Abstract
Studying Information Technology, the History of Science and Technology was very rich in Hungarian talents; those who designed ‘clever’ machines at the very early times of calculators. These calculators are the ancestors of the present-time ones that were called later on, in the 20th century, computers. The computer historians may agree or disagree, but I think the first real-life, early ‘calculator-like’ machine was developed by Farkas Kempelen in the 18th century. It was a real output device, a talking machine. Its input was an organ, a music instrument keyboard and the operator of the machine could enter the text and the output of the operation was a human-like speech.
I start the row of the Hungarian inventors with Kempelen and I finish it in the 20th century with a talented mechanical engineer: Marcell Jánosi, who designed and patented the world’s first floppy disk. Among the thirteen Hungarian inventors are engineers, mathematicians, priests etc. all developed machines for the information technology.
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Kovács, G. (2012). Hungarian Scientists in Information Technology. In: Tatnall, A. (eds) Reflections on the History of Computing. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 387. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33899-1_18
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