The history of computer science

From counting boards and the first algorithms to deep learning: the theory, machines, languages, algorithms, systems, networks, software practice, security and AI that make up computer science, in calendar dates. Moments are tagged and colored by subfield; eras are shown as spans, and links connect ideas to what they led to. Summaries are original; each moment links to its Wikipedia articles as sources. Dates marked approximate say so.

87 moments · 2700-07-01T00:00:00Z BCE – 2022-11-30T00:00:00Z CE · by @athan · @athan

Moments

1. The abacus 2700-07-01T00:00:00Z BCE
2. Euclid's algorithm 0300-07-01T00:00:00Z BCE
3. The Antikythera mechanism 0100-07-01T00:00:00Z BCE
4. Al-Khwarizmi's arithmetic and algebra 0820-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
5. Napier's logarithms 1614-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
6. Pascal's calculator 1642-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
7. Leibniz publishes binary arithmetic 1703-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
8. The Jacquard loom 1804-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
9. Babbage's Difference Engine 1822-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
10. The Analytical Engine 1837-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
11. Ada Lovelace's notes 1843-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
12. Boole's Laws of Thought 1854-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
13. Hollerith tabulates the US census 1890-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
14. Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem 1928-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
15. Gödel's incompleteness theorems 1931-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
16. Church's lambda calculus and undecidability 1936-04-01T00:00:00Z CE
17. Turing's "On Computable Numbers" 1936-11-01T00:00:00Z CE
18. Shannon's switching-circuit thesis 1937-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
19. Zuse's Z3 1941-05-12T00:00:00Z CE
20. Colossus at Bletchley Park 1944-02-01T00:00:00Z CE
21. The EDVAC report 1945-06-30T00:00:00Z CE
22. ENIAC is unveiled 1946-02-15T00:00:00Z CE
23. The transistor 1947-12-23T00:00:00Z CE
24. The Manchester Baby runs a stored program 1948-06-21T00:00:00Z CE
25. Shannon's theory of communication 1948-07-01T00:00:00Z CE
26. Hamming codes 1950-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
27. Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" 1950-10-01T00:00:00Z CE
28. UNIVAC I is delivered 1951-03-31T00:00:00Z CE
29. Grace Hopper's A-0 compiler 1952-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
30. The Dartmouth workshop 1956-08-01T00:00:00Z CE
31. FORTRAN 1957-04-01T00:00:00Z CE
32. LISP 1958-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
33. The integrated circuit 1958-09-12T00:00:00Z CE
34. COBOL 1959-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
35. Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm 1959-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
36. ALGOL 60 1960-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
37. Quicksort 1961-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
38. Time-sharing (CTSS) 1961-11-01T00:00:00Z CE
39. Sketchpad 1963-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
40. IBM System/360 1964-04-07T00:00:00Z CE
41. Computational complexity theory 1965-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
42. Moore's law 1965-04-19T00:00:00Z CE
43. "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" 1968-03-01T00:00:00Z CE
44. The NATO software engineering conference 1968-10-01T00:00:00Z CE
45. The Mother of All Demos 1968-12-09T00:00:00Z CE
46. UNIX 1969-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
47. ARPANET's first message 1969-10-29T00:00:00Z CE
48. Codd's relational model 1970-06-01T00:00:00Z CE
49. NP-completeness (Cook–Levin) 1971-05-01T00:00:00Z CE
50. The Intel 4004 microprocessor 1971-11-15T00:00:00Z CE