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