Glen Beck and Betty Snyder programming ENIAC, one of the first electronic computers, among its panels of switches and cables
Glen Beck and Betty Snyder programming ENIAC, about 1947
Marked Bletchley Park

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Computers

From Colossus, built at Bletchley Park to break German codes in 1943 to 1944, computers went from rooms full of valves to chips with billions of transistors in every pocket.

Place
Bletchley Park · Manchester · Silicon Valley · ShenzhenThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
7 planned, none written yet
Image
United States Army, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforeCalculations done by people, often women, called computers.

  1. IBabbage and Lovelace
  2. IITuring’s idea
  3. IIIColossus
  4. IVThe Manchester Baby
  5. VThe chip
  6. VIHome computers
  7. VIIPhones and AI

AfterMachines that calculate, store and connect the world.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Ada Lovelace
  • Alan Turing
  • Tommy Flowers
  • Grace Hopper
  • Tom Kilburn
  • Steve Wozniak

Objects

  • The Colossus rebuild
  • The Manchester Baby replica
  • The ZX Spectrum

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1943 to now. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?