The history of computers goes back over 200 years. At first theorized by mathematicians and entrepreneurs, during the 19th century mechanical calculating machines were designed and built to solve the ...

In 1947, engineers stared at the room‑sized Harvard Mark II computer in frustration as it kept malfunctioning. They finally ...

Government-funded academic research on parallel computing, stream processing, real-time shading languages, and programmable ...

The first electronic computer was built during the 1940s by John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, and one of his students, Clifford E. Berry. But the ...

In 1982, personal computers were beige, boxy, and built for engineers. They were powerful, but uninviting. Few people knew what they were for, or why they might need one. It took more than just better ...

In 2021, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history professor Thomas Haigh began teaching a course on the history of computers. Haigh, the coauthor of a book on the subject published around that same ...

The invention of the computer is often articulated like a three-act play: the idea of the computer arrives, then there is the process of how to make the computer and, finally, there is the creation.

From AT&T to NASA, women working as computers performed the calculations that made modern science possible. In the early ...

Straight from the Department of Defense History comes a recently declassified gem: Samuel S. Snyder’s History of NSA General-Purpose Electronic Digital Computers. It’s a wonderful late-night read with ...