Al-Jazari's Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices
Al-Jazari's 1206 treatise documented programmable automata, including a peg-driven musical boat, centuries before mechanical computing.
Ramon Llull's Ars Magna, a medieval logic machine
Around 1305 Ramon Llull built a paper machine of rotating lettered discs to generate truths by combination - an ancestor of mechanized reasoning.
Pascal builds the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator
In 1642 the teenage Blaise Pascal built a geared adding machine that carried digits automatically - one of the first working mechanical calculators.
Leibniz builds the Stepped Reckoner and dreams of a logic calculus
Leibniz built a calculator that could multiply and divide, and imagined a 'calculus ratiocinator' to settle arguments by computation.
The Jaquet-Droz automata
Between 1768 and 1774 the Jaquet-Droz workshop built clockwork dolls including the Writer, whose cam memory let it write any text up to forty characters.
The Jacquard loom weaves patterns from punched cards
Jacquard's 1804 loom used chained punched cards to control weaving - the programmable-card idea that later inspired Babbage and computing.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel about a created being that turns on its maker became the ur-text of creation anxiety.
Lovelace's Notes and the first published algorithm
Ada Lovelace's 1843 Notes on the Analytical Engine included the first published algorithm and her warning that the machine could only do what it was ordered.
Boole's Laws of Thought
George Boole's 1854 book recast logic as algebra, giving the world the symbolic system that digital hardware would later implement directly.
Jevons builds the Logic Piano
William Stanley Jevons built a keyboard-operated logical machine that derived valid conclusions, the first to solve logic faster than a person.
Erewhon and the Book of the Machines
Samuel Butler's 1872 novel Erewhon argued machines might evolve consciousness and outcompete humans, applying Darwin to technology.
Frege's Begriffsschrift
Gottlob Frege's 1879 Begriffsschrift introduced modern formal logic, including quantifiers and a symbolic language of pure thought that underpinned computing.
Hollerith patents the electric tabulating system
Herman Hollerith's 1889 patent used punched cards and electric counters to compile statistics by machine, the start of data processing and the path to IBM.
The 1890 US Census processed by machine
The US used Herman Hollerith's electric tabulating machines to process the 1890 census - the first large-scale automated data processing project in history.
Hilbert's Paris problems
David Hilbert's 1900 lecture posed unsolved problems whose second, arithmetic's consistency, set off the work that led to Godel, Turing, and computation theory.
The Machine Stops
E.M. Forster's 1909 story imagined humanity living in isolated cells, served by an all-providing Machine they came to worship.
Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica
The three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910) tried to derive all mathematics from logic, and became the target of Godel incompleteness theorems two decades on.
Torres Quevedo's El Ajedrecista
Around 1912 Leonardo Torres Quevedo built El Ajedrecista, an electromechanical automaton that won a king-and-rook chess endgame on its own.
Markov analyzes Eugene Onegin and builds the first Markov chain
In 1913 Andrey Markov counted vowels and consonants across 20,000 letters of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, building the first applied Markov chain.
Metropolis and the robot Maria
Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis gave cinema its first major robot, the false Maria, and the visual template for movie machines.
Godel's incompleteness theorems
In 1931 Kurt Godel proved that any consistent formal system strong enough for arithmetic has true statements it cannot prove, and cannot prove its consistency.
Church's lambda calculus and unsolvability result
Alonzo Church used his lambda calculus to define computability and proved no general procedure can decide every arithmetic question - Turing's 1936 boundary.
Turing's On Computable Numbers
Alan Turing's 1936 paper defined the abstract machine that bears his name and proved that no general procedure can decide every mathematical question.
Konrad Zuse's Z3
Konrad Zuse's Z3, presented in Berlin in May 1941, was the first working program-controlled, fully automatic computer, reading punched film and using binary.
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics
Isaac Asimov's 1942 story Runaround introduced the Three Laws of Robotics, the first widely known attempt to state safety rules for autonomous machines.
Behavior, Purpose and Teleology
Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow argued goal-directed behavior can be explained by negative feedback, the 1943 paper often called cybernetics' founding text.
The first mathematical neuron model
McCulloch and Pitts showed that simple all-or-none neurons wired into networks can compute any logical proposition.
Von Neumann's First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
Von Neumann's 1945 EDVAC report laid out the stored-program computer - one memory for code and data - the architecture nearly all computers still use.
As We May Think
Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay imagined the memex, a machine to store and cross-link a person's knowledge, anticipating hypertext and machine-augmented thought.
ENIAC
ENIAC, unveiled in February 1946, was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, using about 18,000 vacuum tubes to run far faster than relays.
Ashby's Homeostat, a machine that adapts to stay stable
In 1948 Ross Ashby built the Homeostat, a machine that rewired itself to return to equilibrium after disturbances - a cybernetic model of adaptation.
Grey Walter builds the first electronic autonomous robots
Around 1948-49 William Grey Walter built Elmer and Elsie, tortoise-like robots that sensed light and returned to a charger - early autonomous machines.
Turing's Intelligent Machinery report imagines trainable networks
Turing's 1948 report described 'unorganised machines' - randomly connected nets trained by a teacher - anticipating neural networks and machine learning.
Wiener publishes Cybernetics
Norbert Wiener 1948 book Cybernetics unified feedback and control across machines and living things, supplying a vocabulary that shaped early thinking on AI.
The Manchester Baby runs the first stored program
On 21 June 1948 the Manchester Baby ran the first program held in electronic memory - the first working stored-program computer.
Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication
Claude Shannon's 1948 paper founded information theory, defining the bit and showing how to measure, compress, and reliably transmit information.
Neurons that fire together, wire together
Donald Hebb proposed that learning happens when connections between co-active neurons strengthen, giving neural networks a rule for learning.
Shannon's Theseus, a maze-solving mechanical mouse
Around 1950 Claude Shannon built Theseus, a relay-controlled mechanical mouse that learned to run a maze and remembered the route - an early learning machine.
Shannon's blueprint for computer chess
Claude Shannon's 1950 paper was the first to lay out how a computer could play chess, introducing the evaluation function and minimax.
Can machines think? Turing reframes the question
Alan Turing proposed the imitation game, now the Turing Test, replacing 'can machines think' with a concrete behavioral test.
Minsky and Edmonds build the SNARC, an early neural-net machine
In 1951 Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds built the SNARC, a 40-neuron machine of tubes and motors that learned a maze - one of the first neural-net machines.
The Ferranti Mark 1, first commercial computer
Delivered in February 1951, the Ferranti Mark 1 was the first commercial general-purpose computer and ran some of the earliest AI experiments.
Audrey, the first speech recognizer, understands spoken digits
Bell Labs builds Audrey, an analog machine that recognizes the spoken digits zero to nine with 97 to 99 percent accuracy for one speaker.
Vonnegut's Player Piano
Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 debut Player Piano imagined a society where automation has made most human labor, and most human purpose, obsolete.
Turing's The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis
Turing's 1952 paper showed how simple reacting, diffusing chemicals can spontaneously form patterns, an early model of self-organization.
Turing's Turochamp chess program described
Turing's chess algorithm Turochamp, played by hand on paper around 1948, was published in 1953 as one of the first programs to play a full game.
The Georgetown-IBM machine translation demonstration
In January 1954 an IBM 701 translated 60-plus Russian sentences into English and launched the field of machine translation.
The workshop that named artificial intelligence
The 1955 Dartmouth proposal by McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, and Shannon coined 'artificial intelligence' and launched the field.