of the modern
computer The Controlled Thermonuclear Research Computer Center, established to support magnetic fusion research, goes on line in July 1974 with a borrowed computer, a Control Data Corp. 6600 (1 megaflop). |
| 1975 | Large-scale integration-10,000 components on 1 sq. cm chip,
Robert Metcalfe "Ether Acquisition", Gordon Bell-Vax Project DOE creates ESnet |
| Panel 8 -- 1976-1983 |
| 1976 | Cray Research-CRAY I vector architecture (designed by Seymour Cray, shaped the computer industry for years to come), delivered to LLNL and LANL; Datapoint introduces ARC (first local area network) |
| 1977 | Fiber optic cable, LANL-Common File System (CFS) storage for central & remote computers |
| 1978 | DEC introduces VAX11/780 (32 bit super/minicomputer) |
| 1979 | Xerox, DEC, Intel - ethernet support |
| 1980 | David A. Patterson and John Hennessy "reduced instruction set", CDC Cyber 205 |
| 1981 | Commercial e-mail service, 64K bits memory-Japan
Establishment of global data centers |
| 1982 | Cray X-MP, Japan-fifth generation computer project |
| 1983 | 1st 8-processor CRAY 2 delivered to NERSC CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center) established at ORNL |
| Panel 9 -- 1984-1989 |
| 1984 | Thinking Machines and Ncube are founded- parallel processing, Hitachi S-810/20, Fujitsu FACOM VP 200, Convex C-1, NEC SX-2 |
| 1985 | Thinking Machines Connection Machine,
Ultra High Speed Graphics Project-LANL
(real-time animation, 1 billion operations per second)
First distributed memory parallel computer (Intel iPSC/1, 32 cpus) delivered to ORNL |
| 1986 | IBM 3090 VPF,
message-passing multiprocessor simulator developed at ORNL
COMPUTATIONAL MATERIALS PHYSICS: First-principles theoretical studies of alloy and experiments composition, impurity segregation, and environmental embrittlement provide critical information on brittle fracture in intermetallic alloys, which greatly extends the usable temperature range for intermetallic alloys. (in 80s) |
| 1987 | Evans and Sutherland ES-1, Fujitsu VP-400E, NSFnet established, New tracer techniques developed by ORNL researchers at Oak Ridge Reservation help understand complex subsurface transport processes occuring in heterogeneous, fractured porous media |
| 1988 | Apollo, Ardent, and Stellar Graphics Supercomputers,
Hitachi S-820/80, Hypercube simulation on a LAN at ORNL, 3D FEMWATER, a three-dimensional finite element model is developed to simulate water flow through saturated-unsaturated media. |
| 1989 | CRAY Y-MP, Tim Berners-Lee: World Wide Web project at CERN, Seymour Cray: Founds Cray Computer Corp.-Begins CRAY 3 using gallium arsenide chips, FEMAIR, A finite-element model for simulating airflow through porous media is developed at ORNL to study novel remediation strategies such as in situ soil venting and vacuum extraction. |
| Panel 10 -- 1990-1996 |
| 1990 | Bell Labs: all-optical processor, Intel launches parallel
supercomputer with RISC microprocessors; MFECC renamed to NERSC;
ORNL materials/superconductivity calculations win
Gordon Bell award for price/performance, 1st prize for scientific excellence
from IBM competition, and Cray GigaFLOP award;
ORNL releases world's first publicly available 3D deterministic radiation
transport code (TORT);
ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement) archive established at ORNL |
| 1991 | Japan announces plans for sixth-generation computer based on neural networks; First M-bone audio multicast transmitted on the Net; NEC SX-3, Hewlett-Packard and IBM-RISC based computers; Fujitsu VP-2600; Intel Touchstone Delta (first over 500 node computer) ANL, LANL, LLNL, PNNL, SNL all members of the consortium; ORNL releases PVM; CHAMMP starts - Massively parallel computing applied to global climate models; LAPACK provides routines for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, making the widely used EISPACK and LINPACK libraries run efficiently on shared-memory vector and parallel processors. |
| 1992 | Thinking Machines CM-5 |
| 1993 | CRAY T3D DOE establishes High Performance Computing Research Centers at LANL (ACL) and ORNL (CCS) to support Grand Challenge computing: Computational Biology, Computational Chemistry, Groundwater, Materials, Numerical Tokamak, Quantum Chromodynamics, and Quantum Structure of Matter. PFEM, A Parallel port of 3D Femwater |
| 1994 | Netscape, NCSA Mosaic; Leonard Adleman-DNA as computing medium; Microscopic theory of the vortex state in superconductors solved at ORNL; The ScaLAPACK (or Scalable LAPACK) library - LAPACK routines redesigned for distributed memory MIMD parallel computers, portable on any computer that supports PVM or MPI. |
| 1995 | ACM 50th celebration, Iowa State creates full-sized replica
of Atanasoff-Berry Computer GMR research leads to higher density disks - Researchers from ORNL and LLNL receive the DOE-BES Award for Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment in Metallurgy and Ceramics for 1995 for simulation work; The DONIO library developed at ORNL enables 100 fold speedup of I/O in the DOE grand challenge code GCT; The National HPCC Software Exchange (NHSE) is established to actively promote software sharing and reuse within and across the HPCC agency programs on a sustainable basis; HPC-Netlib (provided by ORNL/UTK); CUMULVS introduced |
| 1996 | IEEE computer society 50th anniversary Supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center are linked via high speed networks using PVM software, so that scientific researchers could use two or more of these machines as a single resource; Electronic notebooks; Electron microscope put online; Dr. Gary A. Glatzmaier of LANL wins the Sid Fernbach award; American Physical Society's 1996 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics to Steven Louie of LBL |
| Panel 11 -- 1997-1999 |
| 1997 | ASCI Red -- first teraflop computer delivered Linked runs of CTH and LSMS over ATM using PVM on ORNL/SNL paragons CalTech/JPL simulates 50,000 synthetic forces NetSolve -- remote solving of complex scientific problems over a network |
| 1998 |
DOE sweeps awards at SC98 LSMS achieves a teraflop on a T3E and wins the Gordon Bell award ATLAS -- automatic generation and optimization of numerical software Large scale genome analysis Protein structure prediction |
| 1999 |
ASCI Blue -- three teraflop
systems installed at LANL and LLNL National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) 25th anniversary of NERSC |