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Strowger switch and telephone dialing (~1920)

- Telephone automation systems, called "switches" or switchboards, were likely among the first electromechanical devices to implement a primitive form of computer-like memory, whereby a number is stored by the setting of relays, or the operation of similar equipment. The earliest form of switching memory was the Strowger switch, developed by an independent American inventor decades before Bell Laboratories invented an equivalent technology. Strowger switches completed an additional segment of a phone call's connection each time a digit was dialed; in this case, the entire telephone system was the memory. Later switchboards (1960's generation) used general-purpose computers and completely stored all digits of the dialed number in a register before making a routing decision based on a host of complex factors. Call connections were made "all at once" after running a program that analyzed the dialed number. + Telephone automation systems, called "switches" or switchboards, were likely among the first electromechanical devices to implement a primitive form of computer-like memory, whereby a number is stored by the setting of relays, or the operation of similar equipment. The earliest form of switching memory was the Strowger switch, developed by an independent American inventor decades before Bell Laboratories invented an equivalent technology. Strowger switches completed an additional segment of a phone call's connection each time a digit was dialed; in this case, the entire telephone system was the memory. Strowger eliminated the need for intervention by a human operation when placing a phone call (in consumer terms, he "invented the dial telephone"). Later switchboards (1960's generation) used general-purpose computers and completely stored all digits of the dialed number in a register before making a routing decision based on a host of complex factors. Call connections were made "all at once" after running a program that analyzed the dialed number.

Discovery of "switching algebra" leading to logic gate designs (1938)

Claude Shannon (1916-2001) made a critical step enabling hardware design of a computer in his 1938 MIT master's thesis on the use of Boole's algebra to analyse and optimise relay switching circuits. Shannon associated boolean algebra, a kind of mathematical system that had been known for centuries, with the design of logic gates in digital hardware, calling boolean algebra "switching algebra" in the context of digital hardware design. Shannon also later made seminal contributions towards the burgeoning field of information theory.

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