The Incomplete History of Computer Science

CompHist is a very incomplete history of computer science. Researching the history of computer science and the fabulous people that made it happen is one of my hobbies since many years. I had the great pleasure to talk to a lot of the first computer scientists in Germany. On this page, I try to document the people, machines, languages, and failures that shaped computing, from Babbage’s Analytical Engine to the LLM era. Each entry traces technical facts and human stories. The Dead Ends section is the most instructive part.