Talk:History of computing

Article Checklist for "History of computing"

Workgroup category or categories	Computers Workgroup, History Workgroup [Editors asked to check categories]
Article status	Developing article: beyond a stub, but incomplete
Underlinked article?	Yes
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	Pat Palmer 15:23, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

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first draft

I've copied this initial stuff out of Computers into here. It may seem a bit incomplete or awkward for now, but it's essential to reduce the size of the top-level Computer article. Someone please take this and own it!Pat Palmer 15:23, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

I'll assume the helm, lieutenant. Stand down! --Robert W King 15:28, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

Thank you! It's a big job.Pat Palmer 18:47, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

I'm considering blanking the whole article and starting over. Any objection? The wikipedia entry was/is such a mess to sort through.--Robert W King 13:08, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

I am totally re-writing the article with more completeness, so it doesn't look like a long essay. In fact it almost looks like the original wikipedia version came from someone's term paper.--Robert W King 13:55, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

more source material?

There might be some useful source material in this archive.Pat Palmer 18:46, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

suggestions for structure

It might be helpful to cover each previous century separately, and then in 20th century have a section for each decade. Or something.Pat Palmer 18:48, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

brainstormed list of items to include

Please add to this list anyone you think might ought to be included somewhere; we can mark them off once dealt with.Pat Palmer 09:29, 11 May 2007 (CDT)

• Charles Baggage
• Eniac (and its inventors)
• Grace Hopper - compilers
• Edvac - important early machine
• Colossus - important early machine
• DARPA, IETF and RFC's - led to invention of networks
• Alan Turing - key computational theorist
• Turing awards - as important in computing as, say, Nobel is is physics
• John Von Neumann - influential mathematician working on early computers
• Claude Shannon - first associated boolean algebra with hardware switching algebra
• Thomas Edison - for Edison effect, which led to triode, which became vacuum tube switch
• Apple, IBM, Microsoft, DEC, Burroughs etc. (but where do we stop? do we go on to include Sun, Oracle, SAP, Google and the newer big players?
• Unix, Multics
• CP-M, Commodore, Tandy Radio Shack
• first spreadsheet - now, what was that guy's name?
• batch processing to multi processing to multi threading
• memory management, especially virtual memory
• operating system evolution (pointing off to many other articles)
• programming language evolution (pointing off to many other articles)
• character sets
• key de facto standards (where the marketplace voted in a good idea)
• official standards bodies, and their role and key standards
• personal computing (some articles already exist, though their variety and structure is still in flux)
• Nasa's computers for the Apollo moon voyages
• supercomputers (Cray etc)
• embedded computer and gadgets
• telecom and fiberoptic communications (an entire specialized industry based almost solely on special computers, realtime software, and some specialized hardware)
• the internet (a diametrically opposed way of doing telecom and everything else; culturally very different than telecom) - some articles already started

I confess, I have been seriously slacking on this article. There's a lot more to be worked in of course, and I'll try to get into it more today and the following week.--Robert W King 09:15, 11 May 2007 (CDT)

No need to feel pressure. This is a huge topic. Books have been written (and I own some of them) he he. I think it will take a long time to get this one ready for prime time, but we have to start somewhere, so I'm starting the list above. I will have a lot more to add to it. I need to look up my old notes from when I last taught this, and we need to construct a timeline. The timeline would then branch off into deeper articles about the invention of that thing. That's one way it could be structured to prevent it from becoming booksized, anyway.Pat Palmer 09:33, 11 May 2007 (CDT)

The trick is to keep this article as short as possible, while also making it complete by pointing off to other articles for deep detail. At the same time, we need a 'compelling narrative'; what a story it is. Good luck getting started!Pat Palmer 09:41, 11 May 2007 (CDT)