How to Use this Site

This site is one of the activities of the History of Computing Foundation and is freely available to all under the Open Content License.

What can you do with the information on this site?

Use it freely!

Many students are using it for their papers, please do so too. Only give honor to whom honor is due and put in your paper or article where you got the information from.

So what is this?

Look at this site as if the editors are weaving a carpet. A carpet that will tell the complete story of the origins of computing, eventually.

The site is not completed yet, we are working on it. So when you have a look at some of the pages of this site it might be that some chapters are not quite finished.

What will you find here?

The first thing they, the editors, set up was a chronology of computing, this one is having some white spots but otherwise fairly complete. It tells you a chronological story from many years ago till present day on the history of computing.

Then there is a list of biographies of computer pioneers, and with some help of Bob Bemer and using the compilation of J.A.N. Lee it became quite large. Not all bio's are completely worked out yet, but a lot are.

A list of hardware, not very complete but growing all the time. And as far as we have the data or used references in the text of the chronology they are there.

Software of course is a different thing and the editors thought up a different format for that.
But we have had little time to work on that yet, so it is just a raw frame work.
However the introduction to software has been set up as a starting point. Have a look. We have planned sections on all major software departments: operating systems, commercial software, programming languages, expert systems, artificial intelligence and so forth.

To top it all off there is also a section on ICT companies that were or are important in the IT industry or played a significant role in it.

The reference page will eventually grow into the most important page of all. Here you will find more information on this project, information on computer related sciences, etc.
In the future we plan to have also a section on how does it work.
In fact the reference pages will become a treasure place to find more material on computing than just the history of computing.

Probably a site map would be nice too we thought so we have included one. And many more sections are under construction.

To read more on how this project started please refer to about this project.