History of Modern Computing

The causal chain, 1913 to now: the deal leads to the transistor and the decree; the decree branches into silicon and software; the branches reconverge in the GPU datacenter. Hover or focus a node for its story.192019401960198020002020silicon− 3 moresoftware− 9 moreThe deal is struck1913Bell Labs founded1925The transistor1947start hereThe antitrust suit1949The decree: give it away1956Shockley goes west1956Eight defectors, Fairchild1957Moore writes the doubling1965Intel founded1968Intel 40041971The reactor warning2001The wall: clocks flatline2004'The Free Lunch Is Over'2005The CUDA bet2006AlexNet, two gaming cards2012FORTRAN: the trade begins1957Lisp, thirty years early1958BASIC, given away1964Unix on a spare PDP-71969C, and the pipe1972The photocopied book1976chroot ships, unnoticed1979Stallman starts GNU1983The deal ends: enclosure1984Helsinki: a hobby kernel1991The lawsuit freezes BSD1992VMware slices x861998Compute gets a dial tone2006cgroups at Google2007Linux in every pocket2008Containers: chroot grown up2013The GPU datacenter2024