Essay1945
As We May Think
Vannevar Bush
Proposes the memex, an associative trail-following machine, and anticipates hypertext by two decades.
≈8,000 wordslink checked 17 Sept 2026History of Computing
How we got from mechanical calculators to whatever this is.
9 topics · 12 curated works
Topics
- 01Foundations & Overviews1
- 02Babbage & Lovelace2
- 03The Turing Era1
- 04Early Mainframes1
- 05The Personal Computer Revolution1
- 06The Birth of the Internet1
- 07Unix & Its Descendants2
- 08Open Source Movement2
- 09Computing Pioneer Biography1
Reading in History of Computing
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No prior grounding assumed.
As We May Think
Vannevar Bush · 1945
Proposes the memex, an associative trail-following machine, and anticipates hypertext by two decades.
+4 more at this level
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Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
Charles Babbage · 1864
Babbage's own account of designing the Difference and Analytical Engines, and his bitterness at the British government's refusal to fund them to…
+3 more at this level
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Primary sources and full treatments.
Proposed Electronic Calculator
Alan Turing · 1945
Turing's own detailed design for the Automatic Computing Engine, written for the National Physical Laboratory months after the war, laying out a…
+2 more at this level
12 works
Essay1843
Notes on the Analytical Engine
Ada Lovelace
Describes a method for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers, now read as the first published algorithm written for a machine that did not yet exist.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Essay1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
Bill Gates
Accuses hobbyist computer users of pirating Altair BASIC rather than paying for it, arguing software written by individuals deserves payment just as hardware does, an early shot in the fight over what software ownership means.
Essay1985
The GNU Manifesto
Richard Stallman
Announces the GNU project and argues software should be free to run, study, share and modify, laying out the ethical case for free software that the later open-source movement would recast in more pragmatic terms.
Essay1997
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Eric S. Raymond
Open, parallel development can outperform closed planning because bug-finding parallelises even when design does not.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Book1864
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
Charles Babbage
Babbage's own account of designing the Difference and Analytical Engines, and his bitterness at the British government's refusal to fund them to completion.
FreeIntermediate
Essay1958
John von Neumann, 1903-1957
Stanislaw Ulam
A memorial account by a close collaborator of von Neumann's life and work across pure mathematics, physics and computing, written within a year of his death.
FreeIntermediate
Paper1974
The UNIX Time-Sharing System
Dennis M. Ritchie & Ken Thompson
Describes an operating system built around a small set of orthogonal ideas, such as everything is a file and small programs composed by pipes, that outlived the hardware it was written for.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Book2003
The Art of Unix Programming
Eric S. Raymond
Codifies the design habits, do one thing well, write programs to work together, prefer text streams, that Raymond argues make Unix software resilient across decades, and traces where later systems departed from them.
FreeIntermediate
Report1945
Proposed Electronic Calculator
Alan Turing
Turing's own detailed design for the Automatic Computing Engine, written for the National Physical Laboratory months after the war, laying out a stored-program computer in working engineering detail rather than the abstract terms of his 1936 paper.
FreeAdvanced
Report1945
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
John von Neumann
Lays out the stored-program architecture, one memory holding both instructions and data, that essentially every general-purpose computer since has used, though its sole authorship remained disputed for decades.
FreeAdvanced
Paper1967
Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication
Lawrence G. Roberts
Proposes connecting the separate computer networks then being built into one interconnected network using packet switching, the paper that set ARPANET's original design in motion.
FreeAdvanced
In order written
1843 – 2003- 1843Notes on the Analytical EngineAda Lovelace
- 1864Passages from the Life of a PhilosopherCharles Babbage
- 1945As We May ThinkVannevar Bush
- 1945Proposed Electronic CalculatorAlan Turing
- 1945First Draft of a Report on the EDVACJohn von Neumann
- 1958John von Neumann, 1903-1957Stanislaw Ulam
- 1967Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer CommunicationLawrence G. Roberts
- 1974The UNIX Time-Sharing SystemDennis M. Ritchie & Ken Thompson
- 1976An Open Letter to HobbyistsBill Gates
- 1985The GNU ManifestoRichard Stallman
- 1997The Cathedral and the BazaarEric S. Raymond
- 2003The Art of Unix ProgrammingEric S. Raymond