A reference site, in progress
The history of computer science, the people who made it, and where to study it
Computer science is younger than the people who still remember its founding. Alan Turing described the universal machine in 1936. The first stored-program computer ran its first program in Manchester in 1948. The first computer science department opened at Purdue in 1962. Almost everything else, from programming languages to the internet to artificial intelligence, happened within a single human lifetime.
This site covers that story in three parts.
The history
From mechanical calculation and Babbage's engines through wartime codebreaking, the stored-program computer, and the eras that followed, with straight answers to the questions people actually ask, like who invented the computer and when. Start with the timeline of key dates.
The people
Biographies of the field's key figures: Turing, Lovelace, Hopper, Babbage, von Neumann, Shannon and the rest. What they actually did, in context, with sources.
The universities
Where computer science is taught best today: global rankings aggregated from QS, Times Higher Education, ARWU and CSRankings, with profiles of the leading departments and country-by-country guides.