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     IT timeline: 1920 to 1939

This page highlights ICT industry developments from 1920 to 1939.

It covers -

• 1923
• 1926
• 1929
• 1932
• 1935
• 1938

Context is provided by the broader media and communications timeline elsewhere on this site.

    1920

• h

    1921

• h

    1922

• h

    1923

• Siemens builds first fully-automatic long-distance phone exchange

    1924

• Remington acquires Noiseless Typewriter Company
• Powers introduces a tabulator with alphabetic capacity

    1925

• h

    1926

• General Electric forms Radio Corporation of America (RCA)
• first telephone cable laid across New Zealand's Cook Strait
• James McKinsey founds McKinsey & Co
• commercial picture facsimile radio service across Atlantic
• Baird demonstrates electro-mechanical TV system
• Bell Labs transmit film by television

    1927

• formation of Remington Rand conglomerate from Powers Accounting Machine, Remington Typewriter and Rand Kardex
• Lang's Metropolis
• JVC formed
• Lindbergh Bubble in US high tech stocks

    1928

• Pleumer patents magnetic tape
• teletype machine
• Baird beams TV image from UK to US
• first scheduled television broadcasts in US
• IBM adopts 80-column punched card
• Société Alsacienne de Constructions Mécaniques and Compagnie Française Thomson-Houston establish Alsthom
• Galvin Manufacturing Corporation (later Motorola)

    1929

• Nyquist Theorem
• telegraph ticker sends 500 characters per minute
• Sydney-Melbourne picturegram service launched
• first magnetic sound recording on plastic tape
• Bell Labs transmits stills in colour by mechanical scanning
• Zworykin's cathode-ray tube "kinescope" receiver, 60 scan lines
• Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co in UK merges with Imperial & International

    1930

• Citizen established
• Geophysical Service Inc founded in US, later becomes Texas Instruments
• Bush's differential analyzer

    1931

    1932

• General Electric divests RCA

    1933

• Canon established
• IBM buys Electromatic Typewriters Inc
• HW Egli Bull renamed Compagnie des Machines Bull

    1934

• Marconi-EMI Television Co formed

    1935

• IBM markets 601 tabulator
• Watson Davis proposes mechanised literature searching machine
• Associated Telephone Utilities in US reorganised as General Telephone (later GTE)
• IBM markets electric typewriter
• IBM buys 86% of Bull AG

    1936

• coaxial cable connects New York to Philadelphia

    1937

• Turing's On Computable Numbers

    1938

• Konrad Zuse creates Z1, prototype mechanical binary programmable calculator
• Carlson's prototype xerographic image
• Samsung established

    1939

• William Hewlett and David Packard found Hewlett Packard
• Atanasoff-Berry Computer, first electronic digital computer
• Bush constructs prototype Microfilm Rapid Selector (MRS)
• AT Kearney founded

   next page (1940 to 1949)