Hardware, software, and the internet.
1 quizzesThe history of computing is the most consequential technological revolution since the printing press, compressed into less than a century. From Alan Turing's theoretical machine in 1936 to ENIAC in 1946, from IBM's mainframes to the Apple II, from Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989 to the mobile internet in your pocket today, every decade has produced a paradigm shift that rewrote how humans work, communicate, and understand the world.
The milestones tell the story. UNIX (1969), ARPANET (1969), Ethernet (1973), TCP/IP (1983), the World Wide Web (1989), HTML and the first browser (1990-93), Google (1998), Wikipedia (2001), YouTube (2005). Programming languages from Fortran and COBOL to C, Python, and JavaScript each reflected a different era's ambitions. The open-source movement — Linux, Git, Mozilla — built the infrastructure that almost every company on Earth now runs on.
This subcategory covers the whole arc: the pioneers (Turing, Hopper, , ), the companies (, , , ), the protocols (, , ), the languages, and the inventions that turned computers from room-sized curiosities into the nervous system of modern civilisation.
