“It’s just like planning a dinner,” the renowned computer scientist Grace Hopper once quipped about computing in a 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan. “You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ...

Mark Wilson, “Untitled Gray Ground & Untitled Light Gray Ground” (1973) (click to enlarge) Personal computing may have begun in the 1980s but the history of computer art started much earlier during a ...

Ada Lovelace’s wisdom about the first general-purpose computer can be found buried in the appendix of another paper Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, better known as Ada Lovelace, was ...

Scientists used the quipu’s data to build working spreadsheets, file systems, and encryption tools, rivaling conventional ...

1982: Programming in BASIC, playing TI Invaders My first home computer was a Texas Instruments 99/4A. We didn’t have a monitor (we hooked it up to our television set) and there was no disk drive.

In 1979, two M.I.T. computer-science alumni and a Harvard Business School graduate launched a new piece of computer software for the Apple II machine, an early home computer. Called VisiCalc, short ...