The first electronic computer was built during the 1940s by John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, and one of his students, Clifford E. Berry. But the ...

This book covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the dot-com crash. The author concentrates on five key moments of transition: the transformation ...

Although quantum computing is a nascent field, there are plenty of key moments that defined it over the last few decades as scientists strive to create machines that can solve impossible problems.

On May 7, 1981, influential physicist Richard Feynman gave a keynote speech at Caltech. Feynman opened his talk by politely rejecting the very notion of a keynote speech, instead saying that he had ...

In a very real sense, the Internet, this marvelous worldwide digital communications network that you’re using right now, was created because one man was annoyed at having too many computer terminals ...

I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum developed Eliza in the mid-1960s. His views on artificial intelligence were often at odds with many of his fellow pioneers in the field. Illustration by Meilan Solly / ...