The Advent of Electronic Computers

Abstract

The earliest known electronic digital circuit, a “trigger relay”, which involved a pair of valves in a circuit with two stable states and was an early form of flip-flop, was described by Eccles and Jordan in 1919. (An unsubstantiated claim [1] has however been made that J. W. Bryce of IBM investigated the application of electronics to business machines in 1915.) The next development that we know of was the use by Wynn-Williams at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, of thyratrons in counting circuits including, in 1932, a “scale-of-two” (binary) counter [2]. By the end of the decade quite a few papers had been published on electronic counters intended for counting impulses from Geiger-Müller tubes used in nuclear physics experiments.