The Pythagorean program: number as structure
Pythagoras' school at Croton linked musical harmony to simple ratios and proposed that mathematical relations underlie nature.
Humanity
115 events across three thousand years — chosen to be multi-regional and honest about uncertainty. Follow a thread to trace one capability through time, or filter by region and kind.
Showing 14 of 115 events. Clear filters
Spatial timeline — scroll horizontally
Euclid's Elements
Euclid organized Greek geometry into axioms, definitions and proven theorems — one of the most reprinted books in history.
Al-Khwarizmi writes al-jabr
Al-Khwarizmi systematized solving equations in The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, and popularized Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Newton's Principia Mathematica
Newton showed that one mathematical law of gravitation governs falling apples and orbiting moons — with the calculus-like methods to prove it.
ENIAC switches on
The first general-purpose electronic computer filled a room, weighed 27 tons, and recalculated artillery tables in seconds instead of days.
The transistor, three weeks after Christmas
Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated a point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, with Shockley's team driving the solid-state program.
The integrated circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently put multiple transistors onto single pieces of semiconductor.
A computer on a chip
Intel's 4004 packed a complete CPU — 2,300 transistors — onto one chip, built for a Japanese calculator and priced accordingly.
The personal computer arrives
The Apple II (1977) and the IBM PC (1981) turned the microprocessor into a mass-market appliance, with VisiCalc and later DOS as its applications.
A student posts a hobby operating system
Linus Torvalds announced Linux 'just a hobby, won't be big and professional'; combined with GNU and the open-source method, it became the world's infrastructure.
AWS rents out the datacenter
Amazon opened its S3 storage and EC2 compute services to anyone with a credit card — infrastructure as a self-service API.
AlexNet wakes up deep learning
A neural network trained on two gaming GPUs halved the error rate of the best computer-vision systems at ImageNet, stunning the field.
Containers eat the datacenter
Docker made Linux containers a developer experience in 2013; Google open-sourced Kubernetes in 2014, and by 2015 it was the operating layer of the cloud native world.
Attention, transformers, and the language models
Google's 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017) defined the transformer; GPT-3 (2020) showed scale worked; ChatGPT (2022) put a conversational model in front of a hundred million people in two months.
Chronology
The Pythagorean program: number as structure
Pythagoras' school at Croton linked musical harmony to simple ratios and proposed that mathematical relations underlie nature.
Euclid's Elements
Euclid organized Greek geometry into axioms, definitions and proven theorems — one of the most reprinted books in history.
Al-Khwarizmi writes al-jabr
Al-Khwarizmi systematized solving equations in The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, and popularized Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Newton's Principia Mathematica
Newton showed that one mathematical law of gravitation governs falling apples and orbiting moons — with the calculus-like methods to prove it.
ENIAC switches on
The first general-purpose electronic computer filled a room, weighed 27 tons, and recalculated artillery tables in seconds instead of days.
The transistor, three weeks after Christmas
Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated a point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, with Shockley's team driving the solid-state program.
The integrated circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently put multiple transistors onto single pieces of semiconductor.
A computer on a chip
Intel's 4004 packed a complete CPU — 2,300 transistors — onto one chip, built for a Japanese calculator and priced accordingly.
The personal computer arrives
The Apple II (1977) and the IBM PC (1981) turned the microprocessor into a mass-market appliance, with VisiCalc and later DOS as its applications.
A student posts a hobby operating system
Linus Torvalds announced Linux 'just a hobby, won't be big and professional'; combined with GNU and the open-source method, it became the world's infrastructure.
AWS rents out the datacenter
Amazon opened its S3 storage and EC2 compute services to anyone with a credit card — infrastructure as a self-service API.
AlexNet wakes up deep learning
A neural network trained on two gaming GPUs halved the error rate of the best computer-vision systems at ImageNet, stunning the field.
Containers eat the datacenter
Docker made Linux containers a developer experience in 2013; Google open-sourced Kubernetes in 2014, and by 2015 it was the operating layer of the cloud native world.
Attention, transformers, and the language models
Google's 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017) defined the transformer; GPT-3 (2020) showed scale worked; ChatGPT (2022) put a conversational model in front of a hundred million people in two months.