Computing

From pebbles in sand trays to the machines that now hold the world together — told one milestone at a time.

22 posts· 2300 BCE – 1952

• UNIVAC predicts an Eisenhower landslide 1952
• The Manchester Baby and the first stored program 1948
• The transistor: a razor blade, some gold foil, and the death of the vacuum tube 1947
• ENIAC: the thirty-ton computer and the six who weren't invited 1945
• The report that named an architecture and killed a patent 1945
• Harvard Mark I: the machine that took up a wall 1944
• Colossus: the machine that Britain built, classified, and ordered destroyed 1943
• Konrad Zuse's Z3: the computer the war didn't notice 1941
• The Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or the basement machine that unmade ENIAC 1939
• Shannon's switching circuits, 1937 1937
• The trust that outgrew its name 1911
• The Hollerith tabulator, or how counting Americans built a company called IBM 1890
• Ada Lovelace's Notes on an engine that never ran 1843
• Babbage's Difference Engine, or the most expensive one-seventh of a calculator 1822
• The Jacquard loom, or how a silk weaver programmed a machine 1804
• Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner, or what a pedometer started 1694
• Pascal's Pascaline, or how a teenager tried to spare his father from arithmetic 1642
• The slide rule, or how a clergyman's shortcut ran the world for three centuries 1622
• Napier's bones, or how a Scottish laird made multiplication optional 1617
• Al-Khwarizmi, or how a name became a word 820 CE
• The Antikythera mechanism, or the computer the sea kept 100 BCE
• The abacus, or how humanity learned to compute with pebbles 2300 BCE