History

Here we present an informal history of the most revolutionary time in technology. From cogs and gears to microchips the development hasn't been smooth. Over the years the industry has attracted strange characters and outlandish solutions to technological problems. No matter what you think of it all the story is far from boring - it's fascinating and it has much to say about the future.

Although we divide our collection into categories the division isn't always perfect. You will find accounts of the machines that they built in the stories of the people who built them and in the same way about the people who built the machines and structured the computer languages in the technology stories and in our accounts of the development of programming itself.
  • Machines   ( 29 Articles )
    Some machines are just bigger than the people who created them - the Altair, the ENIAC, the IBM PC - their stories are best told from the machine's point of view.
  • People   ( 44 Articles )
    The legends of the computing industry made huge technological advances often against the odds. Some names you will know from current news - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Alan Sugar - but computer history started much earlier and there are many pioneers you should know about.
  • Software & computer languages   ( 5 Articles )
    Languages are the core of computing ideas because they embody the latest ideas of how we think about the whole process of computing. In the early years the hardware had most effect on the form of a language but over time the concepts embodied in the languages have drifted away from the hardware and become something new and different.