The Story of Computing
A thread about the first programmers, the machines that learned to remember, and the networks that connected them.
The history of computing is often told as a list of machines, but it is also a history of arguments. What should a machine do? Who gets to program it? What does it mean to remember something in a medium that does not forget? The answers changed as the technology moved from workshops to laboratories to ordinary desks.
This thread follows a few of those turns. It begins with the people who wrote instructions for machines that did not yet exist, moves through the long effort to store and retrieve information, and ends with the networks that made computing a shared activity.