Computing

From gears to chips.

Foundations

Babbage designed mechanical computers he could not build, Lovelace described programming them, and Turing formalised what computation is.

Wartime code-breaking drove early electronic machines.
The stored-program idea made general purpose computing possible.

The transistor and after

Replacing vacuum tubes with transistors, then integrating millions on a chip, produced decades of exponential improvement that reshaped every other field.