PUBLISHED BITS COURSE · 01
People & history
The human chain of computation
What this course develops
Reconstruct the capabilities that made computing possible in contribution order, then investigate the lives, teams, institutions, and contested priority claims around them.
- Ancient rules
- Mechanical minds
- Logic
- Electronic dawn
- Universal machines
- Information
Scope
16 chronological lessons · 462-person biography atlas
Public reading index
- c. 5th–4th century BCE: Rules that generate
- 628–c. 825: Numbers become state
- c. 9th century–1206: Mechanisms follow sequences
- 1725–1804: Instructions on cards
- 1837–1843: The general machine
- 1847–1890: Logic and people become data
- 1931–1936: What can be computed?
- 1937: Logic becomes circuit
- 1941–1946: Electronic teams
- 1947: A switch with gain
- 1945–1949: Instructions live in memory
- 1948–1957: Machines translate languages
- 1961–1969: From batch to dialogue
- 1970–1976: Structured state over untrusted networks
- 1978–1991: The open distributed world
- 2009–2022 · provisional history: Data, model, evaluation
- Pāṇini
- Euclid
- Archimedes
- Heron of Alexandria
- Brahmagupta
- al-Khwārizmī
- Al-Kindi
- al-Jazarī
- Leonardo Fibonacci
- Ramon Llull
- John Napier
- William Oughtred
- Wilhelm Schickard
- Blaise Pascal
- G. W. Leibniz
- Basile Bouchon
- Joseph-Marie Jacquard
- Charles Babbage
- Ada Lovelace
- George Boole
- William Stanley Jevons
- Georg Cantor
- Gottlob Frege
- Giuseppe Peano
- Herman Hollerith
- Alfred North Whitehead
- David Hilbert
- Bertrand Russell
- Thomas J. Watson Sr.
- Jan Łukasiewicz
- L. E. J. Brouwer
- Percy Ludgate
- Thoralf Skolem
- Vannevar Bush
- Norbert Wiener
- Emil Post
- Haskell Curry
- Howard Aiken
- Arthur Samuel
- Walter Brattain
- Alonzo Church
- John von Neumann
- John Atanasoff
- Andrey Kolmogorov
- Tommy Flowers
- Kurt Gödel
- Grace Hopper
- John Mauchly
- John Bardeen
- Jacques Herbrand
- Stephen Kleene
- William Shockley
- Konrad Zuse
- Frederic C. Williams
- Alan Turing
- Maurice Wilkes
- Richard Hamming
- J. C. R. Licklider
- Horst Feistel
- Claude Shannon