On May 7, 1981, influential physicist Richard Feynman gave a keynote speech at Caltech. Feynman opened his talk by politely rejecting the very notion of a keynote speech, instead saying that he had ...

This book covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the dot-com crash. The author concentrates on five key moments of transition: the transformation ...

CC0 Usage Conditions ApplyClick for more information. Computer technology has been employed for more than fifty years at the Smithsonian. Information Technology (IT) currently supports every facet of ...

From AT&T to NASA, women working as computers performed the calculations that made modern science possible. In the early 1900s, computing joined teaching and nursing as one of the few careers open to ...

The history of computers is composed of an ever-growing number of consumer electronics devices, from game consoles to smartphones to music players, and the Computer History Museum's expansive catalog ...

Scientists are harnessing the alternative physics of the quantum realm to create computers of unprecedented power, potentially revolutionizing fields from drug discovery to climate modeling. Quantum ...

MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum developed Eliza in the mid-1960s. His views on artificial intelligence were often at odds with many of his fellow pioneers in the field. Illustration by Meilan Solly / ...

Excerpted from Beyond Eureka! The Rocky Roads to Innovating by Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, with a foreword by Guy Kawasaki (Georgetown University Press). Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace (1815–52), ...

In 1947, engineers stared at the room‑sized Harvard Mark II computer in frustration as it kept malfunctioning. They finally opened a panel and discovered a moth wedged inside an electromechanical ...

On Oct. 3, 1950, three scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey received a U.S. patent for what would become one of the most important inventions of the 20th century — the transistor. John Bardeen, ...