113 questions · 55 sources · 0 syntheses
History of Computing
The people, machines, and milestones of computing history.
Source-derived questions
Questions extracted from the papers in this topic, excluding the curated questions above.
- How did Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a BASIC interpreter for a machine they didn't yet own?
- How did CTSS create the illusion that each user had the whole computer to themselves?
- How did Catmull and Hanrahan's work at Pixar make computer-generated films emotionally affecting despite depicting nothing physically real?
- How did Charles Thacker's hardware design make the Alto more capable than contemporary minicomputers at lower cost?
- How did Compaq reverse-engineer the IBM BIOS to produce a compatible machine?
- How did David Noble come across the surviving stand of Wollemi Pines in 1994?
- How did Edison's Menlo Park laboratory change the way inventions were produced, compared to the lone-inventor model before it?
- How did GMR change the design of hard-drive read heads?
- How did Hugh Dowding's filter room and operations tables turn raw radar returns into usable warnings?
- How did MS-DOS's role in the IBM PC set the stage for Microsoft's dominance in personal computing?
- How did TeX go on to become standard in mathematical publishing?
- How did UNIVAC I correctly predict the 1952 presidential election, and why did CBS initially suppress the result?
Show 101 more questions
- How did UNIVAC I's use of magnetic tape differ from the punched-card systems that preceded it?
- How did Wozniak's colour graphics circuit exploit an artifact in the NTSC television standard to avoid dedicated hardware costs?
- How did human 'computers' work on artillery firing tables before machines like ENIAC took over?
- How did ideas from Corbató's Multics project lead Bell Labs engineers to build Unix?
- How did putting an entire CPU on one chip change what computing could be embedded into?
- How did replacing vacuum tubes with transistors change the physical size and power demands of computers?
- How did the Alto's architecture influence the graphical interfaces used on computers today?
- How did the Macintosh's price and specifications compare to its competitors when it launched in 1984?
- How did the floppy disk's physical size shrink from 8 inches down to 3.5 inches over the following decades?
- How did the graphical desktop environment developed at Xerox PARC influence Apple's products?
- How did you actually run a program on the Altair 8800 with no keyboard or screen?
- How does a charge-coupled device store and read out image information?
- How far did Linux's role expand from a hobby project to major infrastructure over the following decades?
- How large and how failure-prone was ENIAC once it was built, with its roughly 18,000 vacuum tubes?
- How much was spent worldwide preparing for the Y2K bug, and on what?
- How was the contribution of the ENIAC programmers eventually rediscovered decades later?
- How were the ENIAC programmers left out of recognition after the machine's public debut?
- In what sense did ENIAC mark the end of the era of human 'computers' doing calculations by hand?
- Roughly how much did governments and companies spend worldwide on Y2K remediation?
- Under what license was the Linux kernel released, and how did that shape its early collaboration?
- What could a user do with Sutherland's Sketchpad that no computer program had allowed before?
- What device did Bardeen co-invent at Bell Labs in 1947, and why was it significant?
- What did Bardeen and Brattain's germanium-and-gold-contact device do on 16 December 1947 that made it a transistor?
- What did Berners-Lee build by the end of 1990 to turn his proposal into a working system?
- What did Engelbart consider the true goal behind his inventions, beyond the mouse itself?
- What did Linus Torvalds actually write in his original comp.os.minix announcement?
- What did Mauchly and Eckert propose to solve the Army's firing-table problem, and when did construction begin?
- What did using a computer require before time-sharing systems existed?
- What distinguished the Apple II from earlier personal computers that were sold as hobbyist kits?
- What does it mean for a shape in Sketchpad to be a 'constrained' geometric object rather than just a drawing?
- What earlier invention funded Baekeland's private laboratory where he developed Bakelite?
- What efficiency did the Bell Labs silicon p-n junction cell achieve, and how did that compare to the selenium cells that came before it?
- What features did the Xerox Alto have that made it a precursor to the modern personal computer?
- What had Noyce and Moore already accomplished at Fairchild Semiconductor before founding Intel in 1968?
- What happened to Engelbart's lab at SRI in the years after the demo?
- What happened to Jim Gray in 2007, and how large was the search effort that followed?
- What is the Unix philosophy of small tools and pipes, and why did it spread into so many later operating systems?
- What kinds of failures were feared if two-digit year fields misread '00' as 1900?
- What kinds of scientific problems did Cambridge researchers use EDSAC for in the months after it launched?
- What machine did Ken Thompson use to build the first version of Unix, and why was it available to him?
- What made EDSAC one of the earliest stored-program computers to be used for genuine scientific work?
- What made Shuji Nakamura's route to blue LEDs different from the academic approach taken in Nagoya?
- What made programming the IBM 704 in assembly language so laborious before FORTRAN?
- What made the Smalltalk language a paradigm shift rather than an added feature?
- What other ambitious project was La Fontaine known for outside of peace advocacy?
- What practical inventions did Langmuir produce alongside his theoretical work on surfaces?
- What practical telephone-static problem was Karl Jansky originally trying to solve at Bell Labs?
- What problem did Pat Hanrahan's RenderMan shading language solve for computer-generated imagery?
- What problem with the 1950 census led the Census Bureau to commission UNIVAC I?
- What problem with vacuum tubes was Shockley's group at Bell Labs trying to solve using semiconductor materials?
- What problems with punched cards motivated Alan Shugart's team at IBM to develop the floppy disk?
- What realization about debugging did Wilkes reportedly have on the stairs of the EDSAC room in 1949?
- What research institutions, like General Electric and Bell Labs, inherited Edison's model of organized innovation?
- What role did Minsky play in founding the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory?
- What roles did Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson each play in developing the first practical solar cell?
- What specifications did the original IBM Model 5150 ship with in 1981?
- What task was ENIAC originally designed to compute during the war?
- What task were Marlyn Wescoff and the other five women recruited by the US Army to perform on ENIAC?
- What technologies did Douglas Engelbart demonstrate in the 1968 'Mother of All Demos'?
- What technologies did the Macintosh borrow from Xerox PARC that had gone largely unused for over a decade?
- What was Alan Kay's Dynabook concept, and who was it designed for?
- What was Grace Hopper's contribution to the first compiler in 1952?
- What was the Xerox Alto and why was it significant for personal computing?
- What was the conventional wisdom about processor instruction sets before John Cocke's work on the IBM 801?
- What was the first program EDSAC ran on 6 May 1949?
- What were ENIAC's physical specifications in terms of size, vacuum tubes, and power consumption?
- What were Penzias and Wilson actually trying to do with their horn antenna when they found the mysterious hiss?
- Which concepts in modern interactive computing trace back directly to Sketchpad?
- Which modern operating systems trace their design back to Thompson and Ritchie's work at Bell Labs?
- Which universities were connected by the original ARPANET in 1969?
- Who provided Google's first investment, and under what circumstances was the cheque written?
- Why did Dennis Ritchie invent the C programming language, and how did it make Unix portable across hardware?
- Why did ENIAC break down so frequently, and how did operators cope with its unreliability?
- Why did Fert and Grünberg's discovery matter for the growth of cloud computing and portable storage?
- Why did IBM's decision to use off-the-shelf components end up making the PC easy to clone?
- Why did Knuth pause his book project for nearly a decade to build a typesetting system?
- Why did MITS receive four thousand orders for the Altair 8800 when they expected only a few hundred?
- Why did Tommy Flowers and his team go decades without public credit for building one of the first programmable electronic computers?
- Why did early AI researchers like McCarthy believe human-level machine intelligence was close at hand?
- Why did programmers in the 1960s and 1970s choose to represent years with only two digits?
- Why did solving the structure of vitamin B12 take Hodgkin eight years and early computing assistance?
- Why did storing years as two digits threaten computer systems at the 1999-to-2000 rollover?
- Why did the Altair 8800 episode prove that software mattered more than hardware in personal computing?
- Why did the Macintosh make the command-line interface feel outdated even though it didn't invent the graphical alternative?
- Why did the Turing Award arrive almost three decades after Engelbart's demonstration?
- Why did the US Army's need for ballistic firing tables in 1943 create a computational bottleneck that human 'computers' couldn't solve fast enough?
- Why does it remain unresolved whether the remediation effort was necessary or the threat was overstated?
- Why does the save icon in modern software still depict a 3.5-inch floppy disk?
- Why is EDSAC considered a landmark even though it wasn't the first electronic computer?
- Why is VisiCalc credited with selling the Apple II to a completely different audience than hobbyists?
- Why is the Bombe not considered a computer in the modern sense?
- Why is the absence of a Y2K disaster not proof the risk was overstated?
- Why is the story of the incandescent bulb as a single eureka moment misleading?
- Why was Alan Kay sardonic about how his ideas were eventually adopted?
- Why was Java originally designed for consumer electronics rather than the web?
- Why was Shockley not present for the crucial transistor experiment even though he led the research group?
- Why was UNIVAC I considered the first general-purpose commercial computer rather than a one-off scientific instrument?
- Why was programming ENIAC especially difficult given that the women had no manuals to work from?
- Why was solving Leontief's equations impractical before the arrival of computers?
- Why was the first commercial floppy disk read-only, and what was it originally used for?
- Why was this study funded as an occupational health investigation rather than as a joke?
Sources
- ACM A.M. Turing Award
- ACM A.M. Turing Award
- ACM A.M. Turing Award
- ACM A.M. Turing Award
- ACM A.M. Turing Award
- ACM A.M. Turing Award
- ACM A.M. Turing Award
- ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Apple II personal computer introduced
- Apple Macintosh introduced
- Birth of Marlyn Wescoff
- Chain Home radar proves decisive in the Battle of Britain
Show 28 more sources
- Colossus computing machine delivered to Bletchley Park
- Construction begins on ENIAC
- Cosmic microwave background detected at Bell Labs
- Death of Grace Hopper
- Death of John Bardeen
- Death of Thomas Edison
- EDSAC runs the first practical stored-program computation
- ENIAC publicly unveiled
- Early computer development accelerates under wartime pressure
- FORTRAN manual published — first high-level programming language
- First ARPANET message transmitted
- First practical silicon solar cell demonstrated
- Google founded
- IBM introduces the 8-inch floppy disk
- IBM introduces the Personal Computer (IBM PC)
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Intel 4004: first commercial microprocessor
- Intel Corporation founded
- Invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD)
- Java programming language released publicly
- Karl Jansky observes cosmic radio noise
- Leo Baekeland invents Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic
- Linux kernel announced
- MITS Altair 8800: first commercially successful personal computer
- Nobel Peace Prize
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Physics