PUBLISHED BITS COURSE · 13
Companies & institutions
The institutions that shipped the future
What this course develops
Follow the laboratories, firms, public funders, standards bodies, supply chains, and open-source communities that turned technical possibilities into dependable infrastructure—and learn where power accumulated.
- Data processing
- Research laboratories
- Architecture & services
- PCs & semiconductors
- Open software & web
- Cloud, mobile & AI
Scope
20 chronological lessons · 1890 → present
Public reading index
- 1890 — Tabulating the state
- 1925 — Build a research engine
- 1946 — A prototype is not a company
- 1957 — Lower the unit of access
- 1964 — Compatibility becomes capital
- 1968 — Sell coordination, not a product
- 1969 — Fund a network nobody can own
- 1969 — Software separates from the machine
- 1972 — Encode the enterprise
- 1975 — From kit to platform
- 1976 — No nation builds a chip alone
- 1983 — Make code a commons
- 1989 — Keep the Web one Web
- 1995 — Turn participation into a market
- 1999 — The mobile Internet before the iPhone
- 2006 — Rent the machine by the request
- 2007 — Put a market inside the phone
- 2007 — Build for the infrastructure people have
- 2012 — AI reindustrializes software
- 2020 — When a platform becomes infrastructure