Parts

Part I – The Origins of Computer Science

The people and machines that came before computer science had a name: Leibniz’s stepped reckoner, Babbage’s engines and Ada Lovelace’s notes, Hollerith’s punched cards, and the first electronic computers of the 1940s built by Zuse, Flowers, Eckert and Mauchly. Alongside them stand those who imagined what computers could be for, from Vannevar Bush’s Memex (1945) to Engelbart’s 1968 demo and Ted Nelson’s hypertext.

Part II – Theoretical Computer Science

The mathematics underneath computing: Hilbert’s decision problem, and Gödel, Church and Turing on what can be computed at all, then complexity theory’s question of what can be computed fast, from Cook and Levin’s NP-completeness to P vs. NP. The algorithmics section tells how sorting, hashing, graph search, the FFT and the simplex method were found, and by whom.

Part III – Hardware

From vacuum tubes to the transistor (1947), the integrated circuit and the microprocessor (1971), and the engineers behind them, from Shockley and Noyce to Faggin, Lynn Conway and Sophie Wilson. The eras run from IBM mainframes and DEC minicomputers through the Altair, the IBM PC and the home computer boom to GPUs, ARM and the chip foundries of today.

Part IV – Software & Languages

Who designed the programming languages, and why: Hopper’s compilers, Backus’s FORTRAN, ALGOL, C and Unix at Bell Labs, and on to Java, Python and Rust. The part also covers operating systems from Multics to Linux and Windows NT, the practices that grew out of the 1968 software crisis, and core concepts such as compilers, type systems and garbage collection.

Part V – Networks, Web & Platforms

How computers learned to talk to each other: packet switching, the ARPANET, TCP/IP and DNS, email, and Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, which reached the public through Mosaic and Netscape. It continues with Wi-Fi and mobile networks, relational databases from Codd to Postgres, and the cloud platforms that now host most of it.

Part VI – Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence from the 1956 Dartmouth workshop and McCarthy’s LISP through expert systems and the AI winters to AlexNet in 2012 and the transformer. It covers the researchers (Minsky, Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, Fei-Fei Li), the companies racing to build large language models, and the debates about bias, safety and superintelligence.

Part VII – Industry & Economy

The founders, companies and business models that turned computing into an industry: IBM, Microsoft and Apple, Intel and Nvidia, Amazon and Google, but also Olivetti, SAP, Nokia and Sega. Separate articles follow the markets themselves, from the spreadsheet and the ATM to venture capital, the dot-com bubble and software as a service.

Part VIII – Media & Entertainment

Video games from Ralph Baer’s Brown Box and Pong to Tetris, Doom, Steam and Fortnite, with the designers who made them. The part also covers computer animation at Pixar, digital music from MP3 to Napster and streaming, the pioneers of computer art, desktop publishing, e-books and virtual reality.

Part IX – Society, Culture & Politics

What computing did to everyone else. Cryptography and security from Enigma to public-key cryptography and ransomware; famous hackers and the cases against them; online communities from BBSs to 4chan; and the political fights over privacy, surveillance, copyright, platform power, content moderation and who gets to work in the field.

Part X – The World

Computing history outside Silicon Valley: national industries from Japan, Germany and the Soviet bloc to India, China, Israel, Brazil and many more, several with their own machines and their own dead ends. The part ends with the universities and professional societies (ACM, IEEE, IFIP, the Gesellschaft für Informatik) that turned computing into an academic discipline.

Part XI – Emerging Technologies

Technologies still being decided: quantum and reversible computing, the Internet of Things, cryptocurrencies with their frauds and collapses, and self-driving cars. A second section covers computing as a tool of science, from numerical methods and computer algebra to statistics with R, bioinformatics and climate models.

Part XII – Dead Ends & Divergent Paths

Technologies that failed, companies that collapsed, and ideas that arrived too early: the Itanium, OS/2, the Apple Newton, Google Glass, BlackBerry and Bildschirmtext, among some seventy cases. Each article explains why it failed and what, if anything, survived.

Part XIII – Trivia & Special People

Collections that cut across the parts: fun facts, debunked myths, contested firsts, outlaws, family ties, places to visit, recorded interviews with the pioneers, reading paths, eponymous laws and a bookshelf. The decade timelines and the indexes of people and topics are here as well.