1955 - Technology

Technology

The mesa introduced by Bell Telephone Laboratories is a new kind of transistor (see 1948). Bell Labs constructs the first all-transistor computer.

The IBM 752 computer shipped in February is the first IBM computer designed specifically for business purposes (see 1953); by August IBM has reduced Univac's lead to 30 installations versus 24 (see 1956).

Remington Rand becomes Sperry Rand (later Unisys) after acquiring the computer maker (see Univac, 1951).

Carnegie-Mellon polymath Herbert A. Simon and San Francisco-born Rand Corp. computer scientist Allen Newell, 28, pioneer artificial intelligence in December with a computer program that can prove the theorems in the 1913 book on mathematical logic Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Now 39, Simon will tell a class in January of next year, "Over the Christmas holiday, Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine."