1945: Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper discovers a moth trapped between relays
in a Navy computer. She calls it a “bug,” a term used since the late 19th
century to refer to problems with electrical devices. Murray Hopper also coined
the term “debugging” to describe efforts to fix computer problems.
1949: Hungarian scientist John von Neumann (1903-1957) devises the
theory of self-replicating programs, providing the theoretical foundation for
computers that hold information in their “memory.”
1960: AT&T introduces its Dataphone, the first commercial modem.
1963: Programmers develop the American Standard Code for Information
Interchange (ASCII), a simple computer language that allows machines
produced by different manufacturers to exchange data.
Full Chronology
