Arturo Herrero

Decisive moments in history of computing

I’ve read The story of computing: From the Abacus to Artificial Intelligence by—Alan Turing’s nephew—Dermot Turing. Exploring the history of computing was very stimulating, but how wonderful it would be if a great writer could capture these stories. Something similar to Decisive Moments in History by Stefan Zweig.

The following are the possible chapter titles—cryptically evocative—of Decisive Moments in Computer History: Twenty-three historical miniatures:

  1. The use of the abacus at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
  2. Charles Babbage’s difference engine and Analytical Engine.
  3. 1890 U.S. census: punched cards & tabulating machine.
  4. On computable numbers, Enigma codes, and Turing tests.
  5. Truth is binary. Shannon’s information theory.
  6. ENIAC, EDVAC, and the von Neumann architecture.
  7. Grace Hopper, from bugs to compilers.
  8. Silicon Valley and the Intel Trinity.
  9. IBM: Thinking inside the box.
  10. NASA’s Apollo program.
  11. The Mother of All Demos and the magic from Xerox PARC.
  12. UNIX: Ken typed | Dennis defined.
  13. ARPANET and the first-ever email.
  14. Atari, Sinclair, and Commodore.
  15. Windows, apples, and spreadsheets.
  16. Just a hobby, won’t be big and professional…
  17. The World Wide Web and the WorldWideWeb.
  18. Googol.
  19. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator.
  20. DeepBlue, AlphaGo, and AI.
  21. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
  22. Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
  23. Autonomous pilots and machines.

December 08, 2021 | @ArturoHerrero