Hungarian Scientists in Information Technology

International audienceStudying 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