This site is one of the activities of the History of Computing Foundation and is freely available to all under the Open Content License.
Use it freely!
Many students are using it for their papers, please do so too. Only give honor to whom honor is due and put in your paper or article where you got the information from. See how to cite us for more info on that.
Look at this site as if the editors are weaving a carpet. A carpet that will tell the complete story of the origins of computing, eventually.
The site will never be completed, we keep working on it for years
to come. So when you have a look at some of the pages of this site it might
be that some chapters are not quite finished. Help us if you want ![]()
The first thing we, the editors, set up was a chronology of computing, this one is having some white spots but otherwise fairly complete. It tells you a chronological story from many years ago till present day on the history of computing.
Then there is a list of biographies of computer pioneers, and with some help of the late Bob Bemer (1920-2004) and using the compilation of J.A.N. Lee it became quite large. Not all bio's are completely worked out yet, but a lot are.
A list of hardware, not very complete but growing all the time. And as far as we have the data or used references in the text of the chronology they are there.
Software of course is a different thing and the editors thought up a different format for that.
But we have had little time to work on that yet, so it is just a raw frame work.
However the introduction to software has been set up as a starting point. Have a look. We have planned sections on all major software departments: operating systems, commercial software, programming languages, expert systems, artificial intelligence and so forth.
To top it all off there is also a section on ICT companies that were or are important in the IT industry or played a significant role in it.
The reference page will eventually grow into the most important page of all. Here you will find more information on this project, information on computer related sciences, etc.
In the future we plan to have also a section on "how does it work".
In fact the reference pages will become a treasure trove to find more material on computing than just the history of computing.
Probably a site map would be nice too we thought so we have included one.
And many more sections are under construction.
To read more on how this project started please refer to about this project.
On the top and bottoms of all pages you will find the following buttons that are helping you to navigate through the History of Computing site:
More information about the project and our the Foundation can be found here
If you came all the way down this line you'll be interesd to know how to join us.
| Last Updated on 23 February, 2007 | For suggestions please mail the editors |