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.

Fun Facts

Fun Facts — funny, surprising, verifiable facts from the history of computer science, each linked to a deep-dive article.

Myths & Misconceptions

Myths & Misconceptions — persistent legends (the Space Invaders coin shortage, the nuclear-war internet) and what the evidence actually shows.

Computer Science Firsts

Computer Science Firsts — landmark milestones, each precisely qualified (first electronic, first stored-program, first general-purpose…), because “first” is the most contested word in the field. Contested firsts are flagged and routed to the Myths page.

Outlaws & Provocateurs

Outlaws & Provocateurs — the hackers, hustlers, pirates, and provocateurs who shaped computing through its laws and mythology rather than its technology.

Family Ties

Family Ties — the kinship stories of computing: sons who finished their fathers’ machines, sons who bet the family company, couples who built companies and research schools, and the Boole–Hinton dynasty.

Computer Science Locations

Computer Science Locations — a gazetteer of places where computing history happened (garages, labs, the room where the first ARPANET message was sent) and the museums that preserve it, grouped by country with addresses and OpenStreetMap coordinates.

Interviews & Oral Histories

Interviews and Oral Histories — a gateway to primary voices: curated external links to oral-history recordings and interviews in which the pioneers covered here tell their own stories, from the Smithsonian’s 1968 Hopper sessions to the CHM’s video archive.

Reading Paths

Reading Paths — seven ordered routes through the encyclopedia: security in twelve articles, AI from the perceptron to Claude, the Germany path, the network from telegraph to browser, the personal computer, theory from Hilbert to P vs NP, and a Dead Ends starter kit.

Eponymous Laws

Eponymous Laws of Computing — Moore, Amdahl, Brooks, Conway, Postel, Metcalfe, Wirth and two dozen more: original wording, where first stated, who actually named each one, and which have since failed.

The Bookshelf

The Bookshelf — the books the articles lean on: narrative histories, participants’ memoirs, the handful of textbooks that became cultural objects, and the novels that named things.

Timeline

A chronological second index, one page per decade, generated from the articles’ own dates: Before 1940 · 1940s · 1950s · 1960s · 1970s · 1980s · 1990s · 2000s · 2010s · 2020s

The Computer History Museum keeps its own chronologies, linked at the foot of every decade page: the Timeline of Computer History, The Silicon Engine (semiconductors), The Storage Engine, Internet History, 1962 to 1992, Apple@50 and This Day in History.

Indexes

• Index of People — everyone with their own article, filed A–Z by surname, each linked to their main article and the other articles that mention them.
• Index of Topics — machines, languages, companies, protocols, and concepts A–Z, each linked to its main article and further coverage.