FREE TECHNICAL PAPER HISTORY

History of Technical Papers

Read the context, central move, and downstream impact of the papers that changed computing.

• On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem — Alan M. Turing (1936)
• A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits — Claude E. Shannon (1938)
• First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC — John von Neumann (1945)
• A Mathematical Theory of Communication — Claude E. Shannon (1948)
• The Transistor, A Semi-Conductor Triode — John Bardeen & Walter H. Brattain (1948)
• Computing Machinery and Intelligence — Alan M. Turing (1950)
• Man-Computer Symbiosis — J. C. R. Licklider (1960)
• Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework — Douglas C. Engelbart (1962)
• Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System — Ivan E. Sutherland (1963)
• Go To Statement Considered Harmful — Edsger W. Dijkstra (1968)
• An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming — C. A. R. Hoare (1969)
• A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks — E. F. Codd (1970)
• The Complexity of Theorem-Proving Procedures — Stephen A. Cook (1971)
• A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication — Vinton G. Cerf & Robert E. Kahn (1974)
• The UNIX Time-Sharing System — Dennis M. Ritchie & Ken Thompson (1974)
• The Protection of Information in Computer Systems — Jerome H. Saltzer & Michael D. Schroeder (1975)
• New Directions in Cryptography — Whitfield Diffie & Martin E. Hellman (1976)
• A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems — Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir & Leonard M. Adleman (1978)
• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System — Leslie Lamport (1978)
• The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer — David A. Patterson & David R. Ditzel (1980)
• The Byzantine Generals Problem — Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak & Marshall Pease (1982)
• Reflections on Trusting Trust — Ken Thompson (1984)
• End-to-End Arguments in System Design — Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed & David D. Clark (1984)
• Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors — David E. Rumelhart, Geoffrey E. Hinton & Ronald J. Williams (1986)
• Information Management: A Proposal — Tim Berners-Lee (1989)
• The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine — Sergey Brin & Lawrence Page (1998)
• The Part-Time Parliament — Leslie Lamport (1998)
• The Google File System — Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff & Shun-Tak Leung (2003)
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters — Jeffrey Dean & Sanjay Ghemawat (2004)
• Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System — Satoshi Nakamoto (2008)
• ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks — Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever & Geoffrey E. Hinton (2012)
• Attention Is All You Need — Ashish Vaswani et al. (2017)
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks — Patrick Lewis et al. (2020)
• Language Models are Few-Shot Learners — Tom B. Brown et al. (2020)
• Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback — Long Ouyang et al. (2022)