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.

Pioneers & Visionaries

• Vannevar Bush and the Memex — “As We May Think” (1945) and the blueprint for hypertext and the web
• Paul Otlet and Emanuel Goldberg — the Brussels card catalogue of all knowledge, the Mundaneum, and the Dresden microfilm search machine of 1931
• Norbert Wiener and Cybernetics — feedback loops, control theory, and the warning about optimizing for wrong goals
• J.C.R. Licklider and the Intergalactic Network — “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and the ARPA grants that seeded the internet
• Ivan Sutherland and Sketchpad — interactive graphics, OO structure, and virtual reality in a 1963 PhD thesis
• Douglas Engelbart and the Mother of All Demos — the mouse, hypertext, and collaborative editing, all demonstrated in 1968
• Edward Fredkin — the Caltech dropout MIT made a full professor without a degree, who named the trie, invented reversible computing with Toffoli, and insisted to the end that the universe is a cellular automaton
• Ted Nelson and Hypertext — coined “hypertext” in 1965; Project Xanadu still unfinished
• Larry Roberts and ARPANET — the ARPA program manager who turned Licklider’s vision into hardware
• Paul Baran and Packet Switching — the survivable Cold War mesh he designed, never built, and shared the credit for
• Donald Davies — Pilot ACE, the word “packet”, the NPL network, and computer security
• Ward Cunningham and the Wiki — invented the wiki in 1994; co-authored Design Patterns
• Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth — Whole Earth Catalog, The WELL, and “Information wants to be free”
• John Perry Barlow and the Declaration — EFF co-founder and the 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
• Kevin Kelly — Asia photographer, Whole Earth Review editor, Hackers’ Conference co-founder, Wired’s first executive editor, and the “technium” and “1,000 True Fans”
• Wau Holland — co-founded the Chaos Computer Club and gave the hacker ethic its civic creed: “use public data, protect private data”

Foundations of Logic & Early Machines

• Before the Computer: Mechanical Calculation — Antikythera, abacus, slide rule, Pascaline, Leibniz, and the Jacquard loom; the deep prehistory Babbage inherited
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — the stepped-drum calculator that could multiply, binary arithmetic (1679/1703), and the marble machine, cipher machine and binary watch he only sketched
• Curt Herzstark and the Curta — a one-hand stepped-drum calculator drawn in Buchenwald, built in Liechtenstein from 1948, about 140,000 made
• George Boole and Boolean Logic — true and false as algebra (1847/1854); the logic that became circuit design a century later
• Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine — the first programmer, a century before the computer
• Charles Babbage: The Visionary Architect — the Difference Engine, the Analytical Engine, and the hardware that never shipped
• Georg and Edvard Scheutz: The Printing Difference Engine — a Stockholm printer and his son finish Babbage’s idea in 1853 for a fraction of the money; Albany, the 1864 English Life Table, and the Science Museum
• Percy Ludgate — the Dublin clerk’s 1909 Analytical Machine, its role in Zuse’s patent case, and its rediscovery
• Leonardo Torres Quevedo and El Ajedrecista — the forgotten Spanish engineer who built Babbage’s engine in relays, described floating point in 1913, and made the first decision-making machine: a 1912 chess automaton that still works
• Herman Hollerith and the Punched Card — the 1890 census emergency, punched-card tabulation, and the company that became IBM
• Alan Turing and the Enigma — computability, the Turing machine, Bletchley Park
• Tommy Flowers and Colossus — the Post Office engineer who built the first large-scale electronic computer at Bletchley Park in 1943
• Christopher Strachey — the Ferranti Mark I love letters (1952, first computer-generated literature), CPL in the ancestry of C, and denotational semantics with Dana Scott
• Dana Scott — nondeterministic automata with Rabin in an IBM summer of 1957, Boolean-valued models, and the November 1969 Saturday on which the untyped lambda calculus got a model
• Cellular Automata and Artificial Life — von Neumann’s self-reproducing machine, Conway’s Game of Life, Langton’s loops, Wolfram’s Rule 110, and the field that promised digital organisms
• Claude Shannon and Information Theory — bits, entropy, and the 1948 paper that created information science
• Richard Hamming — Los Alamos “computer janitor,” the weekend halts that produced error-correcting codes in 1950, the third Turing Award, and “You and Your Research”
• Konrad Zuse and the Z3 — the first Turing-complete computer, built in Berlin in 1941
• Helmut Schreyer: The Missed Electronic Age — Zuse’s friend who proposed a 2,000-tube electronic computer, rejected because the war was expected to end first
• ENIAC and the First Electronic Computers — Eckert, Mauchly, the six women programmers, and the patent war
• John Atanasoff and the ABC — the roadhouse in Rock Island, refreshed capacitor drums, Mauchly’s four days in Ames, and the 1973 patent ruling
• Howard Aiken and the Harvard Mark I — IBM’s ASCC, the credit dispute with Watson, the 1947 Harvard symposium, Mark II to IV, and Harvard’s computing degree
• George Stibitz and the Complex Number Calculator — the kitchen-table Model K, the first remote computing demonstration at Dartmouth in 1940, and the Bell relay machines
• UNIVAC and the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation — EMCC, the BINAC, UNIVAC I, election night 1952, the Frankfurt UNIVAC, the ENIAC patent trial, and the road to Unisys
• Small Computers of the 1950s — the 1952 and 1954 small-computer conferences, Burroughs E101, LGP-30 and Schoppe & Faeser, Bendix G-15, IBM 650 in Germany, Elliott 401, and the Harwell Dekatron
• SEAC and Russell Kirsch — the Bureau of Standards’ diode-logic stopgap of 1950, SWAC’s Mersenne primes, and the 1957 drum scan of a baby that fixed the square pixel
• Maurice Wilkes and EDSAC — the first practical stored-program computer (1949), the subroutine, microprogramming, and the second Turing Award
• David Wheeler and the Closed Subroutine — EDSAC’s Initial Orders, the Wheeler jump, the usual first PhD in computer science, and the Burrows–Wheeler transform at 67
• The Manchester Baby — the first stored-program computer to run (1948), the Williams-Kilburn tube, and the road to Ferranti
• Alan Turing and the ACE — the 1945 ACE proposal, the Pilot ACE, DEUCE and the Bendix G-15, the imitation game, and the Manchester letters
• John von Neumann — set theory, quantum mechanics, game theory, the bomb, and the EDVAC report; the century’s widest-ranging mind, dead at 53 under military guard
• The Von Neumann Architecture — the stored-program design that defines every modern computer
• Margaret Hamilton and the Apollo Software — the software that landed humans on the moon