A century before the dawn of the computer age, Ada Lovelace imagined the modern-day, general-purpose computer. It could be programmed to follow instructions, she wrote in 1843. It could not just ...
The first computer didn’t show up looking like anything we’d call a computer now. There was no screen, no keyboard, no mouse, and definitely no controller waiting beside it. Early computers were built ...
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: ...