Milestones in asynchronous computing

• ORDVAC (1951) : on vacuum tubes : IAS, precursor to von Neuman, architecture : procured for ballistic compute : business computations could resume based on notifications, but storage media had to be periodically activated to retain data regardless of business
• ILLIAC II (1962) : on magnetic cores : procured for research : but basically the same computer, and now relieved of the need to cyclically refresh memory; ancestor of POSIX signals in the 1970s
• Software Actor Model (1973) : Hewitt abstracts the whole thing into software, with inspiration from Smalltalk's (1972) object-orientated model
• Transmission Control Protocol (1974) : Cerf, Kahn, proposal
• "make depend" (1978) : innovation to track dependencies in source code, with the "make" build tool (1976), but such features were not reliable for several years
• VisiCalc (1979) : spreadsheet software for the Apple II : chained cellular recalculation
• Erlang (1986) : first popular programming language utilising the Actor Model, just not the following keywords ...
• F# (2007) : introduction of "async-bang!" keywords, later evolving in other languages into "async-await"