Every tool in the AI Learning Galaxy stands on decades of prior work. This section traces the milestones that made modern computing and AI possible, and connects each one to how it is still used today. Explore them in context on the IT History Timeline and the Knowledge Galaxy .
History of Computing and IT
The milestones that built modern computing and AI, from the abacus to agentic systems. Each entry explains what it was, why it mattered, and how it still shapes the AI tools you use today.
All articles
57 total
Abacus
A manual counting frame that holds place values in columns of beads, the …
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Ada Lovelace's Algorithm (Note G)
The 1843 step-by-step table that computes Bernoulli numbers on Babbage's …
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Adobe (Macromedia) Flash (1996)
A browser plugin platform for animation, interactive content, and video …
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Android
The open-source, Linux-based mobile operating system led by Google that …
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Apache Hadoop (2006)
An open-source framework for storing and processing huge datasets across …
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Apache HTTP Server
The open-source web server that delivered most of the early web and …
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Apple iPhone
The 2007 multi-touch device that fused phone, music player and internet …
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ARPANET
The first operational packet-switched computer network and the direct …
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Babbage's Analytical and Difference Engines
The first designs for an automatic calculating machine and a …
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Boolean Algebra
A system of algebra where variables are true or false and combine with …
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C: the systems language behind Unix
A compiled, statically typed language built at Bell Labs to rewrite …
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Cloud Native Computing Foundation (2015)
A Linux Foundation body that hosts and governs vendor-neutral …
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COBOL (1959 to 1960)
The English-like business programming language defined by the CODASYL …
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ENIAC
The room-sized machine of about 17,468 vacuum tubes that became the …
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Ethernet
The local area network technology that lets computers share one medium …
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First compiler (Grace Hopper's A-0)
The A-0 system Grace Hopper wrote for UNIVAC I in 1951 to 1952, an early …
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FORTRAN (1957)
The first widely used high-level programming language, built at IBM for …
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Google App Engine: Upload Code, Skip the Servers
Google App Engine is the 2008 platform-as-a-service that runs web apps …
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Google Reader (2005 to 2013)
A web-based RSS and Atom feed aggregator that let people follow blogs …
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Graphical User Interface (Apple Macintosh)
The first commercially successful personal computer built around a …
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Heroku: The Git Push That Replaced the Server
Heroku is the platform-as-a-service that let developers deploy apps with …
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Hollerith punched-card tabulator
An 1889 electromechanical machine that recorded data as holes in cards, …
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HTTP and HTML
The request-response protocol browsers use to fetch resources and the …
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IBM Personal Computer (5150)
IBM's first mass-market personal computer, whose open architecture and …
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IBM System/360
The 1964 computer family that shared one architecture across many …
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Integrated Circuit
The integrated circuit packs many connected components onto one chip of …
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Intel 4004 Microprocessor
The first commercial general-purpose programmable microprocessor, a …
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Jacquard loom (punched-card control)
A 1804 loom controlled by punched cards, the first practical machine to …
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Java (1995)
A general-purpose language that compiles to bytecode and runs on the …
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JavaScript (1995)
The scripting language that made web pages interactive and later spread …
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Kubernetes Removes dockershim
Kubernetes dropped the shim that connected the kubelet to Docker, …
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Leibniz Step Reckoner
The first mechanical calculator able to add, subtract, multiply, and …
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Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228)
A critical 2021 remote code execution flaw in the Apache Log4j 2 logging …
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Magnetic-core memory
Computer memory built from tiny magnetizable ferrite rings on a grid of …
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Microsoft Azure: When the Windows Company Became a Cloud
Microsoft Azure is a global public cloud that rents compute, storage, …
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MongoDB relicenses to SSPL (2018)
MongoDB moved its Community Server from AGPLv3 to its own Server Side …
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Moore's Law
Moore's law is the 1965 observation that the number of components on a …
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Mosaic and Netscape Navigator
Mosaic was the first widely used graphical web browser, and Netscape …
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Networked Email and the @ Sign (1971)
How Ray Tomlinson's 1971 network email and the @ sign let people on …
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OpenStack
OpenStack is an open-source platform for building private and public …
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Pascaline (Pascal's Calculator)
A 1642 mechanical adding machine that used geared wheels to add and …
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PHP (1995)
A server-side scripting language that embeds code inside HTML to build …
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Python 2 end of life (2020)
Python 2 reached end of life on 1 January 2020, ending all fixes, …
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Red Hat Shifts CentOS to CentOS Stream
In December 2020, Red Hat ended CentOS Linux, the free downstream …
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Salesforce and Software-as-a-Service
How Salesforce delivered enterprise CRM over the web on a subscription …
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Shannon: Switching Logic and Information Theory
Claude Shannon's 1937 thesis showed switching circuits can do Boolean …
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SolarWinds Supply-Chain Compromise
Attackers hid a backdoor inside SolarWinds Orion software updates, …
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SQL (1974)
The declarative query language for relational databases that lets you …
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SSL and TLS: Encrypting the Web
SSL and its successor TLS encrypt traffic between browsers and servers, …
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TensorFlow (2015)
Google's open-source machine learning framework for building and …
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The Turing Machine (On Computable Numbers)
Alan Turing's 1936 abstract machine that reads and writes symbols on an …
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Three-tier architecture (early 1990s)
The pattern that splits an application into a presentation tier, an …
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Transistor
A solid-state semiconductor device that amplifies or switches electrical …
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UNIVAC I
The first commercially produced electronic digital computer in the …
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Von Neumann Architecture (EDVAC Report)
The 1945 design that holds program instructions and data in the same …
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Windows XP
Microsoft's long-lived desktop operating system from 2001, prized for …
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XML 1.0 (1998)
A text format for marking up structured data so machines and people can …
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57 articles in this section. Search for a specific topic.
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