History
A timeline of computer science
Computer science took shape over about two hundred years, but most of what defines it happened within living memory. These are the dates that matter most, from the first mechanical designs to the ideas behind modern artificial intelligence. Each entry links to fuller coverage as it is published.
- 1837
Babbage describes the Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage sets out the design for a general-purpose mechanical computer with a store for numbers and a mill to process them, anticipating the structure of the modern computer by more than a century.
- 1843
Lovelace writes the first published algorithm
In her notes on the Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace includes a method for computing Bernoulli numbers, widely regarded as the first published computer program, and argues that such a machine could do more than arithmetic.
- 1936
Turing defines the universal machine
Alan Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" introduces the Turing machine and proves that a single machine can compute anything computable, giving computer science its theoretical foundation.
- 1937
Shannon links logic to circuits
Claude Shannon shows that Boolean algebra can describe electrical switching circuits, establishing the basis for all digital logic design.
- 1943
Colossus breaks ciphers at Bletchley Park
Colossus, the first programmable electronic digital computer, begins operating at Bletchley Park to break German wartime ciphers.
- 1945
Von Neumann describes the stored-program computer
John von Neumann's "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" sets out the stored-program architecture, in which instructions and data share the same memory, used by almost every computer built since.
- 1946
ENIAC is unveiled
ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, is completed at the University of Pennsylvania and revealed to the public.
- 1948
The Manchester Baby runs the first stored program
The Small-Scale Experimental Machine at the University of Manchester runs the world's first stored program, proving the von Neumann architecture in hardware.
- 1950
Turing proposes the imitation game
Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" asks whether machines can think and proposes the test now known as the Turing test.
- 1952
Hopper writes the first compiler
Grace Hopper builds the A-0 system, the first compiler, which translates symbolic instructions into machine code and opens the way to high-level programming languages.
- 1956
The term "artificial intelligence" is coined
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project brings together the researchers who name and launch the field of artificial intelligence.
- 1957
FORTRAN is released
IBM releases FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, making scientific computing accessible to non-specialists.
- 1958
McCarthy designs LISP
John McCarthy creates LISP, a language built on recursion and symbolic processing that becomes central to artificial intelligence research.
- 1962
The first computer science department opens
Purdue University establishes the first department of computer science in the United States, marking the field's arrival as an academic discipline.
- 1965
Moore states his law
Gordon Moore observes that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years, a trend later named Moore's law that guides the industry for decades.
- 1969
The first message crosses ARPANET
ARPANET carries its first message between two university computers, laying the groundwork for the internet.
- 1970
Codd publishes the relational model
Edgar Codd sets out the relational model for databases, the foundation of the SQL systems that store much of the world's data.
- 1971
Intel ships the first microprocessor
The Intel 4004 puts a complete central processing unit on a single chip, starting the microprocessor era that leads to the personal computer.
- 1972
Ritchie creates the C language
Dennis Ritchie develops C at Bell Labs. It becomes the language of operating systems and the ancestor of much of modern programming.
- 1983
The internet adopts TCP/IP
ARPANET switches to the TCP/IP protocol suite, the moment often cited as the birth of the modern internet.
- 1989
Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web at CERN. The first website goes live in 1991 and the web soon reaches the public.
- 2012
Deep learning breaks through
A neural network named AlexNet wins the ImageNet image-recognition competition by a wide margin, setting off the deep learning revolution in artificial intelligence.
- 2017
The transformer arrives
The paper "Attention Is All You Need" introduces the transformer architecture, which underpins the large language models that follow.