History of Computing
Computing is older than recorded history, and there are numerous
milestones. To find out more about this first check out the
Virtual Museum of Computing. Then the
Yahoo
computer history list. Jeffrey Shallit has
A
Very Brief History of Computer Science.
There is another brief history
Quest for a
Universal Machine at York University.
Visit the
Alan Turing
home page by Andrew Hodges.
Unix is over 25 years old and is probably the oldest operating system
in general use.
More information about Unix is in an FAQ
at UNIX-systems.
A History of Computing
archive at Virginia Tech includes the following items:
- Charles Babbage
was the originator of the idea of the digital computer.
- Alan M. Turing
was the inventor of the theoretical Turing machine and a computer pioneer.
- John von Neumann
was a scientific giant who made contributions to many fields including computing.
- Konrad Zuse built
a series of digital computers before, during, and after World War II.
There is also a Charles
Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. It is a center for the
history of information processing. They have a list of pointers to other
related sites and a
list of
museums with holdings
of computer hardware like the
American Computer Museum
in Bozeman, Montana.
Vannevar Bush in 1945 published an article
As
We May Think in the Atlantic Monthly
which is still an amazing vision of the world
of information. He also worked on a series of differential analyzers at
MIT.
There is an organization devoted to the
History of Computer Software.
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Last Updated Tue Mar 25 13:55 EST 2003
Michael Somos
<somos@grail.cba.csuohio.edu>
WWW URL:
"http://grail.cba.csuohio.edu/~somos/"