Category Archives: Computing

“The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would … Continue reading →

The first prototype of a computer mouse, as designed by Bill English from Douglas Engelbart‘s sketches “A computer mouse (plural mice, also mouses) is a hand-held pointing device that detects two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically … Continue reading →

Syracuse University’s SUPARS system was developed by Pauline Atherton as an early antecedent of what we might today call ‘search’. “Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time … Continue reading →

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure … Continue reading →

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program the ENIAC in building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL). “In computing, a compiler is a computer program that transforms source code … Continue reading →

Stop-and-copy garbage collection in a Lisp architecture. Memory is divided into working and free memory; new objects are allocated in the former. … “In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector attempts … Continue reading →

“The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy – often in collective effort – the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to achieve novel and clever outcomes.[1] The … Continue reading →

Desmond Paul Henry, Picture by Drawing Machine 1, c. 1962 “Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video … Continue reading →

Mac Hack “… It will cover a little bit of the history of computer chess, focusing on: Turk, El Ajedrecista, Shannon and Turing’s approaches to build chess programs, MANIAC, Bersnstein’s Chess program, Mac Hack VI, Cray Blitz, HiTech, ChipTest, and … Continue reading →

Spacewar! Video Games Blast Off. Model of the 1962 PDP-1 computer at this Museum of the Moving Image exhibition. “Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob … Continue reading →

1969 “In March of 1970, Martin Gardner opened a letter jammed with ideas for his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Sent by John Horton Conway, then a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, the letter ran 12 pages, typed … Continue reading →

Close-up of the rotors in a Fialka cipher machine “In September 1960, two U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) cryptologists, William Hamilton Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, defected to the Soviet Union. A secret 1963 NSA study said that: ‘Beyond any … Continue reading →

“The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet-switching network and the first network to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was initially founded by the Advanced Research … Continue reading →

Bill English preparing for the 1968 Demo. “In the America of 1968, computers weren’t at all personal. They were refrigerator-sized behemoths that hummed and blinked, calculating everything from consumer habits to missile trajectories, cloistered deep within corporate offices, government agencies … Continue reading →