Charles Babbage designed a mechanical, general-purpose computer with a "mill" (CPU), "store" (memory), and punched-card input — over a century before the electronic computer.
Ada Lovelace, translating notes for Babbage, wrote what is now considered the first computer algorithm: a method for computing Bernoulli numbers on the engine.
Alan Turing's paper introduced an abstract machine reading symbols off an infinite tape — proving that a single "universal" device could simulate any computation.
ENIAC (1945) — built by Eckert & Mauchly — was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Programming it meant rewiring it.
John von Neumann's First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC codified the architecture we still use: a single memory storing both data and instructions. CPU + memory + I/O.
At Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the first point-contact transistor — a sliver of germanium that could amplify and switch electrical signals. William Shockley followed with the more practical junction transistor.
Before FORTRAN, programmers wrote in machine code or assembler — error-prone, machine-specific, glacial. FORTRAN ("FORmula TRANslation") let scientists and engineers write equations almost as they appear on paper, and a compiler emitted optimized IBM 704 code.
C COMPUTE SUM OF SQUARES
DIMENSION A(100)
SUM = 0.0
DO 10 I = 1, N
10 SUM = SUM + A(I)**2
WRITE(6, 20) SUM
20 FORMAT(1H , 'TOTAL = ', F10.2)
STOP
END
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie built UNIX on a discarded PDP-7, then re-wrote it in 1972 in a new portable language: C. Together they defined modern systems software.
$ cat hello.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
printf("hello, world\n");
return 0;
}
$ cc hello.c -o hello
$ ./hello
hello, world
$ _
Designed by Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor for a Japanese calculator company (Busicom), the 4004 packed an entire CPU onto a single piece of silicon — 12 mm². Moore's Law was already in motion.
The MITS Altair 8800 (Jan 1975, $397 kit) lit the fuse — Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC for it and founded Microsoft. Two years later "the 1977 trinity" arrived: the Apple II (Wozniak/Jobs), the Commodore PET (Chuck Peddle), and the TRS-80 (Tandy).
Working at CERN, Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext system to link documents across the lab's mismatched computers. By 1990 he had written the first browser, the first web server, and HTML, HTTP, and URL specifications.
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Hypertext</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Welcome to the WWW</H1>
<A HREF="http://info.cern.ch/">
Read more
</A>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld 2007. Multi-touch, full web browser, no stylus, no physical keyboard. The App Store followed in 2008 — and an entire economy of developers with it.
In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton's "AlexNet" won ImageNet by a country mile — trained on two NVIDIA GTX 580 GPUs. Suddenly, the neural networks of the 1980s worked, given enough data and parallel silicon.
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