A personal project on putting knowledge about history of computing into perspective.
“To teach a subject without the history of how it happened is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product.”
- Universe age: 13.7 billion years (The Big Bang)
- Earth age: 4.45 billion years
- First life on Earth: 4 billion years ago
- First plants: 1.3 billion years ago
- First birds: 150 million years ago
- First Homo sapiens: 250,000 years ago
- First cave paintings: 32,000 years
- First cities: 8,800 years ago
- Invention of the wheel, writing: 5,500 years ago
- Printing press: 540 years ago
- Scientific revolution: 450 years ago
- Fossil fuel revolution (coal, trains): 180 years ago
- Telephone: 130 years ago
- Alan Turing's seminal paper: 85 years ago (1936)
- Term "bit" coined by Claude Shannon: 71 years ago (1948)
- Term "software" coined by John Tukey: 61 years ago (1958)
- Term "computer science": 60 years ago (1959)
- Term "software engineering": 50 years ago (1968)
- First 4 node ARPANET: 50 yeas ago (5 December 1969)
- Early Internet (TCP/IP as main protocol in ARPANET): 40 years ago (1983)
- Public commercial use of Internet: 30 years ago (1990)
| period | name |
|---|---|
| 1930s | Alan Mathison Turing |
| 1940s | Vannevar Bush |
| 1950s | Alan Jay Perlis |
| 1950s | Claude Shannon |
| 1960s | Douglas Engelbart |
| 1960s | Ivan Sutherland |
| 1960s | J.C.R. Licklider |
To update README and table above.
$ go run gen-readme.go people/*.md > README.md