Blast From the Past
A look back at the events and people that shaped computing — from the first scientific computers to the languages that defined an industry.
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IBM 701, The Speed Demon
IBM's first commercially available scientific computer, introduced in 1953 and born from the demands of the Korean War.
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Fortran (1957)
The world's first high-level programming language, created by John Backus at IBM to make programming accessible beyond assembly.
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COBOL (1959)
The business programming language born from a Pentagon-led collective effort, designed with "maximum use of Simple English" in mind.
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BASIC (1964)
The beginner-friendly language invented at Dartmouth to democratize programming for liberal arts students and non-scientists.
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Unix (1969)
How Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie built Unix on a discarded PDP-7, and how a space game led to one of the most influential operating systems ever created.
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CBASIC (1970)
How Gordon Eubanks built on BASIC-E to create CBASIC, a structured, commercial BASIC that helped launch the software industry.
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C (1972)
Dennis Ritchie's creation of the C programming language for Unix, built for the PDP-11 and designed to let programmers see the machine clearly.
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Tiny BASIC (1975)
The first freeware program, a minimal BASIC for 4K microcomputers that embodied the free software ethos before it had a name.
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Microsoft BASIC (1975)
How Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair in a few weeks, and inadvertently founded Microsoft in the process.
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Visual Basic (1991)
How Alan Cooper's drag-and-drop shell prototype became Visual Basic, and helped make Windows the dominant operating system.