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History of Computing

2022-09-29

A slightly hit-and-miss collection of links.

There are many super books on this topic. Andrew S. Tanenbaum lists a few - which I haven't read - in his book, Structured Computer Organization, in Section 1.2, Milestones in Computer Architecture.

Pre-1900s

• Build Your Own Astrolabe. St. John's College, Cambridge. Informative page built for the Cambridge Science Festival in 2010.
• Programming patterns: the story of the Jacquard loom. A nice overview from the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester.
• Who was Charles Babbage?. The Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minesota.
• Ada Lovelace, the First Tech Visionary. The New Yorker.

Early Twentieth Century Computing

• Alan Turing. St. Andrew's University. This is a good if dry account of his life. If you search for Alan Turing, you'll find others.
• I.- Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing. You can find his Imitation Game here.
• The Legend of John von Neumann. P.R. Halmos. The American Mathematical Monthly.
• The von Neumann architecture was described by John von Neumann in a draft report he co-authored called, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. You can find a copy of the report thanks to MIT here, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.
• Celebrating Penn Engineering History: ENIAC. The University of Pennsylvania.

NASA and Computing

• Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience.

Minicomputers

• DEC's Blockbuster: The PDP-8 from 1965. The Computer History Museum. This was a general purpose computer.

Unix, C and Unix-like Systems

• Homepages of Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, the original Unix and C developers.
• Berkeley Software Distribution at Wikipedia.
• The GNU Project. Main website of The GNU Projext.
• Linus Torvalds. Personal homepage.
• kernel.org. The Linux kernel's official website.
• The Linux Foundation. The foundation supports the work of Linus Torvalds and lead Linux maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman.

Universities and Research Institutes

(Selected.)

USA, West Coast

• Stanford University in Stanford, California. Close by Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino and Menlo Park, about 60 km south of San Francisco.
• California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. About 17 km from Los Angeles city centre.
• Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley. In Oakland, about 23 km to the East of San Francisco.

USA, East Coast

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about 4 km from downtown Boston.
• Harvard University, Cambridge, about 7 km from downtown Boston.
• Carnegie Mellon University, 5 km from the centre of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

UK

• University of Cambridge, Cambridge, about 90 km north of London.
• University of Oxford, Oxford, about 90 km west of London.

Chip Manufacturers

USA

• Intel, based in Santa Clara, California. Close by Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino and Menlo Park, about 60 km south of San Francisco.
• AMD, also based in Santa Clara, California.
• NVIDIA, famous for GPUs, also based in Santa Clara, California.
• Apple, Cupertino, close by Santa Clara, California.

Elsewhere

• ARM, Cambridge, close to the university, about 90 km north of London.
• TMSC, manufacturer of, among others, Apple's chips. Taiwan. Based in Hsinchu, about 73 km south-west of Taipei on the Taiwan Strait.

Personal Computing

Altair

• Altair 8800. Computer History Museum.

Atari

• Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell. How I Built This with Guy Raz. 2018.
• The Inside Story of Pong and the Early Days of Atari. Leslie Berlin, Wired. 2017.
• Atari’s Roller-Coaster Ride. The Computer History Museum.

IBM

• The birth of the IBM PC. IBM.

Microsoft

• The Road Ahead after 25 years. Bill Gates. This book, written in 1995 is worth reading through to get a sense of where Microsoft's thinking was in the 1990s and something about its history.
• Windows 95 ad.
• Windows 1.0 to 10: The changing face of Microsoft's landmark OS. ZDNet.

Apple

• Apple Macintosh Personal Computer, at the Smithsonian.
• The Founding of Apple Computers, Inc.
• Apple's famous 1984 advertisement for the Macintosh.
• This video of Jobs' retreat with his NeXT Team is a good one. The interested person will have no trouble finding material about Steve Jobs.
• Steve Wozniak Was My Computer Teacher in 1995. This is a nice article.

Sinclair

• The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread. Designed and built in Britain, in 1981 the ZX81 introduced many to home computing.

Commodore

• The Smithsonian has a summary of the Commodore 64. The Commodore 64 was built by Commodore Business Machines in Pennsylvania from 1982 until 1993. It had an ecosystem of some 10,000 programs and was relatively affordable, about $1,500 in today's money.

Dell

• How I Built This with Guy Raz. Dell Computers: Michael Dell. 2018. This is a nice interview.

The Internet

• ArpaNet. DARPA.
• The birth of the Web. CERN.
• Tim Berners-Lee on the Web at 25: the past, present and future, Wired, 23 August 2014.
• The History of Wikipedia. First edit in 2001.

Companies

• Google, Our Story. Google.

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