A brief history of integrated circuit chips

Binary codes were in use in ancient Egypt but the credit for creating the binary number system－which is the language of computers and electronic devices and much in use today－goes to the 17th century German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

In the 1930s, Hungary-born US scientist John von Neumann said that the binary number system could be used to invent a computing machine, as semiconductors could show two states, labeled "0" and "1", which is the basic unit of binary numbers.

But it wasn't until 1939 before John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State University, invented such a machine with his postgraduate student Clifford Berry.