1942: "creative destruction"phrase coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe the less-than-tidy way free markets lead to progress, e.g., the telephone replaced the telegraph; the cellphone replaced the telephone; the smartphone is replacing the cellphone; related to later 'disruptive innovation'
1943: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." ~TJ Watson, IBM; (myth)
1944: Colossus: world's first electronic programmable digital computer; used by British codebreakers during World War II
1945: Memex in article As We May Think: "[The Memex is a] sort of mechanized private file and library...a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." by Vannevar Bush: head of U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II, through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project
In a Wireless World article, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke described in detail the possible use of communications satellites for mass communications.
1946: ENIAC: Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, first electronic general-purpose computer
software bugAdmiral Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist and developer of the first compiler, is credited for having first used the term "bugs" in computing after a dead moth was found shorting a relay in the Harvard Mark II computer.
1948: CyberneticsNorbert Wiener: transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities
"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons." ~Popular Mechanics
1949: "It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology." ~John von Neumann; fake quote
The Decades That Invented the Future: Part 5: 1940sManhattan Project; George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; Polaroid Camera; Computer Bug; First Videogame; Guided Missile; House Committee on Un-American Activities; Materials Rationing; Helicopter; Microwave; Jackie Robinson; Start of Silicon Valley; Wired; 11/15/2012
1944: Colossus: world's first electronic programmable digital computer; used by British codebreakers during World War II
1947: Transistor: semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical power; How Transistors Work
1949: Nineteen Eighty-Four; NSA surveillance goes beyond Orwell's imagination 9/23/2013