In 1979, two M.I.T. computer-science alumni and a Harvard Business School graduate launched a new piece of computer software for the Apple II machine, an early home computer. Called VisiCalc, short ...

The computer has traditionally been a woman. Before the invention of the electronic computer, the word “computer” meant a female worker who was part of a team with many other workers doing hundreds of ...

C. 2500 BCE: Sumerian abacus -- c. 700 BC: Scytale -- c. 150: Antikythera mechanism -- c. 60: Programmable robot -- c. 850: "On Deciphering Cryptographic Messages" -- c. 1470: Cipher disk -- 1613: ...

Inspired by A New History of Modern Computing by Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi. But the selection of key events in the journey from ENIAC to Tesla, from Data Processing to Big Data, is mine. This ...

Late one evening, UCLA graduate student Charley Kline sat in front of a refrigerator-sized computer and sent the message "lo" to a rack of computers operated by systems engineer Bill Duvall at the ...

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.

But to a computer, this image—like all images—is an array of pixels, numerical values that represent shades of red, green, and blue. One of the challenges computer scientists have grappled with since ...